A reliable Raspberry Pi 4B setup with UPS (power bank) and SSD

After more than 4 years spent in home automation, the thing that bothered me the most was the regular failure of my Pi SD cards.

These failures were the consequences of power supply issues and too much IO on the SD card. I could have tried to reduce the IO or to buy a better model of SD card.

With a home automation system, you need something that is available when you need it. Not something that stops in the middle of your holidays.

So here are the results of my recommendations:

For the storage, it is now well known that the SD Card on the PI is subject to corruption, to avoid that you can put your system in read-only mode, try to reduce the writing, or install an SSD. The raspberry pi 4b can now also boot from the SSD. I choose this solution as I wanted to keep the DB on the Pi.
For the UPS, I had the occasion to test several Power Bank without satisfaction. Indeed if the power bank you are using doesn't have a pass-through mode, you have a risk that the bank will stop at an unexpected moment, due to the low consumption of the Pi.

After some research I selected the following components (Amazon affiliated links):

The Voltaic Systems V25 is configured by default in Always On mode, so nothing to do especially except connect it to a good power supply.

On this Pi, I have installed Home Assistant on top of Debian by following this tutorial.

It explains to you how to migrate to the SSD and get rid of your SD card :-))

Note that this type of installation is unfortunately not officially supported by Home Assistant :-(

Here are some photos of this setup.

The Pi 4B is on the first layer with the SSD fixed below the top layer. The power bank is on the second one.

The power bank power the Pi 4b and the Olimex ESP32 gateway.

I'm very satisfied with this system. It is stable, the power bank is working perfectly even if it is rated for 2A (Raspberry PI 4 advise a 3A power supply).

The cherry on the cake, I have the space to put the Olimex ESP32 gateway + OpenMQTTGateway so as to have a great BLE coverage.

You can see also another Raspberry PI on the third layer, this one is used for tests only.

I hope this is useful and will give you some ideas. I wasted so much times due to SD Cards corruption. If I can avoid you this, it will always be winning!

Commentaires

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

433toMQTTto433 - Bidirectional ESP8266 NodeMCU gateway between RF 433Mhz signal and MQTT

The goal is to act as a gateway between 433Mhz sensors and a MQTT broker or between the MQTT broker and 433Mhz actuators, It enables to: receive MQTT data from a topic and send RF 433Mhz signal corresponding to the received MQTT data publish MQTT data to a different topic related to received 433Mhz signal It can be an interesting part in an home automation system so as to interface sensors and actuators (wall sockets) with software like openhab . List of compatible sensors here The interest of putting this gateway to an ESP8266 and not on a raspberry pi is to be able to manage security actions at gateway level (power on a siren, cut power to certain devices) following RF data received by sensors without being dependent to the PI for security related actions. [EDIT] all infos are now centralized into the github repository take a look at it you will find up to date info about OpenMQTTGateway You need: Software: Mosquitto Arduino IDE latest version (tested ok with 1.6.10

Infrared IR, 433mhz and MQTT on ESP8266 bidirectional gateway OpenMQTTGateway

Following discussions on the home assistant forum people gave me the idea to add Infrared communication to the 433mhz gateway. The goal is to act as a gateway between 433Mhz sensors, infrared remote controls and a MQTT broker or between the MQTT broker and 433Mhz actuators, infrared devices, It enables to: receive MQTT data from a topic and send RF 433Mhz signal corresponding to the received MQTT data publish MQTT data to a different topic related to received 433Mhz signal receive MQTT data from a topic and send infrared signal corresponding to the received MQTT data publish MQTT data to a different topic related to received infrared signal It can be an interesting part in an home automation system so as to interface sensors and actuators (wall sockets), your tv, home cinema, hifi ... with software like openhab or home assistant . List of compatible RF sensors here [EDIT] all infos are now centralized into the github repository take a look at it you will find up to d

Get your BLE sensors data into Home Assistant in 5 minutes

You can now upload your board directly from the web browser! So let's imagine you want to read data from a sensor like a Mi Flora, an LYWSD03MMC, a weight scale, or any other BLE sensor from this list Plug an ESP32 dev board to your computer USB port Go to this website: https://docs.openmqttgateway.com/upload/web-install.html Select esp32dev-ble Click the install button Depending on your board you may have to press the BOOT button Choose the port that the ESP is connected to. Wait until the process is complete. Release the BOOT button That's it, OMG is now loaded into your ESP32 board without Arduino IDE, platformIO or a binary flasher. Here are the steps in images: Now comes the Home Assistant part: Add the MQTT integration and activate auto discovery Create a user and a password (Configuration->Users) without administrator right for the gateway Well, this is enough for Home Assistant. So let's now connect both: Check the Wifi Access points available with your smartph

1 Technophile