Don’t Buy a Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant – Buy THIS INSTEAD!
With Raspberry Pis costing more and more – a 4GB Pi 5 setting you back £81.60, and a Pi 4 is £72 (plus another tenner for an SD card and another tenner for a suitable power supply) – I got to wondering if there was a better way. A cheaper way. And yeah, turns out there is! This thing! This is a used thin client I bought for £27, and this is potentially a better option all round for a home server. Let me explain why you want one of these over a Pi any day!
I’m going to assume you know just how amazing self-hosting your own smart home system is compared to always-online, always-connected company-hosted solutions, and the benefits of running your own home storage and networking. Happily, this little thing lets you do everything you want, all from a machine you own, can never be shut down by a company who decides it isn’t profitable to let you keep turning your lights on, and daddy Bezos can’t watch you when you sleep. As for why this over a Pi, well let’s start with what this actually is. This is a thin client, a mostly defunct class of small form factor PCs that are kind of all over the used market for crazy low money, yet can be remarkably capable. Thin clients were, and I’m sure in some markets still are, a way to have a whole bunch of systems for a variety of users all secured from a centralised server. Basically, if you’re a college with a revolving cast of students, you can either have hundreds of full spec PCs that still virtualise the user profiles, or you can buy a bunch of these small, low power PCs and have the full OS virtualised. That’s what this is for – it’s a low power pc designed to have a central server be the source of the OS environment, so all the hardware has to do is display the image, basically. But, since work from home, Chromebooks, self owned devices and mobile devices, the need for these things is dwindling, so institutions and organisations are getting rid of these en masse, so they are available for fire sale pricing – a whole bunch of models are available for just £30. That’s less than half the price of either a pi 4 or pi 5!
As for specs, the one I have here is an AMD GX-420CA quad core with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of solid state storage – oh and Radeon HD 8400E graphics. That doesn’t sound like much – and yeah it isn’t, geebench scores reckon it’s less than half the speed of the pi 5s chip, although it is slightly faster than the pi 4. It doesn’t draw much more power, and isn’t exactly massive, but the benefits become clear when you see the io and the internals. This thing has usb 3, usb 2, gigabit ethernet, display port and audio. Inside there’s a spare sata port, upgradable ram, an old format of sata SSD under the heatsink, and other models that are a similar size also offer a half height PCIe slot. That basically makes this a zimaboard, but for one tenth the price! This has enough power and expandability to run home assistant, Plex, pihole and even actually as a little nas! There is quite the range of little PCs like these, there are the much smaller Wyse machines that often have 1 or 2gb or ram and like 8gb of storage, and aren’t super easily upgradable, while options like the Fujitsu ones often include pcie slots and more sata ports, so finding the right one is a bit of an art. I’ll throw up some examples of ones I’d recommend (that cost less than a pi) here so you can see what I recommend. Pause if you’re interested. Oh, actually, thanks to an excellent write up by David Parkinson I’ve realised there is actually a somewhat hidden mPCIe slot up by the SATA port which is hidden under the heatsink, meaning if you find the right adapter, you absolutely can connect stuff like a WiFi card or even adapters for network cards or storage to this very model!
As for how to get this set up, that’s remarkably easy. First, flash a usb stick with home assistant os – if you are on windows a tool called Rufus is great for this. Just download the ha os generic x86, pick your flash drive, then flash it. Plug it, a monitor and a keyboard into the system, then boot it up and spam the delete key. If you have a wyse system and it has a bios password, the default password is “Fireport”, which worked for me. Enable usb boot, tweak any other settings you want, then press F10 to save and restart. Spam P and F12 as it reboots to bring up the boot menu, and pick your usb drive. Give it a couple minutes, then that’s home assistant up and running. Head to the ip address listed on screen and away you go! To be clear, Home Assistant is running from the USB stick, not the internal drive. If you want to install HASS on the internal drive, you’ll need to live-boot Linux and write it from there. Anyway, between this and a £30 Sonoff Zigbee dongle, you can have a full-scale off-grid home automation system, and it’d still cost less than a Pi! From inside Home Assistant, through the now labelled “Apps”, you can install Plex, PiHole, WireGuard or Tailscale, Vaultwarden, and a load more options to make this not just your Home Assistant box, but your NAS, media centre, password manager, ad blocker and VPN. It’s a one-stop shop. If you want to find out more about how to set up Home Assistant, Zigbee, Matter-over-Thread, a VPN, or how to connect devices in general, check out my full playlist of my own smart home setup in the cards above!
As for this thing, I know that the Pi does have more options in terms of add-on devices – stuff like microphone arrays, hell even motor controllers and so much more – but for me this thing’s unique selling point is that it’s a lot closer to being a home server than a Pi, and that’s what I’m looking for, and for such a low price point I thought it would be worth at least pointing these out as an option, if you hadn’t considered them already anyway. I do wonder if there’s a market for someone pre-installing Home Assistant on these and selling them with a Zigbee dongle and some add-ons preinstalled to make it all work.
