I’ve got a PC the kids and I built years ago as a gaming machine that we don’t use anymore. Thinking of repurposing it for use with my home automation setup (replacing my current Raspberry Pi 4 with Home Assistant installed).
It’s certainly COMPLETELY overkill for that, so I’m curious what other ways I can make use of it as a home automation server of some sort. Or maybe there’s some reason it’s actually a bad idea to use it at all for this?
Specs…
- CPU: Intel i3-8100 3.6Ghz
- Memory: 8GB
- Storage: 2TB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- Motherboard: B360M Pro-VDH MS-7B24
Currently has Windows 11 installed on it.
If you want to do other things than home automation you could use Unraid or Open Media Vault and make a media server that has homeassistant running on a docker container. Plex can utilize the GPU for video transcoding. Just make sure your docker containers are configured to use the host network or you can run into issues where homeassistant can’t detect the other home automation devices on your network.
Home Assistant -> Frigate for cameras -> Keep the GPU use it with frigate for that AI stuff like object detection, people detection etc.
Not sure if energy usage is a consideration, but consider that the wyse thin client I got from ebay for £70, runs at 15 watts, and this was a drop from a Dell optiplex min destop thingy that used to run everything below at 50+ watts.
So I went from £120 a year to £35 a year and with the £85 I saved, I got a Nabu Casa subscription (£65 a year), and had enough left over to get myself a starbucks:-)
Running at 15 watts:
- Home Assistant with 1,000 + entities
- Frigate 3 x HD cameras @ 1080 15 fps (with Google Coral)
- ESPHome
- MySQL (for Ha data)
- Various bots doing nefarious things onthe internet
- Hugo static web site
- Whisper voice recognition
- Piper TTS
Yup, electricity isn’t terrible on these. My htpc/nas/util server has been my basis for everything for almost 20 years now. No reason not to
The 24/7/365 reliability, ie how long it goes without crashing or restarting from a power glitch, of a desktop PC would concern me. That and the electricity to power it.
I bet you could run a massive wyoming model on that, for super speedy voice control through HA
Put some tier 1 VM on it: ESXI, promox, etc. Now you can do a lot of stuff
I’d run proxmox on it and then from there you’ll have flexibility to spin up any number or vms or cts with any containers you want, loads of self hosted stuff and good isolation so if anything happens to any service you have full vm backups and can nuke them separately without compromising what’s stable, that’s my setup today have about 5 VMS running and some more that I plan to mess around
That’s only just slightly less powerful than the system I’m using for MSFS…
NVR?
Pull the GPU, get linux installed.
I’m running one gen newer of that cpu it’s running hass, frigate, a plex stack, ad blocking, backup and fronting 250TB of storage with plenty of CPU time to spare.
I would sell the GPU, because it’s definitely not needed, the rest is quite suitable for a home server — install Linux, Proxmox, HA, Scrypted, Torrent, Plex, ad blocker of some sort and etc.
Disagree - it could be use for object detection in a NVR setup like frigate, or to enable additional hardware transcoding in Plex. And the 1050 is pretty energy efficient as I recall (for “old” gear)! Doesn’t seem like a negative to keep to me!
Good point actually
Home server?
I have a dedicated home server that runs Unraid. It is primarily used to download and host media (Plex, sonarr, radarr, etc.) but I’ve also found it can be used for home automation purposes.
You can run Home Assistant in a VM/Docker. I primarily use Hubitat, but have a “Echo Speaks” plugin self hosted on a docker container.
The GPU could be useful for object detection using an NVR like Frigate.
you can now use integrated intel GPU with Frigate, much more power efficient. I’d sell the GPU.
But can you, with reasonable latency, run speech to text or text to speech?
I’ve got a couple frigate cameras with object detection, STT and TTS running, and using like 2.8 gigs of VRAM. I might just bump up the quality on the STT and/or TTS actually…
How power hungry is that old PC, though?
8th gen intel has really good idle, so not power hungry at all. most likely in 20-30w range depending on PSU
This. If it’s completely overkill it’s likely going to use a lot of power and you’ll pay for compute power that you don’t actually need.
I’d stick with the pi4. I had 12 or so services running on it without problems.
Not only that depending on how old you might get something much more powerful in a little fanless case that uses way less power. Especially if ARM architecture. Though there are decent Intel chips targeted t this market.
Given that you already have UniFi protect for NVR, I’d argue the utility of something like Frigate is limited. And you don’t want Plex for media streaming, either.
If the Pi is meeting your HA needs, it may make more sense to sell or donate.