Comparison of servers to run OpenHAB on

Hi all.
I am totally new to OpenHAB and even the beginners guide is not basic enough. I need some advise on which system is best suitable for my needs. My second problem is that I am not hundred percent sure about what I need.
First of all, I will probably post some questions that are already answered. If so, please dont be mad at me but either just ignore my post or post some links. Thank you!
Basically I get along quite good with technics but right now I feel like a total noob…

I dont know whether to use a Rasperry Pi, an Arduino or whatever and then I even found that one could use a Diskstation and such things to run OpenHAB on. Is there a comparison about what hardware serves what purpose best?

For now, I just want to monitor (and log) temperature and humidity in several rooms. I already have five ELV RS500
sensors. I found that there is a HomeMatic module for The Rasperry Pi. Is this a good way to start with? As much as I know this module is only for 868 Hz. Is there another module that serves several bands?
As I said, this is probably already answered but I just did not find it…

Later on I would probably like to control the heating via OpenHAB too. And then keep going an make my whole home very smart :wink: maybe the garden first.
I have a FritzBox Router with a harddrive attached to it as NAS. But I already read that it is not advised to run OpenHAB on a FritzBox. Maybe it helps anyway.

Thank you for any advice.

I use this one with win10

work perfect for me

Let me try with some thoughts:
Personally, I would recommend to start with running OH2 on a raspberry. It is cheap, works well, you can use OpenHabian that deals with a lot of the admin stuff of the raspberry. In particular, I personally found it very comforting having a dedicated system that does not impact any other services in my home if and when things go wrong; and by go wrong I mean of course user errors. If you read the forum, you will notice that A LOT of users run OH2 on raspberry and there is a lot of support available. So start with that, read the installation guidelines and read up on openhabian and pick whichever you like best.

Start with that, play with the system, see what you can do, and think about what additional controllers you want to buy at a later point when you grew more comfortable and knowledgeable. You may want to search the forum and read up on any of the devices you are thinking of buying to gain more insights. As you learn more about homeautomation your plans may and likely will change. Read the forum, there are a few threads to considerations about a complete system and there is no one size fits all solution.

And read the docs: docs.openhab.org and read them again and then a third time, especially the beginners guide and the early chapters. You will save yourself endless hours of frustration if you do so.

And just to get back on your question which server to chose: it is a question of preference, aside from the very popular raspberry, old laptops, full size servers, NUCs, virtual machines, docker, synology NAS, MACs and windows systems are all in use and a couple of others…the choice is yours. But again, I found it extremely liberating that with a raspberry I could simply reformat my SD card and start from scratch if I ran into major trouble. If you are a;ready familiar with them, you also can use docker or VMs with similar benefits; but I would not recommend to learn everything at once, if all is new.

Last tip: buy a good SD card if you use raspberries.

In terms of hardware: I think if you are just starting, use what you have. I have a Synology, and OH runs fine on it. However, I’m considering to invest in an Intel NUC (with Ubuntu) so OH runs on an independent machine. This way, Synology DSM upgrades don’t impact OH anymore, and I’ve also noticed some drops in OH performance when multiple computers were backing up to Synology. I’m slightly reluctant to use Raspberry, I’ve read too many posts in this forum related to corrupt SD cards.

Related topic: https://community.openhab.org/t/best-hardware-platform/

Go for a Raspberry Pi. It’s what most people use for a number of good reasons, and in particular any beginner should start with a proven solution so he can focus on learning openHAB instead of having to mess with the server. The less mainstream your server the more work for you.
Use openHABian to get started fast.
It’ll also keep beginners from making a number of bad decisions that can lead to frustration quite quickly.

This is useless advice. See Corrupt FileSystems every 2-3 month?.

It is true, however, that anyone to use a Pi (or other SBC) needs to take precaution to not get hit by SD card corruption or HW outage in general, but it’s a complex topic.
Best advice is to implement a backup solution at the very beginning (even before you start working with openHAB itself). openHABian has a menu option to install/configure Amanda (a backup software solution).
You can use your Fritz!Box as the NAS. If you’re familiar with UNIX, see the link above how to optimize a Pi.

Hi again.
Thank you very much for your advice.
I bought a rasperry now, so I will probably be back very soon when I encounter my first problems. Anyway I hope I wont have to post but rather benefit from other posts from now on :slight_smile:
cheers