466 Upgrade your Raspberry Pi to a Homelab (instead of a Raspberry Pi 5)

The Raspberry Pi 5 was recently announced. It is faster than the old one, and you can add an SSD with a special adapter. The price went up, and now it needs a beefy power supply. Is it worth ordering one for our home automation server? Maybe you watch this video before you order.

Links:
Thin client (second hand):

Root:
User/PW: pi/raspberry (raspberz if you do not use a German keyboard)
IP: xx:xx:xx:xx

Mosquitto:
username/PW: no authorization needed

Node-Red:
Username/PW: no password

InfluxDB
username/PW:

Grafana:
username/PW: admin/raspberry (raspberz if you do not use a German keyboard)

Portainer:
username/pw: admin/raspberry123 (raspberz123 if you do not use a German keyboard)

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[AndreasSpiess]

I forgot to mention that you must pay attention to the keyboard (I use a Swiss-German one where the Y and Z are reversed). You should find the how-to on the internet

[toddbu-WKL]

I agree with you that the RPi 5 is a disappointment. The Pi Foundation has left the education and maker communities in the dust, seeking instead to target Windows users. Just look at the number of RPi 5 reviews that talk about the desktop. No one seems interested in hooking up stuff to the GPIO or learning system internals. Now it's all about performance of graphics or if you can turn it into a NAS. (Sorry, Jeff Geerling.) I guess that it could be argued that the low cost, low-end space is occupied by the RPi Zero 2 and Pico, but the shift in the target audience for RPi 5 is noticeable. The fact that it requires more power and active cooling is awful. Fans that collect dust and have bearings that fail are so 1980s. So no RPi 5 for me for now

[TenFeetDown]

Your videos are so information dense, you do a great service to the community.

[EsotericArctos]

The Raspberry Pi 5 is almost getting to the point, with power consumption, where a lower power Intel based SFF PC is beginning to look more economical from a power usage perspective, and as you said, much more powerful / useful for a home lab.

[DumahBrazorf]

About the 27w of the pi5. Explaining Computers tested the consumption under load and it seems to be 6-7W, 1-2W more than the pi4, so the beefy psu is realisticly needed for external disks and usb devices.

[Joachim_S]

I'm happy to hear something new from you again. I've taken a similar route (used mini PC and proxmox) and I'm enjoying it. I would also like to add that I use bookstack for my documentation and I also installed pihole on it. I have an NVEm with 2 TB and an additional 2 TB SSD for data backup.

[freepoet]

Interesting, but I think I'll stick with my existing RPi4 server, It's low power, works, and just needs minimal maintenance now and then.

[davidharms]

Thanks Andreas, you’re an excellent mentor to us Makers. Your videos are always a great resource. 😊

[Jeppedy]

I have a different point of view. I look at my home assistant as a production machine. It only runs home assistant and the related add-ons. It stays in my wiring closet and focuses on its one task. I have a home lab PC that I use for a great many things with docker, but I prefer to keep my home assistant clean and separate and plugging away without concern.

[D-Khaz]

Spot on with your main point! The last new Pi I used for this purpose was my first HA install on a Pi 2B. I've been using various alternatives from old laptops, SFF, Synology, and cheap server hardware. It makes very little sense to go with a Pi for a new build if you spend 10 minutes researching your options, but many just don't spend the time.

It would be nice to see a better description of your remote radio station including what hadware/software/connectivity you have there that's connecting back to your main system.

[bonamin]

For my Homelab, I started with an AMD E350 old computer that I had laying around.
Now a couple of years later, after diving into this magic world, I run a server with Dual Xeon 2690v2, 128GB RAM, 40TB drives, a couple of NVMe 980Pros, and a couple of GPUs. Never looked back. I'm running everything on UNRAID.

[czarekcz]

Thanks! That's what I did, bought small refurb i7 PC, 32GB ddr4 and I am using it as zfs based home server with intention to do exactly the way you did it with home assistant. So you simplified my next steps. Thank you. But in my home automation I stiil missing cameras to observe/record events at house surroundings. Do you have any intention to add video surveillance to the system?

[SilvaD]

Get a UPS!! I stopped using RPi's for serious projects at the Pi2 due to the unreliability of the sdcards with the PiHole project. I acquired a retiring HP MicroServer (190w) and never looked back. I did purchase a Pi3 for Octoprint, and a Pi4 for RTL stuff, but everything else is a vm now. No need for the 5

[jjspr]

You may want to swap Influxdb with postgres//timescaledb. Of course a running system is a running system. Postgres gives you standard sql, timescaledb the time series db functionality. InfluxData has again switched their query language and it is not clear to me what they will do with flux (no updates since long), influxdb3 is using something different, iox.

[AkosLukacs]

13:26 for passwords, even if it's home lab, and not accessible from outside, I would recommend using a password manager. Storing any password in plain text seems wrong to me.

[GarryMobi]

Picked up an HP EliteDesk 800 w 16G RAM and 256G SSD for slightly over 100€ - relatively low power usage (more than a RPi of course, but still). Running natively though, got a "big" VM server running in our DC, so it's just for local use. Upgraded from a RPi4 w/ 128G USB SSD, which ran perfectly for 2+ years ...

[Adrian_Galilea]

The main selling point of the pi is it's versatility.

I use my pi as my portable retro-gaming powerhouse, before that was making cool time-lapses with some automatic video-processing and before that was running octopi.

You bring a fair point, some users might need something different, but having a simple, reliable and "cheap" machine that I can carry around, abuse, and eventually replace with the same familiarity and support I came to expect from them is something very valuable to me and many.

The last thing I want to do with my very little free time is think about virtualisation, I had enough during my IT days 😅 I want simple and physical.

[ronaldhofman]

Just ordered a Ryzen 8 core mini pc for my development machine and the gigabyte brix pro core i7 i am going to use for proxmox and replacing my ESXI server

[originalmianos]

I have an N100 with two network ports. 8W power consumption. This can run all the above. I run lxd and only containers for mqtt, nodered, technitium (which can use the flakey php pihole blocklists), influx and caddy for full https.
All with the same power consumption as one raspi.
8G box cost me 260 AUD with 512G SSD. 4 cores. Blows a raspi away, but this is replacing 10 of them.

[JorgenHenningsen]

Low power has become my focus point. With the Raspberry I can do home automation for an average of about 2-3W power draw all inclusive. How much does your used PC draw?