I actually took the battery out of my laptop, because it was old and I fear it swelling as the cells break down. The good thing is that most laptops can run without batteries, unlike phones and tablets that typically only draw power from the battery.
It has an SSD so I’m less concerned about corruption, but if I do keep it running as a server it’ll definitely go on my UPS.
I would not necessarily say this is the best device for all OpenHAB scenarios, but it is the best device for my requirements/scenario.
I used to run a Intel J1900@1.99GHz Fanless ‘Topton’ ‘Industrial’ PC with 8GB of RAM and a SSD (Was purchased off Aliexpress) and that has not missed a beat in 4 years.
I was however looking for a bit more ‘grunt’ and upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800U based machine a few weeks ago, with more memory, and also a PCI3.0 NVMe drive.
Both these machines I have run as headless and whilst I have not explicitly measured the new systems consumption, it’s ‘Down’ TDP is 10W.
FYI - the new one that I purchased was https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005237006516.html , but don’t view that as an endorsement from me, yet!! Whilst it works well, and seems well made, it’s only been a few weeks, so too soon for me to call it 
Anyway the original system I had was perfect for running OpenHAB, performed OK, but this is where my requirements start to digress from OpenHAB alone. I use this as a server to run ALL home automation related items.
Both old and new systems run Ubuntu server.
The following you will probably find on any site running OpenHAB and sitting on a PI quite happily:
There are a few utility gateways running on there too, but all pretty light-weight
I use the following to run the Documentation WIKI for the house, and this can chew resources :
And just about to install the following onto the same server (one of my motivations for the upgrade - Felt like this may be the ‘step too far’ for the old system)
The applications run super-fast on the new server, with local page-loads on XWiki & OpenHAB feeling almost instantaneous
So really comes down to your intent. If just an OpenHAB ecosystem, the PI’s will hit the mark. If you are including a wider-sphere of apps/utilities, then maybe consider something with a bit more power, and maybe a Sata based SSD or NVMe drive for reliability.
If you need GPIO/I2C etc, then this is not the system for you… (However I do use PI3B out in the field running MQTTANY on Ubuntu for that purpose).
You’ll find plenty of fanless ‘Industrial’ PC’s available on Aliexpress or similar, with CPU’s which range from slightly more processing power than a PI, to a LOT more processing power than a PI. Your needs and your budget will set where you land in that range Good luck with your search.
Since the Raspberry Pi 4 is not in stock all over the world, what is the best alternative if I need a new device ?
If you can wait a few months, then that might not be an issue.
Alternatively, you could look for a Raspberry Pi 400. I don’t know where you are, but in some regions they never went out of stock.
I also saw this article, but actually I want to get rid of the SD Card and I was looking to Odroid/Orange Pi, because they support eMMC. Or any orther device that is supported by Armbian
It’s a persistent myth that eMMC is any better than SD but wrong.
And with Armbian, you’ll be missing all the benefits of using openHABian.
Long story short, anyone can choose to run OH on whatever he likes and is familiar with, hence the official recommendation.
But if you have no strong preference, in most common usage scenarios, the best device is a Raspi 4.
Thanks for the link to the post of SD card, SSD, eMMC… I’ll wait for the next batch of Pi4’s and maybe already have alook for a brand new SD Card. I do have some old Pi3’s laying around, but I think I prefer some faster ones.
Looks ideal for me, too. Which version did you order? Do you see an advantage in buying the 16gb-version?
We been just arguing over that in other topic. Its not a myth as there are less hops between CPU and onboard eMMC than between CPU and SD card. You might get a SD card reader behind several electronic components. For that reason eMMC will be more stable than SD card, especially when you include various environment conditions. While eMMC and SD card might be based on the same flash memory kind, they don’t have to.
There is a reason why embedded systems heavily rely on eMMC and not SD cards. This reason is stability of such storage. Believe me, if SD cards would be equal to eMMC then embedded computers would use them on daily basis as boot drives, cause it is cheaper to solder a card reader than to get there a emmc. For some reason its not a common practice to get your smart speaker with SD card thrown into a box.
Let’s not have a repeat of it here. You’ve both made your points in the other topic, and I think it’s reasonable to call this an “agree to disagree” scenario. Time for everyone to move on.
I know its kinda funny, I did smile after reading your comment. Yet, putting that aside, reading posts such this: Reddit - Dive into anything makes me wonder if topic of how things are supposed to work was not dominated by one side. Very likely author of reddit post misinterpreted and miss read intentions, however something had to led him into his false assumption.
From the Reddit post:
Because it says so in the documentation of OH.
I suspect that the author is referring to this statement under hardware modifications. Specifically, the last sentence.
To put it straight: we don’t recommend SSDs and do not support attaching an SSD and move the system over there. If you know Linux well enough to manually apply all the required modifications, feel free to do so but please be aware that this is a completely untested option that may work or not and what’s even more important: it is unsupported. Don’t ask for help if you run into trouble.
I’ve read this paragraph many times in the past and never thought anything of it, but I can see why someone might interpret it as “don’t join the OH community”. It’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe they had a traumatic experience with another online community. @mstormi, can we soften it a little without losing the original intention?
Perhaps we can say that openHABian maintainers aren’t able to help with unsupported hardware (since it’s not tested), but that other community members may be able to do so based on their own experiences. I think that would reflect what I’ve seen in the community, and doesn’t make add burden to the maintainers. @splatch or someone else could then post in that Reddit thread that we’ve made an edit to the docs, and invite the author to join us.
And if the author of the Reddit post happens to read this: please know that you are welcome here. All you have to do is follow the rules, which effectively amount to “don’t be a jerk”.
I actually reminded myself of this recently after feeling like my response to someone was unnecessarily sarcastic. We would all do well to remember this when our posts start getting chippy. 
There was an enormous as you name it burden - I’d add “waste of precious time and attention” for us maintainers to people asking for help, despite of knowing that their setup is unsupported.
I’m openHABian maintainer first. Frankly I don’t care if anyone prefers PCs over Pis or SSDs over SD and why she wants to use that for herself. Anyone’s free to use whatever they’re convinced of and spend their time on it as long as they do not impact others in doing so.
However that’s what they do when an openHABian user insists on running off SSD and asks for help with that on the forum. That is only ever resulting in us maintainers and other volunteers having to waste our time for them, and be it just the need to scan their posts up to the point where it becomes clear they’re using openHABian.
Unfortunately most posters don’t even mention this, let alone early and clearly so, some even intentionally hide it, which is really a mean thing to do, particularly to all of us volunteers, be it maintainers or yourself or anyone else spending his time for free to help people on this forum.
I’m open to suggestions (precise ones, please) but contents-wise softening the openHABian docs might quickly lead us back to a re-increase of postings wasting our and everybody’s time which is where we’ve been not long ago.
Plus it’s indeed a huge stretch (and pure assumption btw) to guess-pick a statement of the docs that’s made in a very specific context (SSD as openHABian boot drive) as part of specific documention (openHABian, not openHAB) and make out of that what @splatch and the reddit poster did. It’s not even mentioned openHABian is used or who supposedly disallowed to post on the community.
There’s lack of context and multiple levels of misinterpretation and frankly that reddit post looks dubious to me, many elements in there that apply to fake postings, too.
Bear in mind there’s more people than you’d think whose agenda isn’t really what it seems to be.
Looks ideal for me, too. Which version did you order? Do you see an advantage in buying the 16gb-version?
I got the one with the N5105 CPU and i226-V NICs. As I had both RAM and storage lying around, I ordered it without. I found a few reviews that say that the N5095 actually runs faster than the N5105 due to the former having active cooling and thus has a different thermal curve.
Couple of points. Right now it’s only used for firewall/DNS/DHCP and MQTT and is using about 200MB of RAM, so the 16GB I put in should be more than enough…
I will be moving openhab to this device.
I live in a warm (hot?) country so fanless is not an option. There are some of these machines that come with both a fan header on the MB as well as cutouts in the base plate to allow mounting an internal fan, but this specific one does not. I have had to add external fans: 1 big 120x120mm fan to sit on top and a 40x40mm for the side to cool down the internals or the case get so hot you cannot touch it.
Next device will have to have fans.
ok… how about
I like Russ’ verbage
I don’t know what is in the mind of reddit author, you probably as well. So be so kind and do not link me with him.
It really depends on whether there is any airflow or none. Efficiency of radiators drops with each degree, thus there is significant difference how much heat the heat sink will move. Overall the lower ambient temperature is, the better results are. If you live in hot country then fan which force airflow improves efficiency of overall process. There is significant difference in efficiency of heat sinks between 20C and 35C ambient temperature. Assuming that your computer chips get close to to 100C when they for sure will throttle, you either have delta of 80 or 65C, whereas thermal stuff is not linear, its actually opposite.
Some of Aaeon PCs I’ve seen had a very clever design where CPU was coupled with top of case CNCed in a typical heat sink shape:
If you mounted case bottom to the wall or rail, making radiator part being in front you helped to cause natural airflow and small chimney effect. I saw a lot of mini pcs having “heat sink” style cases, but rarely it is made in above way, making it look nice, but work in fairly limited scope.
Another point - if you have a SSD drive inside computer, it increases temperature of interior and influences thermals. I saw some of catalog cards for Aaeon or another manufcaturer lowering ambient temperature from 65C to 55C just by basic fact of SSD drive being installed inside of the case.
My goal was to make it easier for you to feel like you don’t have to respond at all whenever someone is using an unsupported configuration, while not pushing people away from our community. I ignore lots of posts when people are doing things I don’t agree with, and I think this approach would be perfectly fine for you as well. That’s just my opinion, and you may feel a different level of responsibility.
Maintainers and moderators should get to enjoy being community members as much as anyone else.
I agree that I was guessing, and in this case I was wrong. I missed some hidden replies in the Reddit post, so I didn’t see the link the author posted to a conversation in the OH community…which includes quotes from the openHABian docs. I pointed to different text on that webpage.
I now understand that people with unsupported hardware are not welcome to seek help in this community from others who use unsupported hardware. As such, my suggestion to edit the docs doesn’t make sense.
This statement bothers me. Hinting at something being fake discredits the Reddit author and is dismissive toward my concerns. I hope that’s not what you intended, but that’s how the word is typically used nowadays. It’s hard not to interpret it that way.
For what it’s worth, I try to be charitable when I read things in the OH community, because it’s so easy to misunderstand what people meant to say (particularly with language barriers). This might come across as naive, but it’s not. It’s a conscious choice that I made long before I joined the OH community, and has served me well in my life and work.
When I read an OH post and my BS detector goes off, I just move on. I can’t stop them from lying, but I don’t have to listen to them do it.
Anyway, I was trying to be constructive with my previous post, not start a debate. I now understand that the openHABian docs accurately reflect your intentions, so I can leave it at that.
Some of Aaeon PCs I’ve seen had a very clever design where CPU was coupled with top of case CNCed in a typical heat sink shape:
Mine looks similarish to that with the entire case being the heatsink (it has fins on the top as well).
First, look at the temperature of the NVMe drive when I added a fan on top (similar to how the fan is mounted on a CPU but outside). See nvme_added_cooling.jpg
And then after getting a 120x120mm fan that I could leave sitting on the side and blowing through/over/around the case there was an additional drop of around 10 degrees inside. See nvme_vertical_cooling.jpg
Ambient temperature is around 30.
I previously suggested having a separate section/category for unsupported setups. Those who care only about vanilla openhabian can then completely ignore that section/category and people might still be getting help from others with unsupported setups. I don’t see any downside to this.
