No Raspberry Pi For Home Assistant? No Problem!

raspberry pies are undoubtedly one of the easiest ways to get started with home assistant after all they are the single most popular platform out there in terms of installations but getting your hands on one has become increasingly difficult with increase in demand supply shortage and scalpers to blame and even if you can find one they are often being sold for way over their retail price community sites like andre costa's rpilocator.com are a great resource for finding one in stock but if you're not quick they do disappear really fast but raspberry pi's aren't the only way to run home assistant so i rounded up eight different bits of hardware all capable of running home assistant in some fashion so let's see what they are made of thank you to adaprox for sponsoring this video the aidaprox fingerbot can tackle any form of switch from just a regular button a rocker switch and even a toggle switch with the tool pack there are three trigger modes click press and program allowing it to conquer a variety of situations and also features touch control it's easy to set up fast response time and even better no hub required however you can purchase a hub separately which is wi-fi controlled if you need it for much longer distances it also supports voice control from amazon a-l-e-x-a google home and siri check out their website with the link in the video description kicking us off as a board aimed squarely at the raspberry pi in terms of price but also form factor the kadas vim 3l this credit card size single board computer packs a lot of features into its small form factor it's rocking a quad core cortex a55 processor clocking at 1.9 gigahertz with two gigabytes of lp ddr4 unlike the regular raspberry pi the kadas also manages to squeeze 16 gigabytes of emmc onto its black pcb along with an sd card slot allowing you to dual boot different os's in terms of i o it's got one usb 3.0 port a usb 2.0 port and a usb type-c port for power a hdmi 2.1 port and on the underside is a super handy m.2 slot connected via pcie express allowing you to connect an nvme ssd for even more on-board storage connectivity is decent with a gigabit ethernet port 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth 5.0 and the kadas vim3l comes in at 85 us dollars i decided to run all of these boards through a thermal power and benchmark test as many of you in the current climate are very conscious of these factors particularly when it comes to power one quick note i wanted to provide you with these few benchmarks just so you can see how these boards stack up against each other but just bear in mind that benchmarks don't always give you the true story or the full story when it comes to real world applications however i do think they are useful as a quick point of reference first up i run synthetic benchmark geekbench because it tests a few different things and also because it works on arm and x86 cpus and then i run sbc bench from thomas kaiser which tests 7-zip member and open ssl performance geekbench saw the kadas hit a single core score of 172 and a multi-core score of 570 putting it just behind our control raspberry pi 4b which achieved a single core score of 268 and a multi-core score of 648 due to its slightly superior cpu that trend continues in 7-zip compression tests with the kadas managing a score of 5106 again just slightly behind the raspberry pi the table's term when it comes to memory performance with the vin3l pulling out quite a big lead in both read and write performance due to its improved lp ddr4x memory and again in openssl the vim3l crushes the raspberry pi in performance due to its hardware crypto engine something that the raspberry pi 4 does not have to test cpu temperature i ran an all core stress test for one hour and during that time i recorded a peak of 67.2 degrees celsius which is actually pretty impressive you can see how long it took that stock heatsink to reach equilibrium managing to dissipate the heat nicely without any fan making this completely silent an idle power draw for the cad ass was measured at 3 watts while idle and a peak power drop was measured at 5.9 watts making this one of the lowest power boards that we have here today home assistant installation options for the vim3l are decent with debian 11 available to install pretty easily so you can get an officially supported home assistant supervised install which will give you access to add-ons and all of that goodness or you can install ubuntu rnbn arch or various other distros and install home assistant container or core whichever you want to go with unfortunately there is no home assistant os support right now for this haos is supported on the bigger brother of this board the kadas vim3 but it doesn't quite work on the vim 3l just yet i do actually think this is a great little board for the price it's perhaps a little light on the ram front but the l in vim3l stands for light version and there is a bigger brother more beefed up version of this called the kadas vim3 pro with more ram and a slightly better cpu which might also be of interest to you and of course if you go for that version you will also get official home assistant os support if you want it next up we have a board many of you will be familiar with and has some home assistant history and heritage in it the odroid n2 plus the board featured in the very popular home assistant blue the odroid m2 plus is quite a bit bigger than the raspberry pi but it's still very small and compact and can be tucked away anywhere at its center is a hexa core processor with a big little design giving it four cores clocked in at 2.4 gigahertz plus an additional two weaker cores at two gigahertz for ram it's available in two or four gigabyte variants and for storage we can either use the sd card slot or there is an emmc connector allowing you to install up to a 128 gigabyte emmc module for o we have four usb 3.0 ports one micro usb 2.0 port a hdmi 2.0 port and a three and a half millimeter audio jack connectivity is limited to only a single gigabit ethernet port no wi-fi or bluetooth unless you use an additional adapter and price-wise the n2 plus comes in at 57 pounds for the 2 gigabyte variant or 72 pounds for the 4 gigabyte variant which is the one i would recommend for the price difference and it's the one that we have here today in our geekbench performance test we saw the odroid really start to stretch its legs with a single core score of 379 and a multi-core score of 1216 almost doubling the score of our raspberry pi with a huge 87 performance increase on the multi-core as expected the dominance continues with an 89 improvement in compression in 7-zip as well as our fastest memory performance yet in both read and write bandwidth finally in openssl the odroid m2 plus will pull out a substantial lead over the vim3l and completely dominates the raspberry pi peak temperature during our hour torture test came in at 70.4 degrees again a very respectable number with the stock heatsink performing well and again completely silent power draw at idle came in at a very surprising 2.9 watts with peak power draw at 8.9 watts because of its much more powerful cpu than the kadas vim3l in terms of installation options we have a full house obviously you can install home assistant os on here because it's the same board that is inside of the home assistant blue meaning you already have access to that official supported image you can also install debian 11 for a supervised installation as well as ubuntu armbian or in fact in theory any distro that works on arm you should be able to get going on here giving you access to home assistant container and core so that makes it plenty versatile for the old droid n2 plus overall this is a great little board with plenty of power for most people it's cool it's quiet and it's got pretty decent i o i would have liked to have seen wifi and bluetooth on here as standard but both of those are an easy thing to add if you need either of those anyways and overall if you find yourself on the limits of what a standard pi 4 can do in terms of cpu power then consider taking a look at the odroid n2 plus our third board is from a company called pine64 who you may be familiar with for creating an open source linux mobile phone but they also make this the rock pro 64. the rockpro is a single board computer that in some ways is like the odroid with a six core processor four weaker cores at 1.4 gigahertz and two stronger cores at 1.8 gigahertz two or four gigabytes of ram and space for up to a 120 gigabyte emmc module in terms of io we have two usb 2.0 ports a usb 3.0 port a usb type-c port with video out a hdmi 2.0 port an sd card slot and a unique feature that the rok pro 64 has that none of the other single board computers that we have here have is a pcie express by 4 slot allowing for even more expansion in terms of io add-in cards or storage for connectivity we see a single gigabit ethernet port again no wi-fi or bluetooth here without an additional adapter and the rockpro 64 comes in at 53 pounds for the 2 gigabyte variant or 69 pounds for the 4 gigabyte variant that we have here nice geekbench sees the rockpro 64 pull a score of 293 on the single core and 785 on the multi-core slotting it just above the pi 4 and quite a bit behind the odroid you might be wondering why that is since they both have six cores you would think that would make them pretty close there are a few points here to think about firstly not all cpus are equal as we know secondly the odroid has quite a big clock speed advantage over the cores in the rock pro 64. and finally while they do both have six cores each the rock pro has two higher performance cores coupled with four lower performance cores whilst the old droid has four higher performance cores coupled with two lower performance cores giving the performance edge to the odroid it's a similar story in seven zip with the rock pro slotting in above the raspberry pi and in the memory performance it trades blows with the odroid open ssl performance returns back to form with the rock pro 64 coming in just behind the old droid n2 plus for thermals the rock pro got up to a pretty acceptable 70.6 degrees at its hottest whilst remaining completely silent and power draw saw us peak at 11.9 watts at its max and a very respectable 4.5 watts at idle in terms of installation options we have most of them available to us with the rock pro unfortunately this board does not have official home assistant os support however i was able to get debian 11 working here without too much issue and install home assistant supervised so that you can still get access to add-ons and backups and all of those other features you get access to with supervised and os again if you want to install your own distro and run home assistant container or core you can absolutely do that with this board with quite a few different distros and os's available for the rock pro the rock pro 64 is a pretty decent alternative at a good price and can be really useful for situations where you need that pcie express slot for expansion through adding cards or additional storage the next one up is a little bit of a different one in that it's not just a bare pcb like all of the others that we've looked at so far but rather it's an all-in-one with a case and a display so what board is inside of here well this is the seed re terminal and inside of here is a raspberry pi compute module 4. now i know this is a video about raspberry pi alternatives but i wanted to include this one here because it does show that just because raspberry pi 4s aren't available to buy by themselves that doesn't mean that you can't get it as part of another product specs wise it's just a standard raspberry pi compute module 4 with 4 gigabytes of ram and 32 gigabytes of onboard emmc storage so we won't go over that again but it's got two usb 2.0 ports a type c port for power micro hdmi 2.0 port gigabit ethernet 802.11 ac wi-fi bluetooth 5.0 five user programmable buttons and a five inch 720p touch display and now this is quite a bit more expensive than a standard raspberry pi at 195 now i'm not going to run through the benchmarks again because they are pretty much within margin of error of our standard raspberry pi but i did test temperatures since this does have a pretty hefty included heatsink on the back side during the torture test we see the temperature get up to an actually pretty low 64.3 degrees celsius which is obviously pretty significantly lower than our standard raspberry pi that heatsink does a pretty respectable job of keeping the temperatures under control power consumption was pretty impressive too at 2 watts at idle which is lower than i thought considering it has a display attached to it that obviously needs powering and i observed a max power draw of 11.6 watts during testing installation options for this guy are pretty interesting so because this is a compute module for underneath home assistant does work as we would expect but the display won't work since there is no drivers for it and even if it did it probably doesn't make sense to use haos for this board since you'd just be looking at a command line the whole time debian 11 would be a much more suitable alternative on here so that you could run home assistant supervised now i had a lot of fun trying to get debian to load on here and after a lot of back and forth with this thing i did finally get debian to boot but then none of the network devices worked and neither did the usb ports so i couldn't even log in with a keyboard so i managed to get connected via the serial ports and load drivers which got the network drivers loaded and working but then i couldn't ever get the display to work properly given some more time i think i could get it working but as it stands debian 11 needs official support from seed before i could recommend it for you guys to actually use seed does provide a really polished build of ubuntu that works great out of the box but that won't get you an officially supported home assistant install so that leaves container and core only which do work great but a bit of a mix bag for installation options on the seed re terminal i will say that this is hands down the nicest display for a raspberry pi that i've ever used it's very responsive touch inputs are very accurate and just generally feels really nice to use overall i do really like this thing but i don't think it's necessarily a great use case for home assistant at least not directly i could see this being great for some sort of wall-mounted control panel for your smart home but i see this thing as having a ton of potential for various other cool projects and i do really like it but as a home assistant server there are better options for the money but if you'd like to see us use this thing for something else drop your best suggestions down in the comments for what we could do with it and let us know if you are interested up until this point we've looked at all lower power arm based boards but now comes the turn of x86 with our first board the atomic pi this guy features a quad-core intel atom running at up to 1.9 gigahertz with two gigabytes of ddr3 ram 16 gigabytes of onboard emmc storage an sd card slot a single usb 3.0 port a hdmi port gigabit ethernet 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth 4.0 now that i o seems pretty limiting and that's because well really it is but here's the kicker this board is just 34 pounds which is nuts for a genuine intel cpu granted it is a bit of an older cpu but still this is a pretty cool board for that money you are probably expecting the atomic pie to absolutely stomp the competition in terms of performance because it's x86 right and to be honest so was i geekbench sees us with a single core score of 180 and a multi-core score of 645. pretty much on par with a raspberry pi 7-zip sees the atomic pie fall behind the kadas in terms of compression performance and again in memory performance due to its older ddr3 memory openssl performance wasn't that stellar either still much better than the pie but quite a ways behind the rest of the pack max temperatures for the atomic pie was measured at 48 degrees really impressive job there considering it's completely passively cooled and power draw saw us at seven and a half watts at idle pretty impressive for this type of cpu and 11.9 watts at its peak the atomic pi has again a full house of installation options available so home assistant os works great you can install it on here like you would an intel nok since this is an intel cpu debian 11 also works on here with no problems so that you can install supervised and if you install some additional storage on here you could in theory run something like proxmox giving you access to be able to run vms if you wanted although the two gigabytes of ram will be pretty limiting and if you really wanted to you could also run windows on here too the other problem with this board is that while it is really cheap powering it can be a bit of a problem there is quite a few different ways to power the atomic pie but most of them are going to be pretty janky for most users and you can get a mini breakout board that adds a barrel jack connector on the bottom for easy powering but i wasn't unfortunately able to get my hands on one so i powered it using the header on the back of the board but i probably want a much better solution than that if i was putting this into production in a proper enclosure i o is also really limiting too with that single usb port meaning that without expansion you can't plug in a keyboard and mouse at the same time still i keep coming back to how cheap this board is and if you're willing to put up with some of its downfalls and shortcomings and you need something that is x86 instead of arm this is a pretty interesting board and it's one of the cheapest ways to do so from budget option to powerhouse this next board is the seed odyssey and i love this thing the odyssey is a really compact board with tons of interesting features on it it features an intel celeron j4125 which is a quad-core processor running at 2.0 gigahertz base up to 2.7 gigahertz boost with 8 gigabytes of lp ddr4 ram storage options are pretty stellar you can get it with 64 gigabytes of onboard emmc it also has a micro sd card slot plus you can install up to three two and a half inch sata ssds with the onboard connectors and also right on the board is space for a full-size m.2 nvme ssd plus space for an additional m.2 sata ssd this thing is stacked full of storage options i o wise we have two usb 2.0 ports two usb 3.1 ports one type a and one type c a hdmi 2.0 port a microphone and headphone combo jack two gigabit ethernet ports 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth 5.0 the odyssey comes in at 218 without emmc to 235 with emmc which i think is a pretty good price considering just how jam-packed this thing is the odyssey tops our charts when it comes to geekbench with a 41 improvement in multi-core over even the odroid putting it comfortably in the lead but surprisingly in the compression test we do see a slight dip in performance in the charts as it comes in behind the n2 plus not really sure why that would be memory read and write performance is strong thanks to its lp ddr4 ram and open ssl performance is great not quite as good as the odroid but still great nonetheless temperatures got quite hot a bit toastier than i would like actually with odyssey hitting 102 degrees during the hour torture test although to be fair this was done completely passively without any fan which you may want to consider adding max power draw was measured at 44 watts for a few seconds on boot but during heavy load drew 18 watts and on idle drew and a very impressive 5 watts certainly very low power considering the performance it's also pretty much a clean sweep as far as home assistant installation options go home assistant os works perfectly on here since this is essentially an intel nook no problems there debian 11 installed on here without issues too so that you can run supervised and core and container obviously aren't a problem here either and if you wanted to you could also install a hypervisor so that you could run some light vms the seed odyssey is a fantastic compact little powerhouse capable of a lot whether that's for home assistant a little nas maybe or even as a firewall in fact because of those dual gigabit nics and strong cpu performance i'd actually love to use this guy for a pf sense or an open sense firewall which i think is also a great application for this device whatever it is i really really like this little guy and i think you do get some great performance and features for the money our second last computer is one of the best bang for the buck computers that you can get for home assistant in my opinion and it's this dell 3040 the reason i like these so much is that they are pretty compact for a full desktop so they can be tucked away anywhere they are really well built since they are made for businesses and because it's mostly businesses that are spying them they can be found for very cheap on sites like ebay because they will often sell huge numbers of these in bulk i bought this used on ebay for 100 pounds and for that i got an i3 6100t which is a 2 core 4 thread processor clocking in at 3.2 gigahertz i got 8 gigabytes of ram and a 256 gigabyte ssd plus 802.11 ac wi-fi bluetooth and gigabit ethernet you can find these cheaper with less ram or less storage or if you're willing to search and wait for a bit and there's also an equivalent machine from hp called the elite desk 800 which is a similar specs and form factor as well as price geekbench sees the i3 really stretch its legs just edging out the seed odyssey with a single core score of 906 and a multi-core score of 1995 putting it firmly at the top of the pack 7-zip is a similar story with the dell finally managing to beat the old droid scorer and memory performance is an absolute landslide for the dell open ssl performance is again pretty great still not enough to beat the odroid but still great nonetheless thermals for the 3040 were also pretty great too with a max temperature of 64 degrees although in fairness it should be expected since this is the first machine that we've looked at that has a fan inside i didn't measure the fan noise but the fan was really very quiet during the entire hour and never did i feel that it even got close to unacceptable volumes quite impressive given its size and also power idle power draw was measured at just 11 watts with a max power draw of 44 watts observed during its peak just like the odyssey we again have every installation option available to us home assistant os installs without a hitch since it's similar enough to an intel nook and light virtual machines are also an option for home assistant os2 and since you can easily upgrade the memory in here you should have some extra headroom and of course debian 11 can be installed on here for a supervised installation as well as any other distros or os's of your choosing for container and core dell 3040s or whatever the equivalent generation of this machine is will always be one of my go-to recommendations for home assistant sure there is always some small risks about buying something that is used but from my experience i've always found them to be bulletproof little machines really really reliable and with a ton of performance for the price that you can find these at if you're willing to do some hunting plus they are really compact and quiet and pretty power efficient all things considered all right this last machine is something that is completely different to the rest this is the amber plus from a company called latticeworks and this isn't a standard pc but it's actually a small nas inside here is a dual core n4000 with two two terabyte hard drives in red one three gigabit ethernet ports two usb 3.0 ports and 802.11 ac wi-fi all coming in at 649 euros unlike all of the other computers that we've looked at where you can choose your own os the amber runs its own os called amber os and is capable of being a personal local dropbox as well as a wi-fi router as well as running a docker containers you can have your phone automatically sync to the amber with all of your photos you can drop files on it from windows linux or mac and you can access it from anywhere in the world as well as some other cool features now this isn't a review or a dedicated look at this machine but if you're interested in seeing more about how it works then please do let me know in the comments the os is locked down pretty tight at the moment so i wasn't able to install anything to run benchmarks but if we take a look at the geekbench public history we can see that the n4000 which is the cpu that the amber uses scores around 420 in the single core score and 800 in the multi-core score for whatever that's worth power draw for the amber was measured at 22 watts at its peak settling in at 16 watts at idle which is actually pretty good considering it's got two spinning hard drives in here making the amber a pretty power efficient package all things considered the amber has its own app store of sorts with quick ways of installing popular applications very easily one of which is home assistant i did find that initially that home assistant was a pretty outdated version but since you can install your own docker containers on the amber i was easily able to install the latest and greatest version in just a matter of minutes this is a pretty interesting machine and there's clearly much more to dive into here before i could make a proper recommendation but it does seem to have some good potential and offers a lot of good features in an all-in-one complete package plus it runs home assistant so in conclusion then just because raspberry pi's are more difficult than usual to get your hands on at the moment that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of other great ways to get started with home assistant or maybe even the start of your own home lap some are cheaper than the pie some are more powerful some have more features whatever it is you can find something to suit your needs huge thanks to ameri droid who hooked me up with the kadas the rock pro the odroid and the atomic pie as well as a bunch of other accessories great bunch of guys over there and this video wouldn't have been possible without their help if you're looking for any of these boards as well as a bunch of other computers and other really cool stuff make sure to check out ameridroid also a huge thank you to seed for sending over the re terminal and the odyssey again this video wouldn't have been possible without them and they also have lots of other great stuff including these boards so make sure to check them out too and again obviously we'll have all of the links for everything down in the description anyways i hope you enjoyed this video this video was a lot of work to make but i had a ton of fun making it it was really great to check out some of these alternate boards and see what they can do let me know in the comments which board was your favorite and which one you would love to have and if you're planning on picking up any of these boards for me i was really impressed by the seed odyssey for some varying projects because of those dual nics and maybe we'll see this guy return in some future videos if you're looking for something else to watch maybe check out this video over here where we learn how to migrate any home assistant installation from an old install to a new one make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video i can't reach

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 85,040

Keywords: raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi alternatives, home assistant raspberry pi, home assistant, smart home, home assistant raspberry pi 4, home assistant setup, home assistant guide, home assistant automation, Khadas VIM3L, Odroid n2+, RockPro64, raspberry pi projects, Seeed reTerminal, reTerminal, Atomic Pi, Seeed Odyssey, Odyssey, Dell 3040, Amber Plus, home assistant raspberry pi alternatives, home assistant install, home assistant hardware, adaprox fingerbot plus

Id: FXkkytHSTcI

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022