Introductions

So I have a very technical background in IT, web design and automotive electronics. I have been using Home Assistant at my house for 5 years and 2 years ago added a RasPi to my Sprinter Van.

It now controls and/monitors :
Truma hot water and heating
Victron electrical system
Lighting
Alarm system
My Mercedes system
Pepwave router
“Dog Cam”
Fridge/Freezer temperature
and lots of plans for more!

Began my career in IT 30 years ago as a SQL developer & Windows SysAdmin, but now work as a BA/PM implementing social care systems.

Started migrating to Home Assistant at home about a year ago because got fed up of companies like Philips Hue, TP Link Kasa discontinuing services or hardware, so still a newbie with HA.

Have been using Proxmox at home for 7+ years, currently use a cluster of 5 HP/Lenovo Tinys plus some Pis and a couple of Synology NAS to run various services e.g. VMs, LXCs, Home Assistant, Z2M, Pihole, Unifi controller etc. Not all online at the same time to save energy, but they do say overkill is underrated

No HA in van yet (Carthago C Tourer), just a headless Victron Cerbo, BMV, Solar, X2S etc, but it's something I'm looking to do.

I'm a general nerd that likes playing with code and electronics. My job is in IT, but they wouldn't actually let me near a production system!

I've been running Home Assistant for about 8 years in the house. I'm trying to keep stuff local, so light switches are all ESPHome (I've used several other ESP firmwares in the past). I'm battling Local Tuya. I've got a fair load of ZigBee sensors. And I'm looking to make voice local too. I've used various Pis over the years, but it's currently on an N100 mini PC running native.

I've played with a few links to the van for HA. But I've always been concerned about the power consumption. Although I've now got lithium and I've got another 200w of solar to install, so it's certainly more viable than it used to be.

I've worked in IT from the commercial side since 2010, however I grew up typing code into a ZX Spectrum from magazines - often only to find out in the following week's publication that there had been a typo

I've always liked to use the products that I was talking to others about which led me to having my own firewall and mailserver.

I started down this rabbit hole a few years ago when I bought a Pi Zero 2W and installed Pi-Hole and Unbound on it and I've messed about with various things (game emulators etc)

I'm the most dangerous of people in that I have a little knowledge but not enough to really know what's going on most of the time, but by being stubborn I've gradually picked up bits of information along the way...

Home Assistant is really very new to me (couple of months) but I've managed to get WLED working (super easy) and have integrated my VenusOS Pi and other Victron kit (SmartShunt & MPPT for now, but plan to add inverter later) and have also managed to use Batmon to talk to my Fogstar battery.

That's the successes to date. I'm currently bashing my head against the brick wall that is getting data from my Teltonika router into HA but I'm pretty sure I'm nearly there (but I've said that before)

My playing around has been slightly curtailed by starting a new job on Monday!

Currently looking to consolidate all these different devices onto a single mini PC running Proxmox (which is a product I now sell!)

Was looking at the N305 but am currently leaning towards an Intel 8505. This is because (monkey see, monkey do) I've read that FLOPS per watt are better and that the Intel supposedly uses the 8 core capacity better.

Now, don't go asking me to explain FLOPS per watt, I'm still trying to learn about them!

fishplug said:

Was looking at the N305 but am currently leaning towards an Intel 8505. This is because (monkey see, monkey do) I've read that FLOPS per watt are better and that the Intel supposedly uses the 8 core capacity better.

Now, don't go asking me to explain FLOPS per watt, I'm still trying to learn about them!

Click to expand...

The reason I think the N305 is better is that it has 8 "efficiency" cores they are all the same so it's easy for Proxmox to spread the load across the cores. It also has no hyper threading as well so even easier to schedule processes and this means it runs much cooler on each core (they are not being given 2 threads to run).

The Intel 8505 has a "big.LITTLE" structure 4 "efficiency" cores and 1 "high performance" one with hyper threading. This is going to be difficult for Proxmox to schedule efficiently.

I am not sure you are going to find the Intel 8505 appropriate for Proxmox its more suited to desktop applications where Windows does all sorts of fancy things to utilise the cores effectively.

The N305 can be "dialled down" in the BIOS if power consumption is an issue. I found working with its 8 real efficiency cores much easier than the suer complex Intel 8505 which seems to throttle if one core is over worked and gets too hot.

I found https://github.com/amanusk/s-tui very useful to load up the CPU and measure temperatures and clock speeds. I ran it in virtual machines on Proxmox to see how it was spread across the cores.

Hi all, good to meet you. My background is in marketing and design but I do like learning IT stuff and tinkering, especially if it means I can then be lazy. I bought a HA Green for my van in Jan and have been learning and experimenting since then. Loving the dashboards, getting my mind round YAML and finding out the art of the possible, and found the HA community really useful. Couldn't find many people trying to apply HA to vans so it's good to find some here. I have a mixture of Meross, Sonoff, Eufy, Onvis and Apple devices, and have recently switched to a GL-iNet X3000 router. I will be eating your dust as you leave me trailing on the tech side, but hopefully I can contribute the limited ideas and experience I have.

matbic said:

So I have a very technical background in IT, web design and automotive electronics. I have been using Home Assistant at my house for 5 years and 2 years ago added a RasPi to my Sprinter Van.

It now controls and/monitors :
Truma hot water and heating
Victron electrical system
Lighting
Alarm system
My Mercedes system
Pepwave router
“Dog Cam”
Fridge/Freezer temperature
and lots of plans for more!

Click to expand...

Great work! You seem to control/monitor things that don't necessarily want to be controlled/monitored!

matbic said:

The reason I think the N305 is better is that it has 8 "efficiency" cores

Click to expand...

Well, this is all way above my level of knowledge.

I'm basing my current thread of research from a post from IT Nomad on the SmartyVan Reddit. (Greenapples2019 - SmaryVan is a YouTube channel you might find interesting!)

His comment about the 305 / 8505 (which is what he has) is that:

"Personally I don’t think the value is that great on N3xx CPUs. Single channel memory and 9 pcie lanes isn’t enough for 8 cores."

Welllllll outside of my field of knowledge....

fishplug said:

Well, this is all way above my level of knowledge.

I'm basing my current thread of research from a post from IT Nomad on the SmartyVan Reddit. (Greenapples2019 - SmaryVan is a YouTube channel you might find interesting!)

His comment about the 305 / 8505 (which is what he has) is that:

"Personally I don’t think the value is that great on N3xx CPUs. Single channel memory and 9 pcie lanes isn’t enough for 8 cores."

Welllllll outside of my field of knowledge....

Click to expand...

The vast majority of the time, my N100 is totally idle. So idle efficiency is probably the most important factor.

I was recently CTO of an IoT startup. we raised loads of money and wasted it all. I hate this stuff but I have a lot of useless opinions.

Jane and I are buying a new Xtura which has a Garmin head unit controlling everything that’s a recipe for success

My "Layman's logic" is:

Matbic has an N305, it works.

Chap over on Reddit has an Intel 8505, it works.

N305 with 16GB DDR5 and 1T NVME = £329
8505 with 32GB DDR5 and 1T NVME = £333

So 16GB DDR5 more for the same money....

Of course then we get into the 305 having a fan but the 8505 is fanless, but I'll be putting a temp sensor and a couple of fans in the 'electrics' cupboard anyway so....

The bit I haven't really got my head around yet is whether the power consumption is comparable or not.

The chap on Reddit is doing some fine tuning turning Add Ons of in HA when not in use and finding things out like Studio Code Server has an overhead of 2w

I know this might become an "apple v android" argument about hardware, but is there any reason why the 8505 is a bad choice?

So, with zero specific knowledge of the N305 or 8505… HA is written in Python, you’re only going to use one core mostly. Does HA even get close to using all the processor on either of those systems? Also, I guess it isn’t memory bound so the comment about PCI channels is potentially true but not relevant. If you want to run multiple cameras and recode the video, then you should worry, until then, not a problem I think.

Again, a guess, but the temp those boards can tolerate is way beyond anything your van is going to get to. If your case isn’t awful it’s not going to be a problem. So fanless equals better.

Also, this is the introductions thread

Rog NotJane said:

So, with zero specific knowledge of the N305 or 8505… HA is written in Python, you’re only going to use one core mostly. Does HA even get close to using all the processor on either of those systems? Also, I guess it isn’t memory bound so the comment about PCI channels is potentially true but not relevant. If you want to run multiple cameras and recode the video, then you should worry, until then, not a problem I think.

Again, a guess, but the temp those boards can tolerate is way beyond anything your van is going to get to. If your case isn’t awful it’s not going to be a problem. So fanless equals better.

Also, this is the introductions thread

Click to expand...

My fairly extensive home instance on an N100 is using 2.5GB of RAM, peaks at 2% CPU (mostly to keep the CPU updated) and about 40GB of storage. The only time it's taxed is when I reboot it. My justification for upgrading to an N100 was for voice... But I've not got around to it.

I originally recommended the N305 for a set up with Proxmox and HA running as one of the virtual machines on it. The N305 is ideal for this as it has 8 identical cores and Proxmox can easily allocate the cores. The 8505 has less cores and one is a high power one with the others low power. This is not going to work well with Proxmox as it will not know which virtual machines to allocate to the high performance cores.

HA is indeed mostly written in Python but remember for most who run the “operating system” version it is based on a docker system so the is lots of oportunities to use multiple cores as each “add-on” is a separate virtual machine.

My recommendation for a simple proxmox server is N305.

For a dedicated just HA setup, almost anything will do. An N97 is a good choice (20% less power consumption compared with N305).

With either you can turn the fan down (or off) as HA won’t be stressing the server much (mine sits at 2% load most of the time).

If you use HA local voice processing you will use all the cores for that and they recomend a minimum of a N305 for that.

Hope this helps!

I guess N305 is a bit more expensive as it is in higher demand!

PS I found my N305 uses about twice the power of a RasPi 4 but I am running 4 different virtual machines which would have required 4 separate RasPi4 boards so I am much better off.

My relevant background is as a Field Service Engineer (Mechanical/Pneumatic/Electrical/Electronic/RF/High Vacuum) on various Semiconductor Processing Equipment (basically, the stuff that makes the chips that go in computers).

I also have written code using direct instructions and Assembler for 8080 processor (shows my age!). Designed, built and written code to upgrade said manufacturing equipment to be automated using Opto22 PAC controllers. Spent several years consulting and designing/building/software for a Leading Nanotechnology company who (basically) waterproofs clothing and electronics.

My Home Control system is Node-RED (NR) without HA, but I can help people with installable the version of NR that runs under HA.

Currently building/installing a system that consists of:
Pi-Hole, Grafana, InfluxDB and Zigbee2MQTT onto a Wyse 3040 Thin Client running DietPi
Sonoff Zigbee co-ordinator (USB connected)
RPi Zero 2 W running VenusOS with MQTT enabled
Teltonika RUTX50 Router
All integration data from Router and VenusOS and Zigbee is sent/rec'd through MQTT with NR acting as the HMI (Human Machine Interface) and Control system.

* My Home Control system is Node-RED (NR) without HA, but I can help people with installable the version of NR that runs under HA.

Hello,
Background is mechanical engineering, project management and procurement. So some technical knowledge but more on the electrical side than software.

Have had HA running at home now for 7 years on a Intel NUC on Proxmox. It's been rock solid.

The van is due to arrive shortly so still planning and researching but current plan is HA Green, may not run it all the time. Main integration is planned via an esp32 for main devices and thus use this for control in low power mode.

So it looks like I misunderstood the use of “Social Groups” like this one!! Jim the marvellous person who makes this forum work has asked if we could keep this social group for non-motorhome stuff. Seems sad but it’s not - instead we get our very own section in the main forum! I will post again when Jim has set it up.

This group is only for dicusion about using home assistant at home!

Sorry I started us off in the wrong place! Thanks Jim for being gentle with me!

matbic said:

This group is only for dicusion about using home assistant at home!

Click to expand...

Oh?

OK, that's me out then....

Only use it in the van.