﻿The Raspberry Pi 5 was recently announced. It is faster than the old one, and you can add an SSD
with a special adapter. The price went up, and now it needs a beefy power supply. Is it worth
ordering one for our home automation server? Maybe you watch this video before you order.
Grüezi YouTubers. Here is the guy with the Swiss accent. With a new episode and fresh ideas around
sensors and microcontrollers. Remember: If you subscribe, you will always sit in the first row.
I like the Raspberry Pi for its initial purpose. Like many of us, I was lured into using it as a
home server when it was still cheap and available. During the shortage, I was forced to search for
another solution and found this tiny second-hand PC and Proxmox. Hardly more expensive, but way
more useful and fun. And I discovered the value of a Homelab. A vast improvement and a lot of fun!
This video is divided into three parts: 1. Teasing of the Homelab
idea and show you my setup 2. Migration of Raspberry Pies to your Homelab
3. The creation of a new virtual machine with all needed components, from reading sensors to
displaying the results in nice-looking diagrams (Mosquitto, Node-Red, influxDB, and Grafana)
And you will get a virtual machine with all the examples for your new Homelab. Just in case you
want to save time with your next project. Let’s start with the Homelab. Why is it
so much more fun to work with it? - Everything is built in a nice and
tidy case for a very decent price - No more hassle with defective
SD cards or slow SSDs - More processing power and RAM
- And the most important: Proxmox, a free and fantastic virtualization software
A Homelab with Proxmox extends your possibilities a lot.
- Even a small PC can replace many Raspberry Pies on one machine. This
saves money, energy, and space. - To create a new “Raspberry Pi”
is a piece of cake. Just add a virtual machine and install Debian on it. Done in
a few minutes. Without any additional cost! If you do not need it anymore, delete it and free
all resources for your next experiment - Backup and restore of virtual machines
are simple and can be automated. Like that, we do not forget it
- My favorite is “snapshots”. Before you change something on your virtual machine,
you take a snapshot. If you break something, you just rewind to the snapshot and start
over. Extremely cool and useful - Of course, you cannot connect
sensors directly to a Homelab. No big deal for me because my sensors are not where my Homelab
is. They are all over the place But how can we upgrade from our
Raspberry Pi to a Homelab? First, we need a PC or a
Mac. Typical sources for such devices are: - Revive your old PC, Mac, or Laptop. It should
have at least an SSD. Otherwise, it is no fun - As I did in video #443, buy a used Thin Client
PC. They are sold for cheap on the usual platforms. This is my favorite solution
- Use your NAS if it is strong enough. Saves money, space, and energy
- Buy one of these small PCs. They are sold by the thousands to be used as firewalls. But
they can do much more. If you are interested in networking experiments, this is a good choice
because they have a few 2.5GB Ethernet connectors - Of course, you can go for a 19-inch server if
you do not care about money and energy consumption or if you want to show it off to your friends
My server only has 16GB of memory and a 1TB disk. The 16GB is sufficient for
most former Raspberry users. And 1TB is an overkill for me. But I had it lying around.
Currently, I have 8 VMs on my Homelab. One is Home Assistant, and two run Docker with
many containers. If I run all of them, I still have 3GB of free memory. You see, there are no
problems with resources if you pay attention and do not allocate too much memory. You must upgrade
to a newer or bigger machine if you want more. But before we continue, we must talk about why I
use a second VM with containers on my Homelab. 1. I wanted to use Home Assistant mainly as a
frontend and to integrate sensors. And I wanted to use the operating system that comes with Home
Assistant because I hope it will be the most used and therefore create the least problems
2. I could have installed containers along with Home Assistant on the same VM. Still,
I decided against it because IOTstack is a fantastic project that installs all kinds
of Docker containers with all the glue between them so that they work together without hassle.
Phill and Slyke do an excellent job in supporting the project as well as supporting you on Discord
if you have problems. They recently adapted the project so that it can easily be used on Proxmox
3. I want to be able to quickly create a new installation for another purpose
that does not need Home Assistant. Later, I will show you such an example
As said, I use Home Assistant as a frontend and for sensor integrations. All other things,
particularly all automation, are done in Node-Red. I use influxDB V2 as a
database and Grafana for the display. Now, we go on to step #2 and migrate
our Raspberry Pis. Usually, this is done with the following steps:
Next, I will lead you through these steps. To install Proxmox on the new server,
you will find all the information in my video #443, including some tricks.
But how can we back up our current installation? In Home Assistant, creating a Backup is easy.
Go to Settings→System→Backups and create a full backup. When done,
download it to the download folder of your PC. For IOTstack, things are under construction right
now. I assume we will get a pair off commands to create a full backup and a
full restore on the Homelab. Please consult Phills writeup when you do your migration.
So we are already at point #3: Installing Home Assistant with its native operating system is
simple. I leave a link in the description to a video by Tinker Dad that shows how it is
done. With Proxmox 8, you will no longer need the trick he used at the end of his video.
So we are already at step 4: Creating a VM with basic Debian on it. You could also use containers
instead of a VM, but we chose to go this way. You are covered by Phill’s writeup from phases
1 – 3. Maybe you want to create a template VM now—another helpful feature of Proxmox. A
template can be used to create many clones in the future and save you time for a new installation.
Or you can create a snapshot of your VM. Just in case something goes wrong. Then, you can always
return to this point and start over. Before we continue installing IOTstack,
we insert the Zigbee USB dongle and add it to our VM. Now, we can use it inside the VM
for Zigbee2MQTT. Of course, you can add as many USB devices as your application needs.
Next is step #6: The installation of IOTstack. Follow Phill’s phases 4-6,
and you are done. IOTstack should run now. In step #7, we restore the data of Home Assistant.
This is extremely simple because Home Assistant offers this option at startup. Select the backup
file from before, and you are good to go. As said before, we should get a full_restore
program that has to be run right after script 5. Now, IOTstack is also ready.
In step #8, I recommend switching your old Raspberries off and transferring
their IP addresses to the new virtual machines. Like that, all other devices
in your network will continue to work. And now comes step #9: Feel the speed of
your new system. Change, for example, something in Node-Red and deploy it. Mindboggling speed!
There is still a big difference between a Raspberry CPU and an Intel desktop.
And the best: You have one or two Raspberries free for other projects
and do not need to buy new ones. Cool! I am pretty sure you will never look back!
In the second part of the video, we will build a new installation
of IOTstack and use the following example: My remote radio station has a 7kWh battery,
and I wanted to monitor its voltages and currents from home. In addition,
I wanted to switch the radio remotely on and off. We will also need antenna switches and
rotors to turn them in the future. As shown in video #452, I created a
network to the remote location using a 4G router and Zerotier. I could have installed a Raspberry
Pi at the remote site and connected to it from home. But, because I wanted to keep complexity
and power consumption low at the remote location, I just added a VM to my Homelab. No additional
hardware and no additional energy consumption. What are the basic steps to running this rather
complex system on my Homelab? Here are the steps: - I used this project to read the BMS values. So
we have to add the credentials of Mosquitto. Now, the MQTT messages of the BMS flow via
Mosquitto to Node-Red - Mosquitto itself does
not need any further setup - We can go on to Node-Red. The
MQTT receive node feeds a switch node to filter the messages coming from the BMS. It only passes
messages with the correct device name. Next comes a “function node” that can be programmed
using JavaScript. It takes the messages sent by the ESP8266 and creates a message that can be
stored in influxDB. Later, we will find these values and the name of the “measurement” in
influxDB. While adding an influxDB node, we need a token. To create the token, we go to
InfluxDB and create one. Easy-peasy. - After deploying the Node-Red flow,
we must add a bucket in influxDB. After a few moments, we should see stored data coming
from our ESP8266 in influxDBs Data Explorer - Now, we can continue with the fun part and
create nice-looking diagrams in Grafana. We must go to “connections” and add an InfluxDB
source. Here, you see how the fields are filled. Also, here, we need a token from InfluxDB.
Here is a tip: Create a cheat sheet with all the usernames, passwords,
and tokens. It is much easier when you return a few weeks later. I started to
create a document for all my projects where I noted all relevant credentials and some
special commands. This saves me a ton of time. - I will show you how to create a dashboard
because it changed a lot from version 1 to 2 of influxDB. This query code looks
complicated. Fortunately, it is automatically created by influxDB. Just go back and select
the fields you want to display in your diagram. Hit “Submit”, and you can check
if they look ok. Hit “Script Editor”, and you can copy-paste the needed query. Cool! Just
replace “v.windowPeriod” with 10 minutes or so to aggregate your values. Another tip: In my browser,
I keep three windows open: Node-Red, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Like that, I can switch fast. Hit
“Apply” and “Save”, and you are done. - In my example VM, I also included a
Node-Red dashboard for the radio operator. Here, he sees the most critical data and can
switch the radio on and off. The Node-Red flow for the radio is quite simple and transmits
MQTT messages to an ESP32 running ESPhome. Now, our full-blown IOTstack example is finished.
Of course, I only scratched the surface of the topics. But I hope you got an idea of how to
proceed with your project. As promised, I am providing you with the VM for my
remote station as an example. To import my demonstration VM,
you download the backup file with the link in the description. Then you transfer it to your
Proxmox server into the directory /var/lib/vz/dump using WinSCP and finally, go to the local disk
on Proxmox and restore the VM. Now you can use it as a reference to see how I did it.
Such examples can be precious because I often return to my “old” projects
to re-learn how I solved a problem. Usually, this is easier than RTFM.
So, today, we learned: - How much fun a Homelab can
be and why I never looked back - How to migrate our Raspberry
Pi projects on our newly built Homelab - If you want to start with a fresh Homelab,
I showed you how to create an integrated flow from an ESP8266 sensor to a nice-looking
diagram in Grafana, including the storage in influxDB and some logic in Node-Red
- I hope you can judge now if you need a Raspberry Pi 5 or if you want to get a Homelab
- And because you get my VM, you can feel the power of Proxmox:
Just import it and see how all the details work One last thing: Because Home Assistant is my
front end, I also have a Fire tablet displaying Home Assistant data in our
kitchen and the Home Assistant app on my iPhone. Maybe stuff for future videos…
That was all for today. As always, you find all the relevant links in the description.
I hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you. If true,
please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence. Thank you! Bye