this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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It's not the route I've gone, but lots of people seem to be having success with retired small form factor business machines. Getting a good deal on used business stuff seems to be the key, ideally locally, where they just want to get rid of it compared to ebay. A low-end Intel from 4 years ago is annoyingly good computation per watt.
Also, take your power bill and calculate the cost of a watt for a year. Remember that number for all future purchases. Where I live, it's around $1.50/watt-year. A 60-watt always-on computer gets pricy quickly.
Energy cost isn't much of an issue for me, I just don't want to run something needlessly power hungry for my use case
That’d be my go to option probably if I wanted to move off my Pi's. Locally something like a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 (ex business) on deal sites are not much more than a Raspberry Pi, especially the past 24 months where supply of Pis has been hit hard. Those small form factor PC’s probably come with an SSD also which I’d take over an SD card for ruggedness any day, and if you had to buy one and a caddy because you don’t have any spare, the Pi is possibly costing more than the Intel PC at that point. More ports (and more convenient display output if you need it) etc too.
As you say, power consumptions the one thing to keep an eye out for I’d say, but those systems are relatively efficient.