Techies of mastodon, what hardware under £50 would you recommend if I wanted to host home assistant and a pi hole instance on it?

Kevin P. Fleming

@thecrawford Many people are happy using "Tiny Mini Micro" systems, which are generally HP or Lenovo 'thin client' desktop machines repurposed as servers. There are thousands available and the hardware is well-supported by Linux distros.

Neil Brown

@thecrawford For that budget, you are probably looking at a rather old Intel NUC, or perhaps a laptop with a broken screen.

Would an alternative be to look at booting your Pi from a USB stick?

Matt Crawford

@neil it's an ancient pi3 but yeah perhaps worth looking into. Considering the price of all PC components at the moment!

tiago :ziltoid:

@thecrawford thinkcentre thin clients do the trick. for that and way more, currently have 14 docker services running without any issue. mine cost me 50eur with shipping

Neil Brown

@thecrawford Indeed. And £50 won't get an RPi4 with much RAM, even second hand

Matt Crawford

@neil I've got some DDR3 that I just took out my pc to upgrade to DDR4, so I might sell that and buy a new car!

Stevan

@thecrawford @neil If it's any help, I tend to use my Pi3s with just the FAT (/boot/firmware) partition on the SD card, and cmdline.txt pointing to a USB stick that holds the root filesystem. It only needs the FAT partition to boot. Maybe that won't corrupt?

Neil Brown

@thecrawford Yes, it is a bit like that at the moment!

cos

@thecrawford any old free PC will do fine. Put £50 into hard disk or beer.

Ben Varick

@thecrawford Wyse 5070's are great for exactly this! I've bought a few from this listing (US listing, $39): https://www.ebay.com/itm/356344851574. Right now they are out of stock, but they usually come back in stock in a few weeks. J5005, 8GB RAM, 64GB SSD, very reliable, low power.

Some of the Wyse 5070's have a slower CPU, less RAM, or eMMC instead of a proper SSD. Probably still fine for HomeAssistant

Daniel Carosone

@thecrawford in case you haven't already, try using a good "high endurance" sd card. Usually sold for dashcam and similar uses.

The major problem is that sd cards are binned into many streams by quality, and there is no real cutoff just ever cheaper bins as long as it can plausibly appear to work at sale.

Noisytoot

@thecrawford you can get old second-hand dell optiplexes (and other desktops), some of which even support coreboot/libreboot for that price (I got an optiplex 5050 SFF for £30 and ported to coreboot to it, which would be more than powerful enough for that)