Best hardware platform

I’m also interested in odroid n2+ (or even a NUC)…
What do you mean by that big.little architecture problem? Did you read something about it?

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.

@Suy

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.

(Sub 2 minutes with DietPi, on either platform)

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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 :laughing:

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 :smiley:

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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.

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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 :laughing:

docker

Not really. It’s still flash based so pulling the power will still potentially corrupt the file system. It will also still wear out eventually. Just ask Tesla. Maybe not as fast as SDs but it still wears out.

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Thanks to post No 302 from Domenico this morning, I discovered that the Odroid N2+ may suffer from the same issues as the processor used on the Odroid XU4, becuase they have used Little.Big cpu.

So the C4 may prove to be more stable, for Java at least.

And if anyone does want fisherman stories, I’ve just done two quote which each call for >50 mains dimimng circuits :wink:

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Probably (insert disclaimer here) wont be an issue as in the past it was caused by Samsung not allowing important code to be released as opensource. The Odroid N2+ is using an Amlogic based ARM so this should not be an issue. The C4 is probably going to be more popular due to its lower price.

That’s good to know, thanks for clearing that up. :smile: :+1:

That’s what I used quite long but recently ran into these issues:

I read a lot and assume, that this might be related to my z-wave USB stick and USB-SSD to create this network / SSD access los mentioned above.

So next step is to use an SD-card with zram and see if this is more stable (I use the official RPi4 power supply by the way).

However, a NUC with a “real” SSD connected with sATA might be an even better choice…

It might be worth using a powered USB HUB to attach the SSD and Zwave controller. Even if using the official power supply, the USB devices might be drawing enough extra power to cause problems.

Thanks, Rich. Didn’t think about this yet.
That’s another great way to consider!

Power transmission in (standard) USB is pretty limited so I’d try to rather power the SSD directly.

I am using the RPi4 with this one:

So you mean connecting the 5V in would already help instead of powering it via USB only?

yes

Thank you!
I will try the jack then as I have still one of these somewhere:

I run on a QNAP TS453 pro 16gb ram, 16tb hdd, have been since 2018. I use a native install rather than docker and a dedicated lan interface on an isolated vlan (I’ve also compiled openhab 3 for QNAP - check forum) and never had any issues what so ever. Zwave and zigbee sticks work without issue, I run frontail for logging in a docker container, have native Kodi on it, cctv, fffmpeg, plus loads and loads more. Just stick with an intel version of you go this route.