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.
There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.
As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.
The #1 cause of lithium battery fires is improper charging, you can find anecdotes of phone and tablet batteries puffing up from being charged too much:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/yoitld/battery_bloating_in_wall_mounted_tablets/
But fair enough, you might be able to avoid a potential fire by setting a charge limit.