Best hardware platform

Actually I’m using an Raspberry with an 16GB SD Card for half a year now - no problems yet. Starting from a size of 16GB the SDcards replace damaged sectors I’ve read.

Anyway i could recommend this alternative with an x86 processor and 32GB eMMC storage: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1498.html
The LattePanda board is available starting at 75€ or 90$

All,

That’s a very interesting discussion and fits to my experience as well (unpredictable crash of my RPI 2 running OH 2.1 stable for a few Months without issues.

Because I was really happy about finding openhabian to start pretty quickly I wonder if such an “accelerator” would be available for the Intel based up-board as well!?

My understanding is that openHABian should work on any Debian based Linux distro. Theoretically you should be able to install Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, et al on the machine, download the openHABian scripts and run them.

I don’t know if anyone has tried that though and there might be some board computer specifics that need to be customized (e.g. flashing the light when everything is done).

@ThomDietrich, have I misstated anything?

Nope, 100% correct. I’m always wondering how I can highlight this underrated feature better. The “Manual Setup” steps should succeed on all modern Debian/Ubuntu systems with the exception of special hardware architectures that might need special attention. There were many reports of successful installations on all kinds of devices.

@NCO please give it a try. A quick look at the specs suggests that the openHABian scripts should work without issues. Let me know how it went!

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What’s the point? Do you really need a faster CPU than a Pi’s ? Any other platform will likely have its own specific problems, be it in the HW or the OS. Safest and easiest (and best supported) is to stay with the mainstream.

There is probably no “Best hardware platform” as it all depends on the specific deployment scenario. So in case you are looking for a professional and robust solution, please have a look at the RPi compatible Telegea Smart Hub. If there is some feature you are missing, let us know. Community feedback is important for us.

There is already a forum discussion here.

Ondrej

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Would this address the SD card issue (corrupt SD cards) and does it work with openhabian ?

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Thanks, I will as soon as I have chosen a new HW platform

Hi Jasper,

I am facing the same issue and considering a NUC as well.
Have you succeeded and did you possibly use openhabian?
Which NUC did you choose?
Thanks in advance

That sounds like a good (not too powerful) solution.
It’s actual hard to find a mini pc with a small (and cheap) ssd like the chromebox.

Unfortunately it has a fan inside and i would prefer a fanless solution.

Did you succeed with your chromebox?

No, I am looking for reliability (referring to the original post).
I don’t care for more power - I am happy with the (CPU) performance of my Raspberry.

I heard of successful installs on a NUC before.

My 2c. As my friends and family tech fixer, I’m always being given old dead or retired laptops.

These make excellent home servers - built in UPS, server GUI if you’re that way inclined, etc.

I just whack a headless Ubuntu (xenial last time from memory) on it, openhab mosquito etc and bam.

Take care and remember that most SBC alternatives (incl. NUCs) use the same memory tech that is the reason for Pi’s well-known SD card problems. But USB sticks aren’t any better. And eMMC isn’t either.
Yes there’s variances, and you can be lucky to get hold of a good product, but that’s pure luck, and the average MTBF will still be far from anything accepted in the professional world.
The bottom line simply is that all these technologies and products perform poorly in terms of reliability in this write-a-lot-scenario we will have. Check out this thread.
Whenever there’s an alternative that’s more reliable it’s just because it’s using a more reliable storage medium such as a HDD or SSD. Now you could choose to also equip your Pi with one of those.
But even such a NUC or pimped Pi still can and will fail at times (less often than SD card based one, but it will).
So either way, you have to go for a backup solution such as the Amanda part of openHABian.
And once you have that one working, you can also stick with your Pi.

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Good idea… the (I think only) drawback from a professional perspective (me being a data center designer) is how to handle the need for HW replacement. A Pi is 100% compatible and $35, so just buy two or three. Any next laptop model, though not unlikely, isn’t guaranteed to work with your current HW and OS. But if you prepare it BEFORE the crash, check and keep cross-checking with your evolving ‘production’ laptop’s OH installation at times, why not.
But remember that’s extra work, and people are lazy.

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The RPi Compute Module used in the Telegea Smart Hub is designed for industrial use and mounts an eMMC flash storage which replaces the SD card. The flash chip is a Samsung KLM4G1FEPD. Here is some information from its datasheet.

We don’t have specific data for running OpenHAB on this device for an extended time but we’ve been using many of these devices for other projects for more than a year and never had any issue with the flash memory.

Raspbian with OpenHAB is running fine on the Telegea Smart Hub (see details here). We haven’t tried openHABian yet but if this is of interest we can certainly do this.

Ondrej

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You’re absolutely right that ALL systems will fail and I was pretty happy with the raspi in the past.
The recent weeks have been a little annoying.

Assuming that I have a working image of my runtime system and would move it to a brand new SD-card. Does this mean the image would work for all the upcoming failures (exchangeing the cards each time) or is it possible that the image will migrate issues (corruptions) to the new card.
(Maybe a stupid question!?) :wink:

My new option would be a NUC (Intel NUC Kit NUC5CPYH) with 4 GB RAM and a 32 to SSD.
I assume that this will be much more stable will cost just about 180€.

I did not check out Amanda in openhabiann, but will do before migrating to the NUC.

If you copy a working image (non-corrupted ! You eventually just didn’t spot that yet, so better install from scratch) image to a spare card and lock that one up in your vault, yes, then you should be able to recover your home if your active card dies of corruption (but don’t run off that copy… that would corrupt it !).

Now you didn’t fully read my posts, did you ?

  • there’s risks and drawbacks if you change architecture
  • cost (think of spare HW, too)
  • you still need backup.
    If you have backup, you don’t need to change HW

You could as well attach just that SSD to your Pi. Or attach a simple USB stick instead and move all logging there as described in the thread I referenced.
But the point remains: You need to get your backup right. Amanda can create SD card copies for you, too.

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Sorry to give you the impression that I did not red your post (I did :slight_smile:

I just wanted to emphasize that a change to a NUC and RAM with SSD would eliminate the corruption caused by the SD-card.
Actually I tried to overcome this by an USB Stick already (moved root to USB using openhabian), but the issue stays the same (I will start from scratch to verify though).

I do backupsevery now and then, but it does not help, if I am not at home, when the systems crashs.
So I just would minimize the risks by considering HW not using SD-cards at all.

May or not be as easy using paper ui, but for backups I tend to just do tar zcf backup.tar.gz /etc/openhab/ and then scp it somewhere with a cron script. If fact just all of /etc/ (for mosquito, zone minder, etc)

If a hdd is borked I just reinstall Linux again.

Best life I’ve ever gotten out of a memory disk was 4yrs uptime off a laptop running of a 4 gb USB stick, though from memory I had /var/log mapped to /dev/shm on boot and no swap