It used to be the case that the only way to get a cheap (both in terms of purchase price and electricity costs) dedicated machine for running openHAB was an rpi. And you absolutely want a dedicated machine, so it made perfect sense to recommend using an rpi.
Then the rpi price sky-rocketed and at the same time a plethora of cheap (again both in terms of purchase price and running costs) x86 based machines became available.
From a hardware point of view, at this point in time there really is zero reason to recommend running openhab on an rpi.
I don’t personally use openhabian so I cannot comment on what that brings to the table, but if you are planning on running it on a regular linux distro, just get an x86 box instead.
As dcumented, you can run openHABIAN on an x86 box is you are unsing a Debian Distro.
I am about to move my openHAB 4.0 installation to a Intel(R) Celeron(R) J4125 CPU @ 2.00GHz (QuadCore) with 6GB memory and 126GB SSD.
Just upgraded the box to Debian 12 and used openHABian for setting up all the stuff needed (openHAB, MQTT, homegear, frontail, etc.) This was running absolutely smooth.
Sure, my point was that I have no experience whatsoever with openhabian so I cannot comment on it. And a hardware recommendation on its own is rather pointless without also covering what to run on it, hence why I qualified it with the “regular linux distro” part.
By the way @hmerk, if yours is fanless you probably want to add an external fan. I’m using mine in the tropics and running it without a fan is simply not possible.
That’s a pretty bold statement. It’s not just a hardware point of view. The whole package needs to be taken into consideration including operating system, third party software, power.
The audience and purpose for openHABian is to provide something as close to a turn-key-system as possible to those users who do not yet have the skills to do it all themselves (or skilled users who don’t want to). To achieve that, some sort of standard hardware configuration has to be settled upon and given the nature of home automation, something that supports USB, GPIO, with on board networking and bluetooth is a pretty good set of requirements.
At the time that openHABian was written, RPis were really the only viable option. And despite supply chain issues which appear to be correcting themselves, it remains a good choice to be the targeted platform for openHABian.
But if for whatever reason an RPi doesn’t fit your requirements, you have options to run openHABian. However, those options will be a little more work for you and will make it harder to support you here on the forum. It appears to be easy to underestimate how much time and effort it saves us who help users with problems here on the forum when we can make sweeping assumptions about hardware, OS, and configuration.
These concerns may not matter to you at all and that’s just fine. But to conclude that these concerns don’t matter at all to anyone (which is the logical conclusion to the statement “zero reason to recommend”) is something I strenuously reject.
Mine has a fan and is located in my cellar, sitting on top of a 19“ wall cabin.
This is my home distribution point where I also have a big UPS and my HP DL380 server, running several VM‘s….
Mine (which isn’t running openHAB but opnsense) is running fanless on a shelf lightly covered with a plastic box to reduce dust in my unheated/uncooled garage for four years now. But I’m in the mountains at 7100 ft (2165 m) altitude.
I try to make a concerted effort to not assume that my experience and environment generalizes to the whole world though.
