I’m working on a smart home & industrial automation project and looking for a solid edge device to run openHAB. I came across the ALPON X4, and it seems like a good fit since it has built-in LTE, Wi-Fi, and industrial I/O support.
Has anyone here used ALPON X4 with openHAB? How well does it handle multiple devices, MQTT, and Modbus setups? I’d like to use it as a PoC before scaling up.
Also, I found this setup guide if you’ve followed it, was the process smooth? Any limitations or things to watch out for?
Would love to hear your thoughts before I pull the trigger on this! Thanks!
I’ve no experience with this. Clearly the vendor has done enough with it to publish that guide (though the convention is the “o” in “openHAB” should never be capitalized). The CM4 should have enough RAM and CPU to run OH well unless you intend to run a whole bunch of other stuff on the same machine. RAM is almost always the limiting factor when it comes to OH.
It looks like these use containers to deploy software. That will increase the RAM requirements a little but for something like this it seems a reasonable approach.
“industrial automation” gives me a bit of pause. OH is not designed to work in industrial or commercial contexts where failure and timing can often result in loss of time, money, or injury. So please be very sure to not use this in places where timing is critical (OH is not real-time), order of processing is critical (if two events occur really close together, there is no guarantee of order of processing), automated failover, and other safety and fault-tolerant factors which are often very important in an industrial context.
Without any direct experience with them, I seen no red flags which make me think it wouldn’t work. I’d give it a try and see what happens if no one else pipes up with real experience.
Thanks for the detailed response! That’s actually super helpful.
Totally get your point about industrial automation. I won’t be using openHAB for anything mission-critical where precise timing or failover is a must. My goal is more monitoring + control rather than real-time automation, so I think openHAB on ALPON X4 could still be a good fit.
What excites me most about ALPON X4 is the built-in LTE, so even if Wi-Fi or Ethernet drops, I can keep remote access running via SIM backup. Also, the container-based deployment actually seems like a plus it makes it easier to manage different services without messing up the system.
I’ll definitely give it a try and report back once I have it up and running!
