Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.
Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management. Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank
Negatives:
Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen
I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.
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Seems like it would be fine. The N200 does use more power than the N100, or an RPi when idle, but it’s maybe 10W? They’re selling with a 1-year warranty as well, and an N200 minipc is probably about this same price from an unknown OEM and no warranty, so it’s a net win here with a screen and a warranty.
The only BIG issue with this is the battery draw. You’d need to leave this plugged in, which means the PSU+VRU will constantly draw more power than needed by the actual TDW of the machine to keep the battery charged, so it’s kind of a power siphon. If you could align the input power and charge this via USB-C, it would be more efficient.
The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.
At the same time, you’ve got a baked in UPS. I’m not sure what the normal power refresh cycle is on them compared to a laptop battery but it seems like it might be negligible?
Well, I mean sure, but how much of your HA stuff runs without power to the rest of the house? Haha
At least in my case, I mostly use it to automate things that require power, like lights and climate control. My battery powered sensors would keep working, but they’d not be doing anything but reporting back info that isn’t actionable.
The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.
Yeah, and like I’ve got DNS through PiHole on the same machine as HA. That particular machine doesn’t always want to come back up after power failure. And I hate going to the basement except to do laundry or bury the bodies. Having constant uptime is just useful.
Neat idea, a lot more money than a 7th/8th gen box on ebay, but you have a built in UPS and screen for troubleshooting which is nice.
The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.
Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!
Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!
I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.
Having a screen, a battery and no ethernet doesnt sound good for a home server. N100 boxes on aliexpress are cheaper than this.
Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.
Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.
Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC’s you’re well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.
For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.
Display and keyboard are unnecessary bulk in my closet when I run everything headless, but fair. Lithium batteries in laptops and tablets don’t last long when constantly plugged in and can spontaneously catch on fire if they’re not watched. You can get N100 mini PCs on ali express without fans.
I didn’t notice this before, but soldered ram is a non-starter. With 8GB of ram, you’re not gonna be able to run anything besides maybe jellyfin and home assistant. Trying to combine jellyfin and nextcloud will run out of ram, and there’s no slack for a container orchestrator like Kubernetes to automate container management. The Ali express boxes often come with 16GB, and its super easy to upgrade to 32/48gb for less than $100 when needed. You’d get 2-6x more capacity with a system with SO-DIMMs, at a cheaper price.
super easy to upgrade to 32/48gb
Not on an N95/97/100 as they support max 16… https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/intel-processor-n100-6m-cache-up-to-3-40-ghz.html so they can be repaired, but not upgraded.
Alder lake minis work fine with 48gb dimms
the ram support is just a recommendation, as that’s all that they’ve tested
The bloody morons… why they say 16 tops if it can do better? It’s not like they don’t have access to 16gb sticks to test 2 of them! Like, I get when it’s “this supports up to” and that’s the largest available at launch, but this is just stupid. Thanks for correcting me!
There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.
As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.
The #1 cause of lithium battery fires is improper charging, you can find anecdotes of phone and tablet batteries puffing up from being charged too much:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/yoitld/battery_bloating_in_wall_mounted_tablets/
But fair enough, you might be able to avoid a potential fire by setting a charge limit.
With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.
Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.
