Currently I’ve got a RPi4 without Coral, running Frigate with 2 cams, HA, Paperless, Photoview and Qbittorrent. This works well but maxes out the RPi4. As I want to add Immich and more cams, I have to upgrade. Budget allows for either a USB Coral with the existing RPi4 or buy a secondhand HP Prodesk 600 g4 with Intel 8th gen. According to Frigate I can use Openvino for object detection. Otherwise, I could add a Coral mini pcie, with a mini pcie to pcie adapter. But that stretches the budget. Besides frigate the HP should be able to run the rest.
Any thoughts?
I personally graduated from a Rpi3b to an Intel NUC years ago and never looked back. Real RAM slots and Storage options internally and you can get as nice a processor as your budget allows. So my vote is to move to the SFF PC and let your Pi stick around for other projects.
Thanks for your insights. Thought about a NUC as well, but AFAIK it doesn’t have pcie slots? So I won’t be able to install eg a graphics card or pcie coral?
Three versions that I know of have it but you’re right it’s not common. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000091705/intel-nuc.html
I wouldn’t go NUC if you need a PCIe slot. The HP you were talking about would fit the bill though.
I believe they make a Coral that fits where the wifi chip goes too. As long as you are ok ditching the wifi/bt functionality for a TPU. For a server doing image processing that’s almost a no-brainer to me.
Interesting re the wifi chip, as all posts I’ve found said it only works for a wifi card. Do you have a source for that?
Yeah, no wifi is no problem. It’ll be connected via cable
Oh I’m not sure if it actually works. I thought they just made one to fit that slot
Migrating is your best move. Hardware go brr
Okay thanks!
Don’t go for the Raspberry pi. It isn’t going have good performance and isn’t upgradable in the least.
I’ve got HA with Frigate + USB Coral w/4 cams, FlightRadar24 receiver/feeder, ESPHome, NodeRed, InfluxDB, Mosquitto, and Zwave-JS on a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCenter M92p Tiny, rigged with an i5 3.6GHz, 8GB RAM and 500GB spindle drive. It’s almost overkill.
Frigate monitors 2 RTSP and 2 MJPEG cams (sometimes up to 3 RTSP and 5 MJPEG, depending of if I’m away for the weekend) with hardware video conversion. FR24 monitors a USB SDR dongle tracking several hundred aircraft per hour. I live under one.of the main approaches to a major US hub.
Processor sits at 10% or less most of the time, and really only spikes when I compile new binaries for the ESP32 widgets I have around the house. It uses virtually none of the available disk. It’s an awesome platform for HA for the price.
Thanks for your reply! So that is a 3rd gen Intel chip if I kagi’d correctly? I was planning to get a 8th gen or later. Not sure though if it’s worth it, I’m not too familiar with the differences between all generations.
I think the i5 is Ivy Bridge, but I couldn’t tell you what gen that is. My main use of HA aside from the automation is Frigate, which apparently needs the hardware AVX flags. This chip supports AVX512, where my older AMD did not, so that’s why I went with it. Its an i5-3470T, if that helps.
For an older SFF unit, it’s a beast for HA.
3470 means 3rd gen. The first number is the generation. Good to know that also works.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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Not sure exactly what you’re asking but I have a Coral mini pcie with frigate and it works great. Hardly any cpu and tiny power consumption.
Okay thanks!
I had a lot of freezing when I was using immich on my RPi4. May be due to ram constraints. I moved to a 7 8 year old PC that I had lying around. It’s less finicky than a Pi4.
I would advise you to go with HP and not RPi
Thanks, HP it will be. When comparing Intel gens, there isn’t a massive difference between 4th and 8th gen, except the openvino detection which only works on 8th. But I can get a 4th gen for 25% of the price of a 8th gen.
I’d also highly recommend the proper PC, Immich can get pretty RAM-hungry if you use the ML functions, for me that has actually caused crashes before. Granted, that was while importing roughly 20k Assets (200GB) from a Google photos takeout, but it’s still probably better to be prepared.
Thanks for the insights. I’m planning to import about 1.2Tb of photos… So RAM is most important? What about Intel gen? I’ve compared 4th and 8th gen in terms of cpu speed and 4th still scores well. Depends of course on exact cpu. 4th gen can be bought here for about a 5th of the price of an 8th…
It shouldn’t really scale above a certain point, it’s just that if you import a lot of pictures all at once (in my case with immich-go, as mentioned from a Google photos takeout), all the ML-Tasks (facial recognition, search tagging) together with the normal tasks (thumbnail extraction, video transcoding) can suddenly increase the ram usage from in my case normally 1-2gb to around 6, which even on an 8gb raspi could get a little tight. But for example even just 16gb in the HP should be enough, assuming you don’t have a bunch of other stuff clogging up your RAM. As for the CPU, I’m not too sure tbh, I’m using a Ryzen 5 5600G, which can handle everything that’s running on my server with ease. I think the only significant downside you’d have here going with 4th gen is power efficiency. I still have an i7 6850K (OCd to 4.3GHz) in my main PC, and that thing uses a couple hundred watts when fully loaded, compared to my Ryzens 65W or so. If you’re just going for an i5 or i3 with the fourth gen that’s probably not gonna matter too much, but the performance probably also won’t be amazing at the same time.
Thanks! Very helpful. Will give it some thoughts.
Openvino is going to be really slow compared to a tpu like the coral. Its faster than just CPU, but not by much.
Okay, good to know. Then I wouldn’t need an 8th gen, a 4th gen with a Coral pcie should be better I believe. Much cheaper too.
