Best hardware platform

Hi all i think this is related to subject , what ever platform you take…

I see the topic mostly becoming a hoky war :slight_smile:, let me throw a piece in. I am running OrangePi Plus2e, chose it due to dimensions and RAM size (2gb). My Android experience tells me Java is always ready to eat more mem.
Emmc size turned out to be good enough for raspbian + openhabian install. Works fine. Though it’s a new install with uptume only about a week.
Takes a bit long t boot up, but does not feel sluggish in operation.

This looks quite interesting, except for the need to create an individual power supply:

https://liliputing.com/2019/04/35-atomic-pi-dev-board-with-intel-cherry-trail-now-available-form-amazon.html

What do you think?

I am running OpenHab on Allwinner H5 based Nanopi K1+ I have dozen of Z-wave devices and it seems an overkill.

OpenHab should run on any single board computer under Armbian, selection is quite big. Best thing there is - you don’t need to do anything. System is perfectly optimized for running from SD card: wear-out is cut down to minimum out of the box, system is secure, stable and supported, installation is menu driven.

Except the way oh does logging and persistence is usually orders of magnitude more than what even a typical non-optomised OS would do.

Also, not all boards are created equal. I have a BananaPi running Armbian and the list of things that don’t work like BT is quite long and if you try to do anything that requires a lot of of CPU such as, for instance, start OH, it over heats and freezes up.

I can’t therefore recommend just any old SBC. If you go outside the big players, do your homework.

Hi Igor very cool setup… but the only advantage i see when running on signal board PC is the power consumption(not a very big issue for me)
so i prefer a desktop PC… i have allot laying around office/home

as you can see OH is overkill for single board PC, so you can virtualize it very easy

and use the rest of the PC for other things… making OH as VM that can travel around very old hardware, is priceless for me … also i can perform backups and restores on the fly

what i want to say, we are each with our own unique issues /reality, its a good thing OH can run on all platforms :slight_smile:

Bananapi (at least model Pro and M1+) comes with a chip that doesn’t have BT part at all. But I do agree at least BT is badly supported in general but other things, especially for server case operation, are supported very well. Regarding stability I won’t agree - Allwinner A20 is old, but (at least with Armbian modern kernel) it works perfectly stable for months/years. A20 is not prone to overheating (perhaps your experience goes to Banana with H3/H5 or A83T chip which is totally different hardware?) - you don’t even need a heat sink. But I do agree that application such as OH can be a bit too heavy for a 5-7 years old technology.

Edit: With H3 boards, there used to be problems with overheating and some boards with cheap voltage regulators overheats more then normally. And thermal throttling, which resulted in sudden emergency power off, was broken for some time.

True. Not everyone is powerful enough. This mostly goes for boards that are equipped with only 256/512Mb of memory … while anything with 4 core Allwinner H3 or better should be powerful enough.

I would certainly recommend to avoid exotics, equipped with weird chips, but everything that is labelled (Armbian supported) is just fine. At the same level than big players, whatever that might be? Skip things with little memory and go for boards that are equipped with eMMC. That is a huge step forward in terms of reliability/performance/durability.

When it comes to small boards its usually about testing boundaries/having fun, but since I have 150+ single board computers lying around my house, I just picked the one which accidentally had a wall mount case with it :slight_smile: … and put OH on it. Next to this board is my main high-end dual Xeon server, which runs a dozen of VMs …

Containerization (Docker) is also supported on Armbian OOB and one can go that path if such layer is needed. I don’t use it since this is a dedicated machine for OH.

1 Like

:astonished:
Well you’re not an average user then, and this thread is foremost meant to provide help to those …

Rich’s key point is the second sentence but it’s not about HW power.
If you want to use non-mainstream HW and/or OS, be prepared to encounter (HW, OS) problems that you have to resolve for yourself simply because there’s not enough users here on the forum and elsewhere on the internet that could help you with that task.
So you also have to be capable of solving these on your own.

That’s fine if you are, but the above is why the recommendation for beginners and I’d say even intermediates is to go with the mainstream - which is RPi2/3 and openHABian.

1 Like

Agree and that is also my intention - OH users and solution providers/OH makers should be aware of serious and IMHO better way of deploying OH. Suitable for end-users beyond (obsolete/proprietary) Raspberry Pi or power hungry Intel based hardware. If board is “Armbian supported” you can fully rely running OH on it. Some boards are more suitable, some less. In essence, Armbian is a stock and clean Debian (or Ubuntu) with certain board related optimizations and dedicated kernel(s). Even most of the low level functions such as 1wire, i2c, spi, … are supported, at least on most popular SoCs. I plan to add one 1wire sensor to this board (it supports it) to monitor temperature in the “server room”.

According to the documentation, there seems to be more hassle with so called mainstream. I have to try.

What docs are you referring to here ?
The current relevant one is this:

The BPi 0 does have a BT chip.

How to get going with OpenHabian on RaspberryPi:

This board is not even mentioned so it can’t have a badge “supported” https://www.armbian.com/download/?tx_maker=sinovoip This usually makes a huge difference. If they gave you some “armbian” they just try to fool you, like they do it with providing “raspbian”. But that is their policy, a way of doing business …

As I already mention, Bluetooth is not well supported in Armbian in general. It doesn’t work on every boards, where hw support exists, since not enough people care about, but wireless is sorted out, where exists.

Sinovoip (Bananapi maker) have a bad reputation for quality of their design and (many times) wrong documentation. Because of that, their hardware is mainly not supported by Armbian. There are other makers, which provide similar hardware, namely FriendlyElec or Xunlong (OrangePi), Olimex, Hardkernel, … which do their job respectfully.

Please provide a source to support that claim.

What docs are you referring to here ?

https://www.openhab.org/docs/installation/openhabian.html

That’s the openHABian (not openHAB) docs and I see no mention of hassle or mainstream in there.

Don’t put up misleading statements like that please.

Ubuntu version also provides an easy switching to full virtual read-only mode, where there is absolutely no writings to the SD card.

This is just for saving SD card related with squeezing more power out of the (limited) hardware.

Perhaps you did not clearly understand my point. I find OpenHAB system documentation just fine. Or at least the one I am familiar with - setting up on the application level.

I am only ranting about recommended way - setting up OpenHabian on RPi looks like more work that my recommendation. Which is just that. A recommendation.

Perhaps not here on OpenHAB forum which is anyway a place for supporting something else. In case of troubles with Armbian, there is an fairly active Armbian forum https://forum.armbian.com. Matured boards doesn’t need much if any support anyway.

1 Like

Yes, I believe that was the point Markus was making, support, tutorials and documentation for other boards not being anywhere near as for the recommended platform. Many of our users are not linux folks, don’t know how to find more information and this forum is one of a very few places to get help keeping their OpenHAB installations running

Thank you for that! You seem to really know your stuff and information you have already provided will help some of our more technically crafty users get on

1 Like

I was just responding to your statements. You said

I asked you where in the docs that’s mentioned and you replied with a link to docs where there’s nothing like that contained. So to me that was a false, misleading statement of yours.

You obviously have a strong background in and preference to use Armbian and some SBC you already know to operate - that’s perfectly fine, in fact the official recommendation is not a RPi but to use whatever you feel most comfortable with.

And any opinion and substantial contribution is welcome - thanks for those pointers.
Those optimizations however aren’t exclusive to Armbian and in fact the most important ones are already part of this recommendation (note the post’s creation date).

But by no means we accept ranting or false claims.
Setting up openHABian on RPi means to flash the image to the card, then boot and wait for the installation to finish… I can hardly think of any other method to be even less work for a user - so to me, the “more work” statement is another false, misleading one.

To the average OH user, support is of uttermost importance (@Andrew_Rowe expressed it well).
And the best support you will only get when you stick with the mainstream.

Latest Odroid n2 https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/ (4GB ram) seems to be very nice platform for OH application.

1 Like

Which is why I said I cannot recommend just any SBC and as Markus elaborated, this kind of knowledge and research is beyond what we should be able to expect from the toe of user who would need a hardware recommendation in the first place.

This entire thread is only tangentially about what is the best hardware. It’s about the best hardware to recommend to new users who are not technically proficient enough to figure that out on their own.

With that criteria, market share/mind share both here in these forums and on the internet at large and availability of the hardware will trump technical superiority every time.

And it’s worth noting that openHABian also installs and configures a host of third party applications to work with OH, not just openHAB itself: Mosquitto, InfluxDB, Grafana, NodeRed, Amanda, ngnx reverse proxy, Frontail, Firemotd and more. And many if not most of the optimizations for SD card writes are it could be included in openHABian. But, as I said, weed caused by OH itself and any databases set up for persistence will far outpace the writes Armbian configures to reduce, and the database stuff can’t be reduced. So the optimizations are if limited value in this context anyway.

And for the record, you can install openHABian on Armbian. Just clone the repo and run through openhabian-config. But if course cloning a github repo is beyond the audience this recommendation is directed towards RPi with the openHABian SD image which sets it all up for you.

Not exclusive, but are defaults. Novice users use defaults and yours are actually missing most important ones (according to your research from 2016). Extend them with compression and swap without external media - you will be amazed on results. Even and especially on mainstream RPi which is by far the worse device in term of I/O performance.

According to the wall of text … “there seems to be” … can be classified as a speculation, certainly not a a claim. Are you a native speaker? I am not, but still this should be clear. I am not claiming anything in this regard. I didn’t even try to install it and will skip. I believe you its simple.

Of course, Armbian is 100% Debian compatible and it goes even without git cloning. It can be installed from armbian-config -> software menu.

This is why I am writing those few sentences. There are more options which are perfectly fine for new users, performs (much) better and I did show how to find that out - there are people who do that job instead of/for you. If you have official(!) Armbian running on some hardware, that have enough memory, you can expect at least the same level of overall performance as mainstream while most of board will outperform RPi. OH installation is hassle free OOB.

Yes, it has remarkable specs and performance but going for a brand new device and expect that it will work stable is the most typical mistake you can make.

Basic software support / kernel & boot loader usually needs a year or more before it gets to the levels you want to use it to serve you. Before that, you will be the server :wink: This is a speculation based on past experiences. I seriously doubt it can be any better, contrary due to increased complexity of devices that are coming out today.

First stage of support, after device is launched, where this board is in now, is somewhere on the proof of concept which demonstrate device hardware abilities. You can run this and that, but you will experience crashes and instability here and there, things will not work exactly as advertised …

This is not a platform for running your house. Not today.