Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.

Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management.  Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank

Negatives:

Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen

I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.

  • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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    2 months ago

    Display and keyboard are unnecessary bulk in my closet when I run everything headless, but fair. Lithium batteries in laptops and tablets don’t last long when constantly plugged in and can spontaneously catch on fire if they’re not watched. You can get N100 mini PCs on ali express without fans.

    I didn’t notice this before, but soldered ram is a non-starter. With 8GB of ram, you’re not gonna be able to run anything besides maybe jellyfin and home assistant. Trying to combine jellyfin and nextcloud will run out of ram, and there’s no slack for a container orchestrator like Kubernetes to automate container management. The Ali express boxes often come with 16GB, and its super easy to upgrade to 32/48gb for less than $100 when needed. You’d get 2-6x more capacity with a system with SO-DIMMs, at a cheaper price.