Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.
Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management. Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank
Negatives:
Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen
I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.
Seems like it would be fine. The N200 does use more power than the N100, or an RPi when idle, but it’s maybe 10W? They’re selling with a 1-year warranty as well, and an N200 minipc is probably about this same price from an unknown OEM and no warranty, so it’s a net win here with a screen and a warranty.
The only BIG issue with this is the battery draw. You’d need to leave this plugged in, which means the PSU+VRU will constantly draw more power than needed by the actual TDW of the machine to keep the battery charged, so it’s kind of a power siphon. If you could align the input power and charge this via USB-C, it would be more efficient.
At the same time, you’ve got a baked in UPS. I’m not sure what the normal power refresh cycle is on them compared to a laptop battery but it seems like it might be negligible?
Well, I mean sure, but how much of your HA stuff runs without power to the rest of the house? Haha
At least in my case, I mostly use it to automate things that require power, like lights and climate control. My battery powered sensors would keep working, but they’d not be doing anything but reporting back info that isn’t actionable.
The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.
Yeah, and like I’ve got DNS through PiHole on the same machine as HA. That particular machine doesn’t always want to come back up after power failure. And I hate going to the basement except to do laundry or bury the bodies. Having constant uptime is just useful.
The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.
Neat idea, a lot more money than a 7th/8th gen box on ebay, but you have a built in UPS and screen for troubleshooting which is nice.
The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.
Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!
Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!
I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.
