Question

If you were to setup your own “hub” with Z-Wave and zigbee radios running Home Assistant is there any advantage to running on a full blown PC versus a Raspberry Pi?  

Answer 1

Depends on what you expect "full blown PC" to be. I have everything running on a Pentium J4205 ITX board. Host system is proxmox and each part of my hub is a container image that allows me to easily exchange part. e. g. the zwave to mqtt bridge is openhab, but I might decide to go for openzwave instead, easy task as I can do this while everything else is still running. I have even more stuff running on it such as a NAS distro and pfsense firewall

Answer 2

Processing power?  

Comments

@hague but I guess my question is would that processing power actually be used or just go to waste?  

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@subtreasury70 valid question. Unfortunately I don't think I'm the right person to answer that one

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Waste. Get a pi4.  

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@unclothe1851 got one but also have an extra PC laying around.  

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@subtreasury70 pi4 will be better on your power bill

Answer 3

It depends on what you plan on doing. If you are doing simple automations you may not notice a difference but there is a reason many switch from a RaspberryPi to a NUC or PC VM.  

Answer 4

If the pc is powerful enough to run HA plus other stuff. why not? I run docker on my main pc

Answer 5

But no there is no disadvantage to run it on a pi. SSD is recommended though.  

Answer 6

I have HA running on a "full blown PC. " It's running Ubuntu Server 18. 04 headless. HA and Plex run in Docker containers. The PC isn't too special though (1. 8ghz dual core i3, 8gb ram and a 240 gb SSD with attached storage for the Plex lib). Runs well and it's what I had laying around so I put it to work.  

Answer 7

There is absolutely no need whatsoever for anything more than a raspberry pie for this kind of application.  

Answer 8

I’d imagine you find they work about the same but the pc uses significantly more energy to do that job than a pi.  

Answer 9

I moved from a Pi to a NUC. I have a lot of complex rules, InfluxDB, many addons, and OpenHAB is Java. I didn’t like the occasional delays and GC pauses (4GB Pi4 might work well though). It’s super snappy now.  

Answer 10

Dont know about restart time on the pi 4 but it was taking 4 to 5 minutes for HA to restart on my pi3 and the wife approval factor wasn't having that

Answer 11

I'm planning on using a pc to run more than just HA. So, in the end, I'd be having a pc running anyways. No need to have a pi too.  

Answer 12

Pi vs PC, not much in it. They both have a single PSU and disk (ie single point for failure), although the SD card on Pi will fail sooner. Get a proper server if you need reliability.