4 ms·

> Have my setup running for over 5 years. Wow. Mine invariably cratered after 3-5 months. Had to start over from scratch every time.

tass 4y ago
What do you mean by cratered? Biggest issue I had was using a raspberry Pi and having the sd card fail. There’s addons for regular backups to cloud storage, and also alternatives to using an sd card - I now use an odroid
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Same, SD card failure was the only failure I ever had. Nowadays, I just run an SSD instead.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    I just grabbed a cheap Lenovo Thinkcenter Mini and don't bother with raspberries at all :)
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  > cratered Quit working. One or more critical modules would fail beyond my ability/interest to repair in a foreign container-manager based application. Or the thing would quit booting. I guess I could try different SD cards but the ones I had were serving fine with raspbian before. The first time it failed, I tried to join the community but found it exceptionally hostile before I even had a chance to seek regular support.
  - tass 4y ago
    I have had the following variety of problems: * very occasional post upgrade problem which was fixed by the next upgrade or just a restore * zigbee radio occasional issue which turned out to be a bug with the dongle firmware. Upgrading the firmware sorted me out. (Basically, I sometimes needed to power cycle before the zigbee network was functional) * SD card corruption. This was the biggest pain, and required building the system from scratch once (since the backups were on the same card - oops!) and from backup one other time. I never once had an issue after moving away from using sd cards that needed more than a restart - and this was maybe once in the last 6 months. I suspect the upgrade problems I previously had were also corruption related. If you were willing to try again, I highly recommend the odroid with eMMC - it’s also more powerful (though pricier) than a raspberry Pi 4 along with being generally neater since all the plugs attach on one side and it doesn’t need an external usb for its disk.
    - spacemanmatt 4y ago
      I may be burned. My first oDroid order was dead on arrival and I got into HomeAssistant when it was still common to brick your whole setup just updating plugins.
int0x2e 4y ago
If you had a RPi setup and your SD card died, I would suggest one or more of the following: 1. Buy an endurance-oriented card (e.g.: Samsung Pro Endurance), and try to get a higher capacity card just for the added endurance. 2. Make sure to disable write heavy configurations if possible. 3. If you can bear the expense, consider swapping the RPi with a used corporate mini PC (HP ProDesk/EliteDesk are my personal favorites, but the Dell Wyse 5070 is great bang for your buck) - you can get a pretty powerful setup with plenty of CPU, RAM and a real SSD, while still consuming ~10 watts at the wall, which is close enough to the RPi for my taste. Most of these units are not fan-less, but they are extremely quiet unless you're pushing them...
- outworlder 4y ago
  Or just use a SSD. My Home Assistant instance is sitting inside an Argo One case. It has a small fan (controlled by Home Assistant so it can be stopped if not needed) and a M2 SSD slot, which I'm using with a SSD that I pulled from a Chromebook. It's rock solid. I don't need any significant CPU and RAM.
monkeydust 4y ago
Few things I did: - Get off RPi and onto a windows virtual machine - Backup frequently - Upgrade lazily

tass 4y ago

What do you mean by cratered? Biggest issue I had was using a raspberry Pi and having the sd card fail. There’s addons for regular backups to cloud storage, and also alternatives to using an sd card - I now use an odroid

Semaphor 4y ago
Same, SD card failure was the only failure I ever had. Nowadays, I just run an SSD instead.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  I just grabbed a cheap Lenovo Thinkcenter Mini and don't bother with raspberries at all :)
spacemanmatt 4y ago
> cratered Quit working. One or more critical modules would fail beyond my ability/interest to repair in a foreign container-manager based application. Or the thing would quit booting. I guess I could try different SD cards but the ones I had were serving fine with raspbian before. The first time it failed, I tried to join the community but found it exceptionally hostile before I even had a chance to seek regular support.
- tass 4y ago
  I have had the following variety of problems: * very occasional post upgrade problem which was fixed by the next upgrade or just a restore * zigbee radio occasional issue which turned out to be a bug with the dongle firmware. Upgrading the firmware sorted me out. (Basically, I sometimes needed to power cycle before the zigbee network was functional) * SD card corruption. This was the biggest pain, and required building the system from scratch once (since the backups were on the same card - oops!) and from backup one other time. I never once had an issue after moving away from using sd cards that needed more than a restart - and this was maybe once in the last 6 months. I suspect the upgrade problems I previously had were also corruption related. If you were willing to try again, I highly recommend the odroid with eMMC - it’s also more powerful (though pricier) than a raspberry Pi 4 along with being generally neater since all the plugs attach on one side and it doesn’t need an external usb for its disk.
  - spacemanmatt 4y ago
    I may be burned. My first oDroid order was dead on arrival and I got into HomeAssistant when it was still common to brick your whole setup just updating plugins.

int0x2e 4y ago

If you had a RPi setup and your SD card died, I would suggest one or more of the following: 1. Buy an endurance-oriented card (e.g.: Samsung Pro Endurance), and try to get a higher capacity card just for the added endurance. 2. Make sure to disable write heavy configurations if possible. 3. If you can bear the expense, consider swapping the RPi with a used corporate mini PC (HP ProDesk/EliteDesk are my personal favorites, but the Dell Wyse 5070 is great bang for your buck) - you can get a pretty powerful setup with plenty of CPU, RAM and a real SSD, while still consuming ~10 watts at the wall, which is close enough to the RPi for my taste. Most of these units are not fan-less, but they are extremely quiet unless you're pushing them...

outworlder 4y ago
Or just use a SSD. My Home Assistant instance is sitting inside an Argo One case. It has a small fan (controlled by Home Assistant so it can be stopped if not needed) and a M2 SSD slot, which I'm using with a SSD that I pulled from a Chromebook. It's rock solid. I don't need any significant CPU and RAM.

monkeydust 4y ago

Few things I did: - Get off RPi and onto a windows virtual machine - Backup frequently - Upgrade lazily