Nice lineup. I've been extremely happy since I moevd HASS from RPi to HASS Blue (Odroid). Never had a crash again while RPi got stuk every 3-4 days.

I love the attention to detail and appreciate the work thank you!

Well done! A concise and detailed explanation on the Raspberry PI options. I have two Intel NUC's now running in two different locations. My eyes were looking for the Ambar😃but maybe for another project. Thank you for your suggestions. All the Best.

Thank you for all the work you put into this test. My Raspberry Pi3b+ (1GB) is dying after recent HA updates

this was a great idea! Thanks for listing the options

Great video! Thank you! I have Home Assistant running on a Gigabyte BRIX GB-BMCE-5105. Cost around +-200 euros, is released end of 2021 and has a lot of power!

Your content is great man, very helpful and on the point, just want to say keep it up 👍

Thank you for the great comparisons, great video! I would add a few OrangePi boards as they have a very good feature sets at a competitive price and power consumption..

I think they should have continued with the Home Assistant Blue as it was a very nice little system (but doesn't heat my basement like the Pi4 does) and very user friendly and attractive, especially to people just getting into Home Assistant. That said since Home Assistant is becoming a full blown automation system (Microsoft was too early with Home Server), with security camera etc, you can quickly scale up your system such that old mini PCs become sought after (Home Assistant Green, recycling old computers) and the Pi shortage couldn't have come at a better time for Home Assistant as it is forcing them to stay pretty much platform independent as this will pay off nicely for the user community in the long run.

My Home Assistant Yellow just arrived. But the ETA on my back order for the RPi 4 compute module (RPi CM4) is December 2023! So in the interim I've ordered a BigTreeTech CB1 for $30.50 USD including shipping. The company appears to create electronics for 3D printers and were using the RPi CM4 and their info says they launched the CB1 recently due to shortage of the RPis. The CB1 is designed to with the same BTB headers as a the RPi CM4 so it should fit the Home Assistant Yellow. I cant see any show stoppers at this point, but you never know until you plug it in so im keeping my fingers crossed.

Hi pal, nice content as usual. Would love to see a full review of the amber plus. How does it differ from Synology?

Great review of Pi alternatives - thank you!

Just received my Dell 3060 today. Can't wait to set it up!

Super helpful video!

When you show the heat graphs I would like the ambient temperature included somewhere (or did you mention it and I missed it?). The max temp on the board could differ pretty much if you are at BigClive's home or in an ordinary place😁. I have an inside temp somewhere in between BigClive and most homes (at least those that I visit regularly) with a temp around 15-16 °C

This was sooo helpful. It helped me realize I needed to move my HA install from a RasPi3 to an IntelNUC I had laying around. I have had some issues though with it on restart so if anyone has some suggestions on how to make the load pretty stable

I run my HA on Mac mini M1 (16Gb/512Gb) with 2 Debian VM, one for Home Assistant and another for Apache Web server. Additionally MacOS runs MySQL server and bunch of Selenium python scripts for web scraping (one of them getting hourly electricity prices from NordPool). In my opinion it is the best setup, because of power efficiency and performance. Power consumption is around 6-8W. Only drawback is the price of this great machine itself.

Useful vid. The low level background music drove me mad though as I kept thinking my phone or doorbell was ringing in another room.

Very interesting, great job!

getting your opinion on Amber X / Amber Pro sounds great! Seems like a very feature rich alternative to Synology

I have been running HA OS on a Beelink T4 mini pro with 4GB Ram and 64GB emmc for at least 6 months now. Works flawlessly.

Hey, Very cool video, congrats! Quick question do you know if it is possible to install home assistant with supervisor in AmberPro?

I am using the M6 mini pc based on the newer Jesper Lake Celeron which comes with wifi, bt, ethernet, usb3.0 and m.2 sata ssd to run my HA. Much smaller and powerful than most of the recommendations here which buyers should seriously consider when getting their HA box. Small little x86 computing monsters! Much better than a RasPi and almost perfect to run a smart home server.

Very interesting video! Also, I like your GPU shirt from LTT!

Please let us know the alternative to run frigate/doubletake/deepstack without a coral ? As I understand you can quantify capabilities by mentioning the number of frames per second a rig can handle with inference etc in place.

Thanks for the great video! Why do you think the guys who released Home Assistant Blue on Odroid made Home Assistant Yellow on Raspberry Pi 4 CM?

I’m running a hp t620 thin client with os. Has a 1.6 amd dual core, 16gb ssd, 8gb ddr3. Works perfectly and only cost 32 shipped from eBay.

Really good video. Not just because of the shortage of Pi's but also for people looking to upgrade their HA hardware. One question: can the FingerBot be used with Home Assistant? How?

Great video Lewis, although now I want to spend money upgrading from an RPi 4 🤣

Great video! Due to the RPI shortage I’m really leaning towards Odroid. I’ve just ordered an M1 as it has very low power consumption, can boot from SSD and odroid claims some really impressive CPU cooling on their website.

I would add a used HP ThinClient T5xx/6xx as they are very reliable, cheap with a bunch of ports.

Well. Looks like I made the right choice buying the Odroid :D the performance is nothing but SOLID!

I really like the deep dive on this video ! It really push me to go Odroid. I never has though I could use a Nas but know I think of it I could setup all my family to upload directly to it (they always complain to lose photo and don't know where they are...)

Thanks for the awesome video! Do you know of any similar options to the Seeed Odyssey (which has internal SATA headers)? Unfortunately with shipping, customs and sales tax, the Odyssey becomes extremely expensive for EU customers.

Thanks for the video! Have you tried Protectli? I just got a fw4b for running pfSense and it's great!

Thank you

That seed board would make a pretty cool NAS.

I've been running HA on a Dell Wyse 5070 Thin Client Celeron J4105 4GB DDR4 with an upgraded 128 GB M.2 SATA drive for $16. It's fanless and draws about 7 watts. I paid $40 for it on eBay, and it's been fast and rock solid. I am contemplating trying a Google Coral M.2 in the WIFI card slot since I don't use wifi on this box.

Hi, What about Raspberry Pi 400 and compatability with Home assisstant is there any defrencess between it and the regular PI4

Paid £35 for Pi 4 4GB last year or so, happy with it, low wattage, does what I need no noise via wifi in a drawer

I was wondering what the weather card/integration was at 16:35 of the video?

Just to clarify as this is all new to me. If I get the Dell model 3040 or equivalent, the Home assistant install is just like doing a NUC ?

Thank you so much for this. I just moved everything over to a Dell Optiflex 3040 (£90 on eBay) with 16Gb memory and a 1Tb SSD and it flies. Best HA experience so far and much less faffing than a VM on my Mac. Thanks again.

Hmm, to install HA supervised ... where did you find a Debian 11 image for the vim3l ?

Is there a step bey step guide for installing on the Dell 3040? as im not able to find one. The ones i can find talk about installing on a vm or using other software, i may be missing something really obvious. Thanks . Chris

Cracking video mate, so useful in the current climate! Also can’t tell you how nice it is to hear a fellow Scot on KZfaq in a space dominated by Americans! (no hate to them, just nice to hear 😎)

There is some confusion between dell 3040 thin clients (often having only display ports) and dell 3040 optiplex (VGA and hdmi)... Also none I see on e-bay come with ssd... I am looking to built one for my sister...😁

My home assistant flight on Dell WYSE 7020 Thin Client and is what I would recommend as they cheap and pretty power efficient

Hi, i'm now progessing in installing HA on a older laptop with a USB stick where i installed it on. I want to change to a older suitable Mini PC. Is it possible to make a copy from the installed version on the USB stick to this Mini PC ?

If there is a Guiinees World Record for acronyms-per-minute this video is definitely a contender :-)

My Home Assistant is running on a Synology DS920+, nice and easy :)

I personally am using an old laptop to run HA. Idk exactly what its power draw is like but it has 8 GB ram, a quad core CPU and I believe draws a maximum of 40w..? It was a hand-me-down since my mom upgraded... If you're going to upcycle an unused laptop and use it for HA, a few things to keep in mind: -- #1 do this always it is very important to REMOVE THE BATTERY. If you're going to use the device for many years leaving a battery plugged in could be a serious hazard -- #2 put an SSD into it if it doesn't have one already -- #3 close it if you can ,, it'll turn off the display which will save power -- If you can, tweak the bios so that when it loses power it comes on rather than staying off when power is restored

Never ran HA on a Raspberry Pi. I had an unused Dell OptiPlex 790 with 20GB RAM and run it on VirtualBox. Also run Daphile for the Squeezebox solution as well as a few other VMs. Very flexible solution 🙂

Up until a few days ago, I was running HAOS in a VM on my personal rig. My mother was about to throw out an old laptop the other day. I said NO I want it lol. It's got an i5 4200U, 2C 4T processor with 8GB of RAM. I replaced the old HDD with a SATA drive and it is perfect. I run my HAOS (which is a very lightweight version, I don't have any crazy stuff going on) using Virtual Box. I took out the laptop battery and plugged the AC adapter into my UPS. Works perfectly for me and only $20 spent for a SATA drive. I wanted to run a RP4, but couldn't find one for a sane price... So she'll do for now

Khadas Vim1 works fine too. I have it working for months now. It was added by agnes but as its old it was never made public. Also Khadas Vim3 works very smooth

I have HA running as a VM on a NUC :P I don't have anything with Raspberry Pi's. They're fun and all, but way too expensive on what you're getting + storage is a drama.

Nice missed this last at the time, but I have a Dell 3070 running proxmox and HasOS recommended 👍

Posso instalar no Kadas VIM 2 ?

Do you know if any of these can be run off 12v DC?

Hi will HA run smoothly on Orange pi 3gb ram

Would you run the Dell using Proxmox to have a virtual setup for HA (and other things) or would you recommend using HA OS for the whole machine?

Awesome job. The 7 zip comparison graph looks quite misleading, because of the scale. Makes it look like RP4 absolutely murdered the Khadas, when in reality, it’s a very small percentage difference

Hi guys, would home assistant run on a late 2013 imac?

i recently got my paws on one from amazon :-)

Question for you. I’m currently running home assistant on proxmox. Would it be worth me switch into one of these devices?

The power consumption for the Khadas is displayed backwards on all the comparison charts. The idle and max are the wrong way around.

you mentioned the Dell OptiPlex 3040 as a good option would the Dell OptiPlex 7040 also work?

It'd be nice if there was an img/mk5 for our growing pile of older, but still good Android phones.

I strongly suggest to use a dell optiplex. I’m using one with proxmox on it with several virtual machines including one HA.

I don't know if I missed the explanation in the video, but why does Them because VM3L draw almost 6W at idle and only 3W at Max, according to your graph? Is that not backwards?

The Adaprox sensor is so cute

Any suggested options for built in zigbee addons on those Intel boards? For me it is an attractor for the HA Yellow boards.

be cool to get an update to this for 2023

Looking at the comparisons the Odroid N2+ is pretty much THE standalone Home Assistant host. Clearly the HA team did some serious research to settle on that board for the Blue. Great performance with lower power consumption. Just a shame USB sticks have to be used for network connectivity beyond LAN, the thing I love with the Pi 4 is everything in a neat package, including ZigBee and Z-Wave.

My personal preference for such things is the UP Squared from AAEON (the industrial division of Asus), not particularly cheap at about $400 US including an Aluminum case for the top of the line Pentium version, but that is for a very small, passively cooled quad core I5, with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of eMMC, 4 USB3 ports (3 Type A and 1 Micro OTG) and dual Gig Ethernet (they also make Atom and Celeron versions of the same board, that cost less in various memory and eMMC configs). It has an HDMI and a Display Port for dual display video and an additional Display Port available as a header. There is a micro PCI mSATA slot as well as an additional SATA port, so you can easily stuff 2 SATA SSDs internal into that very small passively cooled case. There is even an M.2 E-Key slot for laptop type WiFi/Bluetooth modules so it's upgradeble to whatever the latest standards are and a 40 pin Raspberry Pi compatible I/O connector, plus an additional 60 pin I/O header, and 2 more USB (2.0) header ports. it's a pretty action packed board. The case is pretty beefy too, heavy aluminum extrusions with machined surfaces, and comes with a VESA mount so you can just mount it onto the back of a TV or monitor or on a wall or whatever you want to do with it. It's actually called the Up Squared because it is the size of the longer side of a Raspberry Pi on all sides, the original Up Board (quad core Atom) was the same footprint as a Pi, and there is a newer version of that as well, and even beefier versions of the Squared that don't have the industrial case option. I used to use those small Dells where I am using the Up Squareds now, but all of those have since died, the fan being the biggest issue. It's not a very robust fan with not very good airflow, that has to double as both the case and heatsink fan. The power supplies are not fantastic either. I also use the UP Squareds for control machines for dusty areas like CNC Routers where a fan in a small case is a particularly bad idea. Given that these run an Intel I5 processor they can run pretty much ANY version of Linux, IllumOS, FreeBSD, Windows, and many different hypervisors and container environments. If HAOS was capable of running mirrored disks I would be doing that, the UP Squared I run HAOS on is the only one of these I don't run mirrored, and I have quite a few running both Linux and Windows. This is just one of the boards from a pretty extensive lineup of "Up Boards" from AAEON, not sure why they don't get more attention. They are very well made, reliable, ship worldwide, and have stated availability.

I haven't watched the full video yet so I'm hoping to see a PoE powered and fanless solution. If there is one out there I will probably dosh out the cash and relieve my VBox of the HA task😁

Can I turn my old cell machine into a ha-os machine?

Hi friend, sorry to ask this question in this video but you are my HA GURU xD So i had HA running on Pi2 with no problems for months. This week i moved to a new house and i wanted to have a clean install for this new home so i formatted the card and use THE SAME haos.pi2.7.4... i had install previous, but now it gives me an error when installing. Something that the HA is getting ready and after a few minutes i have "Home assistant cli not starting! jump into console for emergency" and i cant find any solution online. Do you know anything about this? The only thing diferent is that i have a new Internet provider. Thanks in advance

Does an arduino not work? and if not why?

quick question. All the tutorials out there today always talk about the RP4. I have an old RP2 that was gifted to me that I've never done anything with. COULD I use this to run home assistant? or is it too old and limited in ram to run it well?

I've been seeing them but... oof! I only wish I'd gotten more when I was setting things up.

There are mountains of low cost or free x86s that will annihilate a RPi. It'll take a couple of years of usage before the cost of electricity justifies the cost of an SBC, if ever when you price in performance.If HAOS ever gets its own x86 distro or exe, the average person can put it on a mini pc.

Raspberry pi 4 cost more on Canadian Amazon Core i3 micro solutions. I mean Raspberry was a nice cheap computer. Not anymore.

You forgot pi 400. It is available everywhere.

nice shirt

Hi, I've seen your videos regarding the active lighting for backlighting TV's but as you have stated on this video... raspberry pi's are like gold dust these days. Is there any particular pi clone or similar which I could use inplace of a raspberry pi zero 2?

I think i would get a used intel nuc or Odroid

Good video. A few points: your color grading is a bit flat, your graphs should start at 0 (first 7-Zip Graph), and the graph for the Phadas Power Consumption is wrong (Idle and Max mixed up). The Odroid has two cores at 2.2 GHz and two at 1.9 GHz, not 2.4 and 2.0 as you say.

Home assistant runs on surprprisingly low spec hardware, i personally run an old laptop with an i7, ubuntu installed and then run home assistant in a vm with backups to google drive

I went with an intel NUC 7th Gen with an i7 and 32 GB Ram. I want to use Docker to run HA.

Even better, run HAOS in a VM. Cost me nothing.

get old hardware install proxmox and a vm and bam, run Home assistant way faster than any raspberry pi could

No need to spell out A-L-E-X-A, if you say "Amazon Alexa" it doesn't trigger as the wake word.

what about a mac mini

LINUS what was the website😂😂😂

Wait, you didn't include the most logical and one of the more popular solutions? Synology NAS?

£69 - nice

Hello. Please can you tell me where I can buy an Odroid N2+ at this price as I cannot find one at anything similar to the price you talk about. Many thanks.

You-ban-too 😂 please It’s uh-bun-too

meanwhile I have 5 raspberry pi's collecting dust