Hardware Recommendation (Raspberry Pi?)

Hi,

I have several Zigbee, Z-Wave and Enocean devices that I want to openHAB to control. I am however totally new here and have no experience with Raspberry Pi. What can you guys recommend to put together to make this work?

Cheers

Odroid c2 as it is easy to get openhab running on it and has 2gb of ram. If cpu or ram is not enough then either an intel nuc, gigabyte Brix or the Odroid H2 which are x86 based.

Benchmark showing speed of the Raspberry Pi, C2 and the H2…

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-ODROID-H2-Benchmarks

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Our brand new introduction section of the documentation includes a recommendation for Pi version 3
here is a link… good reading if you are just starting out


and welcome to openHAB!

So to make this work I will need

  • 1 board such as the Odroid or Pi w/ power supply + case
  • 1 Wifi stick
  • 1 Zigbee stick
  • 1 Z-Wave stick
  • 1 Enocean stick
  • a memory card (will 4GB suffice?)

Will those sticks even fit and not cause problems?

and welcome to openHAB!

Thank you!

My pi 3B was upgraded to B+ but now I’m contemplating on reusing my spare Dell FX160, easily twice the computing power and draws only max 10W per specs. I’m planning on moving all my IoT microservices in a single hardware (assistant sdk based service, broadlink rm3 service (will post this to github soon), MQTT, alarm decoder integration, website uptime monitoring, openhab-cloud (I’m hosting my own), etc). Will run Debian on the fx160

Yes some of the older systems if purchased second hand can be a steal, just with a 10 year old power supply I’m not sure if I would trust that with so many eggs in the one basket… I’m using a second hand 5th gen i5 for video Handbrake encoding and it actually uses less power than an Atom that I was using previously for the same role simply because it gets the job done much faster and then shuts down, where the Atom had to crunch the data 10+ times as long. I measure all power usages at the wall with a meter and my Atom was using 15 watts just at idle from memory.

My Odroid C2 is using 10% CPU load average with Openhab and drawing 2.5 watts of power measured at the wall outlet. Peaks around 4 watts when booting up.

I agree with the eggs thing, but daily image backups help mitigate future headaches. Restoring from a backup is basically few clicks.

It’s been a while since I “killawatted” my pi but currently it’s on SSD, has zwave dongle, SDR radio, and 433mhz radio. I have some of my microservices running mostly on separate orange pi zero. If I could save power usage on the FX160, I’d probably switch them over and put as much as I can on the 160 but I do need to measure power usage. I’d just hate to unplug the Pi since it’s currently on 200+ days uptime :smile:. It’s on a DIY UPS so killawattting it through the UPS won’t be an accurate test.

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That’s a very good question which the answer is I’m not sure as I dont know the power draw of the sticks. Wifi sticks are known to have issues and be sure to look at the raspberry Pi forum for ones that work as some either dont have support in rasbian or draw more power than the pi can supply out a single usb. The power supply and the USB cable feeding the Pi is very very critical to be good quality, even more so when you are loading up the USB. You may need to use a powered USB hub to feed them all, however if you simply use a network cable you will find it much easier and more reliable.

The latest pi3 has wifi built in which would free up a usb port. I would still use a wired network.

Yes your list looks good, the only thing to mention is the 4GB card, best to replace it with a genuine good brand card that is >16gb in size. Modern cards have wear levelling and tiny arm processors in them to spread the wear out over the card and also to replace bad areas on the fly that come from normal manufacturing which happens to all cards. Even if it was large enough using a cheap, old technology 4gb card that you have laying around is probably going to fail sooner than what you would like.

Official SD card advice is here, as will most questions you have it will already be found either in an article or in their forum…

The new orange pi 3 offers a lot of things the latest rpi3b+ does not. If my fx160 test does not meet my expectations, I’m moving to an oPi3

See the link in post 3. You will want to go for a Pi 3 and openHABian. Anything beyond is possible but only recommended to OH experts that know how to properly install Linux derivatives and OH on top.

No, wear levelling does not always apply and the larger your card the longer a raw backup will take, and backups are the most important part of the story. Read on.
I’d suggest 8 or 16 GB at most, even 4 will do (if you still find someone to sell them).