I wouldn’t worry about the USB c thing. IMHO the world has gone a little mad and overcooked it.
I buy all my USB C cables from banggood, fleabay or aliexpress. Every one of them work. If you buy a fancy one then you might run into the problem. As @rpwong says, get the psu with the rpi and you’ll be fine.
Buy RPi 4 (2GB minimum) if you’re starting out. It’s better than the 3 by a long shot just for the ram.
C
I don’t have any evidence to support this, but I believe the manual installation instructions for openHABian (i.e. install Raspbian Buster, clone the repo and run openhabian-config to install and configure everythging) should work. It’s just the SD image that won’t work because it is based on Raspbian Jessie which the RPi 4 won’t run.
The Zulu Java installation from openhabian doesn‘t worked for me and i used the manual installation.
And FireMotD wasn‘t installed correctly, but i didn‘t had the time to check on this.
FireMotd isn´t installed correctly either, using the openhab 2.4 hassle-free image for Rpi 3.
And it’s not installed correctly on other GNU/Linux platforms (tried with a debian VM). But I had no time to explore and did simply install it manually…
Hi All
Has anyone found a small PC for OH2 that allows a SSD inserted for resonable cost. I purchased one of those fan less units from aliexpress but its junk. Kept over heating when the ambiet was 18degrees celcius and the unit wasn’t even doing anything. I got my money back thankfully as the seller couldnt be bothered to respond.
For me, the Pi is not a solution. SD cards dont provide enough longevity/reliability and there’s no nice case solutions that provide the Pi and storage in one.
Cheers
Hello,
I’m thinking about using the following model:
https://skinflint.co.uk/zotac-zbox-ci327-nano-zbox-ci327nano-be-a1605469.html
If I am not mistaken, you could forward your logs to a NAS so nothing gets written to the SD card.Another option some people use is to buy an SSD USB stick which is far more resilient than plain SD memory.
Add a external SSD connected through USB to your Rpi. Thats how my Openhab is running atm.
Other choices could be to use Odroid C2 (or H2 if you want a x868 device).
I just ordered an Odroid C2, hopefully it will arrive today. This will replace my Rpi 3B+, cause it´s way faster. It´s using onboard eMMC, (or SD card for those who cant live with the speed of eMMC/SSD 
).
Odroid h2.
Or there are a number of itx boards made that use the j4105, j4205 and j5005 processors. Be sure to use a pico supply and not an atx supply if you want less than 5 watts power draw at idle.
Gigabyte make a board I am looking at but looks like stock due to intels shortage supply issues mean I can’t find it in stock locally.
ASRock J5005-ITX and Gigabyte J4105N H
The odroid is in stock and a nice solution and has a cheap case and power supply that is suitable.
Odroid H2 is an Intel based CPU. It is VERY fast. But in my opinion its way overkill for openhab unless you use other applications and video/grafana rendering etc.
If Hardkernel ever change it to use the J5005 CPU, at the same price, I would be getting a few
There’s a patch soon to be released to have OH write to memory instead of SD, mitigating SD wearout problems.
I recommend to wait for that and stick with a Pi as that’s mainstream. You can even try it before it’s merged into openHABian.
Excellent news, will that be the default way or will it need to be switched on? it will make a big difference when no UPS is used. I have been doing that for over a year with Openhab ( far longer with other projects) and it works great.
Hi matt
those boards are nice, have you see any cases that would suit? Odroid isnt a solution because it has no decent cases (that crazy thing with a huge fan on it looks cr@p)
cheers
Just google ITX case as it is a standard which most pc case makers will have models. Also if you have a normal ATX case they often allow itx if you move the posts so an old case laying around will work. A pico supply Is well worth doing over a standard atx supply. You will save the money back in the first year with the cost of electricity.
They should have made the Pi4 with M2 NVME.
Hi Markus looks interesting, is there a way to quantify how long an SD card would last with your patch given the writes being moved to RAM?
Agreed…
Dont overlook J5005-ITX board, if you consider to get an ITX board. The price of the J4205-ITX and the J5005-ITX are almost the same. But the J5005 is alot faster.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-Silver-J5005-vs-Intel-Pentium-J4205/m487063vsm221469
Its not really about speed, its about having a nice solution that allows an easy storage solution at a resonable cost. To add a motherboad, case, memory etc etc all adds up and makes the ITX solution far less cost effective.
Markus’ solution of a Pi with the SD card and RAM may be the ticket. I need something thats going to give me a good 2 years of usage