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.

  • lastingd@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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