yeah odroids are great, personally using them to decode h.265 tv standard (EU)
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I was very happy when I started with my rasp3. It’s perfect for openhab and it has a power consumption near the zero 
However after a year of use I can see its limitation (the same you can read everywhere): first big issue I had it was the breaking of mmc, after I bought a good quality mmc and all it’s ok.
Second limitation is the small quantity of ram, from OH2.5 I’m near the full and I’d like to install a DB instance, graphana and a small instance of nextcloud. Now I don’t know if is better an upgrade with a rasp4 or better a nuc. Now the CPU is ever near the 2%, so I don’t think a nuc will give me a performance increase and the power consumption of the nuc is not trascurable
The 4gb pi4 is a considerable step up in RAM, if thats the limitation. The CPU improvements might not make material difference.
Once you have bought the pi, a case with heatsink (or fan), a new PSU you still wont be approaching the cost of a new NUC or the fanless ?BRIX equivalent. The cheap atom fanless PCs can be ok, but the price will be higher and only the most expensive of them have more than 4gb RAM.
I suppose the alternative is if you have any other NAS or 24/7 machine running. For example, I use a fraction of my Plex server.
Intel NUC can be considered if you would like to use it for more fuctions. I have I7 with 8Gb ram + SSD. It runs Plex server + OH. OH 2,5 eats roughly 800k ram but database handling is switched off currently. I use Graphana + Influx.
My Plex is remote and I prefere to have OH in house. So I think rb4 should be ok for all I need to have in house. Otherwise an amd64 architecture it will be more flexible for the future.
Old thread, but I recently flashed Mr Chromebox’s updated UEFI bios and have had good success across kernel updates. Seems the problems with kernel location have been sorted. CN60 looks to be a viable solution for x86_64 openhab.
On 32 bits from my experience 2GB RAM is enough. Running with 28% of RAM used (but without grafana and persistence at the moment). The board is OrangePi Plus2e. The only problem i have: the system freezes hard sometimes, requiring a reboot. I was never able to retrieve logs even via SysRq, however it looks like a kernel panic.
Bought a 4GB Pi4 for that reason, will build an mk2 controller with hard drive
BTW, does anyone know of any HW diagnosis software for ARM? I would like to test the board and locate the issue after decomissioning
Kernel version?
root@orangepiplus2e:~# uname -a
Linux orangepiplus2e 4.19.38-sunxi #5.85 SMP Wed May 8 14:20:48 CEST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux
Is it known problem ?
Also this can be confused with another phenomena: OrangePI is veeeery fastidious about power supply. Despite the core is running at 3.3V input power drop below approx. 4.8V sends the board to reboot. If your connections are flaky (for instance you decided to power the board via GPIO connector and use jumper wires with discrete 1-pin connectors like these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GD2BWPY), this can happen sporadically. Furthermore, during bootup consumption increases, sending the board to endless loop of reboots.
But i solved this by feeding the power via jack, using thicker wires, and using screw terminals for power distribution. Now power voltage measures at steady +5.3V on board’s test pads near the GPIO connector. The board crashes much less often but still does.
No.
But if powering is not good, this is more then expected. Good PSU is the 1st thing you have to fix in case of troubles. That’s common for all boards. Some hangs, some crashes, some clocks down, some silently clocks down … I hope you power the board via proper power connector now?
This particular board - Orange plus 2E - is the best H3 board you can find on the market. It must run stable.
Moving to most recent kernel 5.4.y is highly recommended. I am running few boards, also Openhab on H5 based board and didn’t have not a single crash in months.
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Yes, as i have told just above.
To tell the truth i like eMMC, and i feel sorry about replacing the Orange. It quite fits the purpose.
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I was playing with Dell Edge Gateway 3000 (it is much more expensive than RPi) and some of Aaeon Boxer devices. Both come with eMMc and RS232/485 options.
If you haven’t made your mind and have budget for experiments try above.
Me too 
Are you possibly running openhabian or did you use the “regular” installation process?
There are also lower performing NUCs, which are not overpowered like the i7 verion (if you run a dedicated OH server only)
Intel NUC BOXNUC7CJYH2 Celeron J4005
I am using a Latte Panda with windows 10…no more Linux, no more apt-get update, no more apt-get upgrade no more dependencies problems, no more permission problems, no more sd card problems, no more complicated installs and you have visual studio, remote desktop, etc, etc. and you never have to restart this machine, The widows updates are automatically done. I have installed it with a cooling fan witch prevent high cpu temperature and keep the speed up to spec. I am using this setup for 8 months now and never ever i would get back to any Linux machine. I would recommend this setup.
If you are primarily concerned about performance, it is hard to beat Intel NUC. They are even quite power efficient. A bit pricey though, for what they are (last time I checked).
However, of much greater concern are the firmware level backdoors (IME). Personally, I will not be buying any more Intel hardware whatsoever until they end this despicable practice (and I’m not holding my breath). In case you were wondering, AMD is not any better.
Which is why all these other ARM based Single Board Computers are so interesting to me. Many of them (other than RPi) have little to no binary blobs, much less crap like IME built into them. They are also quite inexpensive, and because they are essentially based on smartphone chips, very power efficent! For me, a winning combination.
If you don’t have the same concerns (and many people don’t, unfortunately in my view) then buy whatever you like.
You say that as if it is a good thing. 
I changed from Windows to GNU/Linux a few years ago, it’s amazing to me how all the devices on our home network suddenly “just work” together, when everything is designed from the ground up with Freedom and open protocols in mind… 
Really makes you think…
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This is one simple line to fully update the whole system:
sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade
Uuh, really? That comes with a high cost (and it’s not true either)
That is no linux issue 
and by using ZRAM you can prevent problems (you can even use a SSD)
As if windows installs are less complex…
I also have Visual Studio (Code) and
I don’t need a desktop on my headless server
nearly every update for windows needs a complete reboot, so that’s not true at all!
Well, you can’t prevent the updates (and I can setup GNU/Linux to automatically update and upgrade, but I want to have control)
which is also easy for Pi computers
Please, don’t recommend a setup only because you are familiar with it. To install openHAB on Windows, there is no setup routine, you have to install Java, unpack openHAB manually, setup the correct Java path manually… You have to ensure that no one can do funny things with openHAB…
The whole point is: If you are familiar with Windows, you can use openHAB with a windows machine. It will consume much more energy as an embedded system, but you will have a desktop (even if you don’t need it). My openHAB installation is restarted only if I do a configuration (and that would also be true it I would use a windows machine) But other than windows, I don’t need to reboot my computer because of updates, only when the kernel is updated)
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I did not know that and did consequently not care about it
Possibly I should and I will.
At least to see, if it soncerns me.
Thanks for bringing this up.
So I will delete my NUC, RAM and SSD from Amazon Shopping card for now.
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I kind of agree with both of your positions:
Windows seems to be user friendlier. So I get your point @zonegrise
But keep in mind that you (most likely) spend already years with windows (willingly or not).
So, if you (willing to) spend as much time for Linux as you did for Windows, @Udo_Hartmann is right with all his arguments.
Bottom line it’s a question of perspective.
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