9mo ago

Excellent Home Assistant Platform

www.ebay.com

Dell Latitude 11” 3000 (3140) Laptop Intel N200 256GB SSD 8GB RAM Win 11 Pro | eBay

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.

19 comments

Having a screen, a battery and no ethernet doesnt sound good for a home server. N100 boxes on aliexpress are cheaper than this.
- Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I'm not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.
  Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.
  Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC's you're well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.
  For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.
  
  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.

Seems like it would be fine. The N200 does use more power than the N100, or an RPi when idle, but it's maybe 10W? They're selling with a 1-year warranty as well, and an N200 minipc is probably about this same price from an unknown OEM and no warranty, so it's a net win here with a screen and a warranty.
The only BIG issue with this is the battery draw. You'd need to leave this plugged in, which means the PSU+VRU will constantly draw more power than needed by the actual TDW of the machine to keep the battery charged, so it's kind of a power siphon. If you could align the input power and charge this via USB-C, it would be more efficient.
- At the same time, you've got a baked in UPS. I'm not sure what the normal power refresh cycle is on them compared to a laptop battery but it seems like it might be negligible?
  
  Well, I mean sure, but how much of your HA stuff runs without power to the rest of the house? Haha
  At least in my case, I mostly use it to automate things that require power, like lights and climate control. My battery powered sensors would keep working, but they'd not be doing anything but reporting back info that isn't actionable.
- The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

Neat idea, a lot more money than a 7th/8th gen box on ebay, but you have a built in UPS and screen for troubleshooting which is nice.
- The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn't seem to work reliably on any of my systems.
  
  Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

19 comments