For OH, any small computer that is supported by Armbian (community knows hardware and squeezes best performace out of the hw. User don’t need to do anything) that has 1GB memory is fine and quickly much better (also cheaper) than Rpi. Best is to get something with eMMC, without HDMI (since you don’t need it and only adds cost/consumption) and that is not exactly the latest and greatest. All bleeding edge hardware have SW issues so in case you want things that works, get previous generation … which is more then enough (overkill) what you need to run OH.
Recommended budget for SBC HW is 25-50 USD, OH works also with cheapests, but its best to avoid. Also stay away from mUSB powered devices (or power them via GPIO)
In most cases there is no binary blobs (Rpi), no failed powering (Rpi), no overheating (Rpi4), eMMC (Rpi dreams about), …
As most people, I spent my whole life with Windows (until a few years ago). GNU/Linux was a little different at first of course. But to me, actually seemed to make a lot more sense the way everything is laid out. The file system heirarchy, common commands (and directory names) are very short at command line, almost all configs in text files, pipes, “everything is a file” (including devices), the “Unix Philosophy” (lots of little programs, each doing one thing well, which you can combine together in your own way to do whatever you want). And on and on.
Here is a great old video (from AT&T Archives) about “Unix Philosophy”:
Now, all of the above are Nice Things™, but they are not even the most important differences between Windows and GNU/Linux. Any comparison between the two on a strictly features or usability standpoint is entirely missing what is by far the biggest difference!
Of course I am talking about your Freedom! On this point we are now talking about apples and oranges between the two! GNU/Linux was explicitly designed from the beginning with your freedom in mind! It is all about what is good for you and what you want to do with your system, instead of what { Microsoft, Google, Sony, NSA, RPi foundation, […] } want to do with it, and then only letting you do what they let you.
This is by far the biggest difference, and one that is not mentioned often enough IMO. And I did not really “get” what all the excitement about GNU/Linux was all about, until I got my head around this very important distinction.
I highly encourage you if you are at all interested in this (IMO, very important) topic to please follow the “Freedom” link above where you will find a very short video which I have found to be one of the best short introductions to the concept of Free/Libre Software, for those completely unfamiliar.
sorry, actually this is not my discussion, but I can’t stay calm on reading this
OK: seems !
It might be, as long, as one is playing consequently on user level.
But on system level, windows to me is nearly a disaster!
On Linux it’s just a line in a conf-file; on windows it’s 1 hour clicking if it’s possible at all.
And the worst thing to me is called Android; this as off topic.
Who ever tried to write code on system level knows, where I’m speaking about.
To name Windows user friendly, what many believe, is more a marketing idea of MS then the truth.
/Ulli
Let’s all stop the operating systems religious wars on this thread. It’s been hashed out before. No one is going to change their mind. openHAB can run on almost any consumer operating system (even the BSDs) if that works for you.
I believe NCO’s and TRS-80’s point was that most of the time, people confuse familiarity with easier to use. If all you’ve used is Windows for a decade, Linux and Mac are going to be harder to use. If all you’ve used is Linux for a decade, Windows and Mac are going to be harder to use. If all you’ve used is Mac for a decade, Windows and Linux is going to be harder to use.
The easiest operating system to use is the operating system that you know. And OH will work with what what you know.
What I like (theoretically) about the Intel NUC is also the housing and space for an SSD inside. Beside the flexibility to upgrade RAM if needed.
On the other side I am quite happy with my RPi3B+ and an SSD I use in a element14 desktop Pi housing.
Unfortunately this housing causes the RPi to stay OFF after a power failure (there is a start button in the housing.
So I would prefer a SBC with a wide range of accessories (housings for ssd and such) - which possibly will result in the RPi4 - unless there is another widely used SBC in the ARMBIAN list, which is more powerful than the RPi3B+
I recently bought a used HP T620 Thin Client (4GB RAM, Quad Core) used on ebay for 55€. Together with a new M2 SSD (128GB) this cost me about 85€ which is about the same as a raspberry pi 4 kit.
With the ssd this can be a good alternative to the pi 4 with a marginally higher power consumption (~7Watt vs 3.5Watt).
The CPU should be much stronger, but I can’t seem to find the PI4 on any cpu compare sites.
It runs ubuntu server out of the box without any tweaks or problems.
CPU in that Thin Client is somewhere in the range of Celeron J1900 - to have some base to compare. Rpi4 is a bit slower (which is not actually a problem for OpenHab) while SSD connection and proper powering makes Thin client a class better … if you don’t plan to make use of GPIO which is presumably absent on those devices.
Pretty cool that this threat is still active and people are still contributing.
Just to update my experience, I’m still running on the INTEL NUC, until this day I had no single crash or corruption.
I’ve reinstalled the machine completely, but that’s more because I’m always testing with additional software, programs etc…which sometimes end up in a mess
But, currently running Openhab 2.5.8 on Debian 10.5 without any issues.
The intel NUC has been a perfect buy. Fast, reliable and silent…
Now i’m running OH on a Raspberry Pi 4. But the weak point is always the SD-card. Sinds I have a Synology NAS i’m looking into the options to run OH op this NAS.
Which methode is nowaday (2020) preferred on the Synology NAS? SPK, Docker or virtual machine?.
That’s a software question hence somewhat off-topic.
In the first place, a DEDICATED hardware is recommended to minimize dependencies.
That would exclude any of your methods, on any NAS.
In question of SD-card wearout: Please be aware of ZRAM to minimize write access. It’s possible to use a SSD to start openHAB from, or just boot from (read only) SD-Card, then use SSD for any data.
Hi all, someone using odroid n2+? Now is ufficially supported by armbian. It seams to have a lot of kill feature. Only I don’t like the big.little architecture because of some possible little problem during the switch from little to big and vice versa
I’m also thinking about using a NUC … RPI is primary meant for education purposes, and it get’s hot (RPI4) ,sd card’s are not that reliable and an ssd only usable via USB… Doesn’t sound reliable to me.
MDAR
(Stuart Hanlon, UK importer of Velbus hardware)
303
I didn’t know they’d elected for that strange combination of CPU cores again, just like in the XU4.
I had terrible issues with Java falling over every time it got moved from big cores to little cores (and vice versa)
The only solution I found was to pin the Java process (or specifically the openHAB2 processes) to the big cores, using the affinity command within the service file.
A search of the forum for “XU4 CPUAffinity” should get you plenty of information
Specifically this post on a thread
FYI
I use the ODroid C2 or C4 as they only have Big cores.
They are both very stable machines that run openHAB2 really well, the C4 is lightning fast with openHAB2.
Especially if you use the DietPi OS (basically a shaved down Debian OS)
Ubuntu 20 headless runs well, but it takes longer to boot the core OS, before it starts loading openHAB2.
Either way, it’s all up and running within 5 minutes.
I really like nuc but actually an arm architecture have sufficient power for almost use case and a very low power consumption.
I read somewhere that some application crash during the switch.
I’m shure that problem it’s fixed recently but we know that except for Raspberry, the support is not the best and I don’t like to struggle
I have seen this statement many times. And I cant keep wondering, what exactly makes someone to state something like this. In my head, it makes no sense. It all comes down to, how much you push your system, no matter if its arm, Intel pentium, core Ix or anything else.
My experiences using an Rpi3B+ with SSD (USB boot) since openhab 2.3:
I use 18 (19) bindings. I havn´t counted exactly, but I have aprox +290 things running, (lots of those are modbus data and pollers things). I have no idea how many items, but I will say its probably close to 8-1000 items, maybe even more. I havn´t counted my rules, etc.
Question is, is my system a big system? Does it require a big (high powered/resources) hardware? Or is it enough just because its a arm architecture?
One thing is for sure, most people would not like to having pushed their exsisting smarthome system over its limits. Trust me, I have been there (and actually still is with my Rpi3B+ which has been running since openhab 2.2. It struggles on its limits every day, even though I run from SSD drive).
Btw… My Rpi3B+ also run Influxdb and MQTT broker. I had to move grafana to my windows server, cause that left my Rpi3B+ way over its limitations crashing openhab (Java), everytime Grafana was rendering an image.
A quick reply for the thread topic will be - It depends on what you´re going to do with it. In over-all, bigger (more powerfull) is better. Thats my experience.
Sidenote - Today I plan to rebuild my main system to my spare Odroid C2. I have everything prepared as much as I can. The Rpi3 will be left running Influxdb and MQTT broker only. I hope to get rid of some of the issues I have been having lately with the more power Odroid C2 can provide (and start to use the ipcamera binding on my main system). If the Odroid C2 runs the system more stable, I will “upgrade” to Odroid C4 very soon.
I do have an Rpi4 (4Gb) as well. But my testing with the openhabian hasslefree image has not been pleasent at all on the Rpi4. And after reading there are no plans for the image to support USB boot, I simply wont spend anymore time on this. Running a smarthome system like this from an SD card may sound “hasslefree” and a easy choice. But it also has some quite fatal disadvantages. I cant help wondering how my system would run from an SD card… My guess it, it would throw up bits and bytes within just a few seconds. That doesnt sound “smart” or hasslefee, to me
The big.little issues in the past were caused by Samsung branded units.
The Odroid N2+ is not a Samsung design so should not suffer.
There are some posts on this forum from people that had fixes for the issues with the Samsung based Odroid XU4 boards, so it was solvable.
A user posted the N2+ is working fine with Openhab so I will be getting two of them when they are back in stock.
I’m not here to tell fisherman stories, so I will not enumerate how big is my installation. The point is that a n2+ is more powerful than a rpi3 and also than a rp4. It has a emmc (that solve your problem with sd). Have a rtc and 4gb of ram. You can bet you can run all of your services and other like a vpn and a nextcloud instance without any issue.
So for me is wrong to spend money to buy a future proof server that use a lot of Energy and actually you don’t need now when you can change it every 4 years with a very small price.
Again I think is not difficult to boot openhabian from usb (I never tried), so the point is: do I really need to have a Windows server in my home? I think none need a windows server in the world
