Since rpis have been almost impossible to find, I’ve been looking around for alternatives for some local self hosted services like home assistant. A lot of boards seem to talk about GPU, GPIO pins, etc. But I really just want a single board, fanless (low power), decent CPU and RAM, ethernet.

Any recommendations?

  • marsokod@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you don’t care about GPIO/serial lines, frankly buy a small NUC or a used Thinkcentre M93p. Used, you can find them for very cheap (£100 in my case), they are powerful enough for your needs, you can have an actual SSD storage, and you will avoid the odd issue with a software not working on ARM (less and less the case but still worth taking into account).

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ll second the NUC–I use one as an HTPC and another as a headless server. Both run quiet, though there is a single small fan. Can’t speak to power usage though.

    • bunny@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This is what I use but with Debian. I had an older NUC 8 i5 lying around so I decided to drop 32GB of RAM and a new 1TB NVME drive into it. The performance is way better than a Pi and the measured power consumption at the wall socket is under 5 watts idle (peaks at around 13-15 watts under load if I recall correctly).

      In terms of noise level, if I start loading the CPU heavily the fan can be noticeable … however at idle or when it’s just streaming Plex content to my TV (without transcoding), it doesn’t make any fan noises at all.

  • brotherballan@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    The OrangePi 5 is one of the better options right now. Starts at $80 for a 4GB (RAM) model and goes all the way up to a 32GB model. CPU is roughly twice as good as an rpi 4, so if you want you can underclock it with no fan and get solid perf still

  • nocaptchaforme@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is slightly different, but in this rpi drought, I’ve set up proxmox on an old laptop and have several VMs/LXC/containers running on it. It fills that same role for me. I don’t know exactly what the power cost comparison is, but it’s gotta beat several rpis running simultaneously.

    • blaine@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve got a Rock64 running OpenMediaVault with about 6-10 Docker containers. Works great and the power consumption is very minimal (~1A).

        • blaine@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Thanks! It’s installed on my sailboat, so the primary concern was efficiency from a power perspective. I wanted something I could run off 12V DC with the lowest possible power consumption that would still do the job.

          I’ve got it running the Jellyfin/Radarr/Sonarr/Sabnzbd stack for media server purposes and PiHole for DNS. Even with DDclient and Wireguard containers running, the CPU utilization at idle averages around 25%.

  • Notorious@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It’s not that difficult to get a Pi 4. I wrote a python script that scraped rpilocator’s rss feed every 5 minutes and would notify my phone when one was available in the US. It went off basically every day around 8:30am PST when Adafruit would drop 100+ Pi4s. I’ve picked up two in the past week (one for my Voron printer and another for a RetroPi cabinet). They did sell out fairly fast… in about 10 minutes or so.

    • saucyloggins@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Sorry I have to laugh at this. If you have to write a script for it even if the script is easy there’s no way I can consider it “not hard”. Not hard is just being able buy it like anything else.

      I get what you’re saying though.

      • Notorious@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I didn’t realize it would be so easy when I wrote the script. Knowing what I know now I’d just check adafruit every couple minutes starting a bit before 8:30am PST.

      • Perhyte@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hard for a “layperson”, maybe. But IMHO for someone interested in self-hosting this probably should not be a hard problem to solve, or at least a decent “warmup exercise” to see if you’d like it.

        I say this because you don’t even need to write the script yourself, there are plenty of preexisting applications that can be configured to notify you of updates to an RSS feed.

        I’m sure I could whip that up in changedetection.io or Node-RED pretty quickly, for example.

        I don’t use a dedicated RSS feed reader app, but I’d also be somewhat surprised if there isn’t one that supports some form of push notifications.

    • homelabber@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      The thing is that right now it’s not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.

      • Notorious@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Power wise you are absolutely correct. It is not the best performance value anymore. However, support for the Pi4 is much more robust when using them in specific projects designed to use them.

        For everything else I have a much beefier Unraid server that hosts all of my dockers and VMs.

  • Sphere@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Of the alternatives available, Libre Computer, Pine64 and Orange/Banana Pi all offer options that fit what you’re looking for. You can generally find these on Amazon, eBay etc at a reasonable price.

  • BigVault@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab

    Works great.

  • DiagnosedADHD@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Thin client! They’re significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage, I’ve had sd cards go bad in pis

    • orangeboats@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?

      • PopYaCork@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but I just told you I’m running over 20 servers. Try running 20 raspberry pi’s 😀

        My resources are being shared for around 20W of power.

      • banana1@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Pis consume lower power, but are less powerful also. I think thr Power Consumption VS Performance is way better on Tiny/Mini/Micros. The Pi4 may idle at 3-4W where a 8th gen USSF will idle at 6-8W, but will provide more than 2x the performance IMO.

        I prefer paying almost the same price for a USSF with an i5-8500T than a Pi, even if it consume more, idle under 10W is great, and they let you go up to 65W if needed!

  • vividspecter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Aliexpress has some reasonably affordable fanless mini PCs. Not quite as low power but you can run a heap of containers on them since they are more powerful and x86 and some of them have multiple ethernet ports which can be useful for router purposes etc