Pis are excellent mini computers. Unfortunately, their long term reliability isn’t quite there. When I used one, I was getting a couple of lock up crashes a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just enough to be REALLY frustrating to the (less technical) wife. The tipping point is when it goes from “nice to have” to “expected”.

I acquired a 2nd hand NUC, and it’s been bomb proof for a few years now.

The rule of thumb with servers is

• Performance
• Reliability
• Power usage
• Noise
• Size

The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

The dream router is an excellent base to build upon. It provides all the normal functions (ethernet, wifi, router etc) as well as hosting the control software.

Unifi’s real power is when you expand it. The access points make extending WiFi coverage easy. You dont even need a wired link. It will link over WiFi, either as a primary or as a fall back. The flex mini is also quite handy. It’s a little poe powered switch. I have a couple tucked away providing extra ports around the house.

With my setup, I have detailed monitoring and control down to the port or wifi device. I can monitor and control things in detail, or get a high level view of my network.

While expensive, UniFi hardware is just a huge step beyond the rest of the consumer market.

I’ve had literally 10x the range (5x vs 50m), in congested environments, compared to ‘gaming’ hardware. I actually did a side by side to test. I was shocked at the difference.

The bridging function is also a life saver. 2 LR units can get a reliable signal between each other, at ridiculous ranges.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

Depressingly, that’s around 2x the cost/Tb.

I personally make use of the sonoff pow smart plugs, with Tasmota firmware. Though any Tasmota compatible smart plug with power readings will work.

The key thing is that with Tasmota, you can properly calibrate the readings. I have a friend with a high quality power meter. I used that to calibrate my smart plugs, they seem to track within a few % of the expensive one, once calibrated.

Depending on if you have access to an expensive meter or not, this will either be the best bet, or completely useless to you. Your local Hackspace might also be a good option for getting your hands on an expensive meter for an evening.

Yes I did. Autocorrect decided to “help”. Apparently the edit I made hasn’t propagated through.

I migrated on to a NUC. They seem to have the right mix of performance and power efficiency, for me. The i3 processor also means you’re not dealing with the extra complexity of Arm64.

Unfortunately, BBC news has been corrupted from the inside. It used to be impressively independent of the UK government. It was happy to hold any politician’s feet to the fire. This is why the conservative party worked so hard to put their own stooge at the top. Careers now stop progressing, if you are overly critical of the government, at least in the news department.

Overall the BBC still leans slightly left, and produces a lot of good material. I no longer trust it to report evenly on our government anymore. It’s still a lot better than most news organisations overall however.

From memory, I think it worked out 50-80% more power draw, on average. I might be wrong on that however, I’ve yet to do a will watt measurement with like for like loads. My testing was closer to both idling.

The NUC can draw more power, but has far more advanced power saving features too. I ended up budgeting using 20W.

I hit the limit of my Raspberry Pi 4. It would periodically crash itself by overheating (Heatsink was hot to the touch) I now use a NUC. It runs excellently, and handles my home automation setup fine. Unless I start doing something extreme, I can see myself overloading it.

One of the less mentioned things with self hosting is running costs. A Pi is extremely cheap to run. A NUC is a bit more, but still well below a full blown PC. Servers can actually pull a significant load, even when idle.

The raspberry pi was never meant to be a power house. It’s whole goal was to make support and learning easy. A few, very well maintained models, with the same core chips. The last bit is the cause of the shortage. They can’t easily redesign without fragmenting the support base. That is completely against their ethos.

I’ve also found, once you hit a Pi’s limit, that it’s best to go to something more specialist. My go-to options are NUCs for general computing, or the Nvidia Jetson series, for portable brute power. Anything that saturates a pi will quickly saturate the smaller SBCs soon after, as well. They suffer from many of the same bottlenecks.

In their defence, the pi was never intended to be a powerhouse. Their focus was on getting good software support for a low cost system. This provided a stable foundation that built that turnkey reliability.

A lot of the other board providers have a habit of just creating a powerful little board, and throwing it out there to fend for itself. This is great for competent geeks, but less good for those still learning.

That’s a useful health check, but not a useful rule for de-federation. It’s more a sign that we have become lopsided and need to correct in other ways.

I’ve got a degree in the subject, and I still often feel the same way. Quantum mechanics works outside what our savannah running monkey brains can handle. The best we can do is trust the maths and approximate as best we can. We’ll regularly break those approximations however, and get thoughly flummoxed.