@@Rodrigo-rq1dx If i search for edid emulator i'm getting passthrough adapters that probably change the edid information they seem to cost about 15€. If i search for hdmi dummy i'm getting products without a passtrough port for about 3€. But i think you're correct in the way that they both supply fake edid information.
I'm glad I'm not the only one crazy enough to hunt down a PSU with 80mm fan for 2U cases lol. I ended up having to get a used Antec Earthwatts, probably over a decade old. Works great though.
I subscribed to you in 2018, and until recently, youtube buried your channel for me and wasn't getting any recommendations. I am glad to have been reminded of your content and appreciate it's here.
Perfect timing because I've wondered doing just this, building a rack n100 HA machine. Just putting together my first rack, and I have the HA running on an old nuc now, but this case looks so much better then those nuc rack mounts. Thank you, any more videos on all things around this will be much appreciated since I'm pretty new to every aspect of it
If you have a 3d printer, or feel up to a tiny bit of metal work (drilling, filing, maybe a hack saw), you could use a PicoPSU that takes a 12v power brick, the make an adapter so that the brick fits in the ATX PSU spot with the IEC connector at the back panel. Then you would get higher power efficiency and probably spend less money. A bunch of replacement PSUs for vintage macs have been taking this approach, although since the motherboards don't use ATX connectors an additional adapter is needed between the PicoPSU and the Apple wiring hardness.
Just so you know, there are RPi rackmount solutions out there(commercially available as well as 3D printable ones). Your solution makes sense though given you may want some flexibility for things in the future.
I have an RPi 5 8GB running HA that is rack mounted...albeit with three other cheap Pi 4's in the same 1U chassis performing other tasks. Even running 4 Pi's it still doesn't consume more than 20W with all of them in use. They all have PoE & NVME hats as well. 1U chassis saves space, much lower initial cost and so little power draw. The 1U chassis was $40 US off Amazon. Worth a lot more now though since I painted Ubiquiti silver.
Another great video. I've been very happy with Frigate, but I was coming from ZoneMinder which is archaic in comparison (PITA to configure and resource heavy with modern IP cams). Frigate's integration with HA works great, minimal resource usage, and it "just works" for me. I had a ton of issues with the USB Coral TPU locking up on Intel USB controllers, so the PCIe/m.2 version seem a good choice. The base Frigate+ model (even with minimal training) was a big upgrade over the out of the box model that comes with Frigate itself, but the initial model is good enough to get a feel for things. But I have almost perfect identification day and night with minimal false positives with the Frigate+ model. Training is a bit of a faff.
Nice video, but as a tip from a retired IT Technician and system builder. Always always, place the PSU first when building a new system. That way have the most space to move arround for getting the PSU in place and no risk of damaging the motherboard with one of the corners of the PSU. Install the PSU first, hang the cables outside the case, install as second the harddrive(s) and/or SSD(s) and install the motherboard with on the bench pre-installed CPU (and CPU cooler if needed) and RAM as third.
I am really looking forward to the videos about the HDMI distribution! I've looked on YT and the only videos available are very basic, and quite boring!
Nice build. My rack mount solution was to use a 1U rack mount that can support 3x NUC's or Rasp Pi's and spray painted silver to match the rest of my UNIFI equipment. I use one slot for a NUC running Proxmox for HomeAssistant and a rasp Pi for PiHole. I have been considering using the 3rd slot for a dedicated MQTT server. I notice that racknex do a very nice looking rack mount unit for an Intel NUC which had it been available 3 years ago I would have bought it.
I found this case too about 6 months ago after looking for a 2U case for aaaaaages that I could use as a compact all SSD Unraid NAS, it’s a really good case! Still going strong.
For the PSU, you could have gone with a SFF PSU. I built a couple of 2U TrueNAS units a while ago, and in them I used Corsair SF450 PSUs with AT to SFF adapter plates. Alternatively, you could have used a Seasonic SSP-300SFG. I looked at using these for my NAS builds originally, but leads were a bit short and they didn't have many SATA power connectors.
I get going all out for the server, but this system definitely will cost more than a single board computer to run, and rack mounting is kind of an excuse as there are plenty of rack mount options even for Raspberry Pis in the community. That said, great video. Home Assistant has casting options, so you may not even need the HDMI option. Let us know how the Coral goes as there have been a lot of mixed reports with reliability directly on the Home Assistant machine. Regarding RAM, well anything more than what the system uses is overkill. If your apps don't use more than 8gbps all up, adding more makes no difference. Sometimes the "more is better" just doesn't make sense, especially if it is a dedicated machine with known usage case and not likely to be changed often. Better to add the resources to your VM server that you play with more often
Power consumption is around 12W, sure, it's more than a raspberry pi but it's really not a big deal. Sure, I could have rack mounted a Pi however I also wanted the reliability of a proper SSD rather than an SD card, especially with the amount of timeseries data I plan on logging. And yes, 16gb of RAM is likely excessive, however it was £14 more to get 16gb vs 8gb, not an amount I'm going to lose sleep over. Essentially with this system I just didn't want to even have to think about not having enough power for everything I need to do including running a tonne of HA add-ons, potentially including Frigate for computer vision. In terms of the HDMI output, casting is great for sharing dashboards to TVs but it's not necessarily what I'm going for here, the long term dream would be to use TV remotes to integrate with an OSD served from this machine to do things such as switching media inputs. This will likely require me to build something outside of HA itself. Of course time will tell if I'll ever actually have the time to build it, but it's nice to have the option!
Great video, I'm very tempted to approach something similar with my home assistant setup, it's currently hosted on a VM and yeah, the tinkering does become problematic. I think for me I'd just get the motherboard with the external power supply and then mount the power brick where the ATX section is, maybe with some sort of 3D printed bracket. Appreciate that's probs a hassle though and getting a normal power supply is more convienient.
Great to hear you're using LVM for storage. I ended up creating RAID1 with WD Blue SA510 SSD and an NVMe drive for both the system drive and the larger media drive. The snapshot feature is really nice for doing reliable backups. How do you have it configured?
Really want to see your software setup for this. I've never really been able to fully get to grips with properly designing HomeAssistant screens to control everything.
I might try and put something together if I get a chance, my previous setup was awkward to make videos on since it was heavily Node-RED with HA bolted on top at a later date so it was very "non-standard". In the meantime, from memory, my previous setup heavily relied on github.com/twrecked/hass-virtual/ which can be used to create "virtual" devices in HA which you can interact with through the HA UI and then also use in your Node-RED flows. I also heavily used the "input" helper integrations to provide buttons, slider inputs and dropdowns which I also had connected to Node-RED. Finally, I used helper buttons configured as links on the dashboards to split my dashboards up into several smaller pages that were easy to navigate on mobile or through small, in-wall touchscreens.
You can get a dummy vga plug if you want to get rid of the flashing LED without disabling the post codes entirely. That's the sort of little thing that would drive me nuts
I see they cut down on costs / retooling of existing cables by using ribbon cables made for floppy disks / hard drives / optical drives for the front panel header buttons. Smart thinking :)
I really would like to get into home assistant - i kind of just use 5 or 6 different apps and everything is a bit of a nightmare (also all of my stuff requires cloud things D:)
Nice build. THough I think I'd have bought a rack mount enclosure from Rapid Electronics, built a raspberry pi into it with some breakouts to mount the ports to the enclosure.
The ASRock board with it's brick is fine, just get a right angle adaptor (or 2) so your not putting strain on the connector and you can VHB the brick into the case, done that with mine with no issues. The ASRock board is also great for a quick and dirty test system, no stuffing around with big motherboard connectors if it's not in a case. I'm also surprised you went with a 350w PSU. A Pico PSU would be a much better option, better power efficiency etc. Probably a 120w just to be sure (n100's can boost to 25 - 30w) and again, VHB the brick inside the case to keep everything neat. (on a side note, Seasonic are annoying they don't list the damn connectors for the industrial PSUs).
If the blinking power light is an error code for no display attached, you could plug in a dummy HDMI dongle - sometimes known as a Headless Ghost Display Emulator - commonly used for crypto- mining or BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) work. They're available for about £5 - £10.
That 80mm fan is a guaranteed failure point in the near future (bargain bin fan with awful sleeve bearings). Definitely worth swapping out now so you won't need to worry about it (or hear it screaming) in the future.
Nice! Do you know if they’ve managed to get ASPM working with the Coral TPU M.2 yet? I know it previously have had problems with the CPU timings so in some systems you’ve even got to turn ASPM off to get it to work. In a low powered system it’s always nice to actually be able to reach low C-states.
That would make a nice music computer case too wouldn’t it 😀 I like that it doesn’t have any gaming features too. Are you also a music producer or did I dream that?
(27:36) What I did with an old Intel J1900 based mainboard I have was put in a HDMI dummy plug (though you could also get VGA and DVI ones) that just transmits a fake EDID so that it thinks there's a monitor connected, and the one I have even lights up a blue LED to indicate when there's a display signal.
I have the same CPU in a tiny mini pc box running HaOS and Frigate with a Coral TPU replacing the wifi card. It runs with no issues with 6 cameras at 2k resolution...Coral TPU report around 5% usage and cpu around 20%. So you shouldn't have any issues running frigate on there.
I would have looked at using a Motherboard that can do Hardware RAID 1 across two SSD drives to keep the server running in case an SSD fails and you can power down and replace faulty drive and it will continue running
For Frigate you will probably want a more powerful CPU that supports ffmpeg hardware video decoding. Frigate first extracts a subregion of the video feed where it detects motion before passing it to the Coral TPU, so for high resolution videos especially with several cameras it quickly uses a lot of CPU. You can mitigate this somewhat by using lower resolution feeds that some IP cameras provide in addition to the main feed, and Frigate can be configured to detect using the low res but record using the high res, but then you lose detection ability - especially for cats which is important for my application! I'm using an Intel Core i5 several generations old for my Frigate instance, but I'm planning to move it to a Xeon D motherboard like you did a video on a few years ago and I'm planning to add an Intel Arc Battlemage GPU when they are released later this year. In addition to helping keep CPU usage low with several Frigate camera feeds, this will give hardware H.265 and AV1 decoding without consuming too much CPU, useful for Jellyfin running on there as well.
Someone else commented here saying their N100 works fine for Frigate with 6 cameras. It's a basic CPU but is definitely very surprisingly powerful, and supports QuickSync for video decoding.
@@camerongray1515 It will depend on whether they're using the low res or high res feeds from the cameras, and how they've configured Frigate's sensitivity to pixel luminance and contour area (which corresponds to detection sensitivity of small objects). There was recently a misty day (and a building fire in the area, possibly contributing) causing lots of visible particles in the air in front of my external cameras all day, which triggered Frigate like mad giving me constant high 90s % CPU load. During the night when a bunch of cron jobs triggered it led to 100% CPU and dropped frames and artefacts in the camera recordings. That's actually what triggered me to move over to a Xeon with GPU to be honest. I'm sure it will be able to work ok, just maybe not quite as sensitive.
@@slorpslorp N100 chip has Intel UHD graphics oboard-- a fairly modern GPU that has, among other things, QuickSync which is very good at transcoding video without CPU load. It's a 4k capable decoder, and will work fine with Frigate. It's still not a bad idea to use a lower res source for the Frigate / Coral object identification, so that you're not sending 1k clips to the Coral TPU, but many modern cameras will generate both. It will definitely out-perform your Xeon + GPU combination.
Great video. I assume you have seen the UCTRONICS Rack mounts for the Raspberry Pi ? I'm using that but have considered moving to a PC platform for Home Assistant. Do you have any data on the power consumption ?
It draws around 12w with network connected but no monitor. A rackmount Pi is also an option but I wanted the reliability of a proper SSD rather than an SD card. Once you start outfitting Pis with NVMe shields and rack cases, the costs add up pretty quickly.
I'd love to try it out but unfortunately Control 4 is extremely locked down to "approved installers" who can get access to the relevant programming software.etc. There's apparently some dodgy ways to get hold of it but those don't really lend themselves to UA-cam content unfortunately
Frigate got a lot better with the v0.14 update. It's now comparable to commercial NVR solutions, though I still have my cameras record to UniFi protect as a backup since Frigate sometimes gives up with twitchy RTSP streams and needs to be restarted to reconnect.
The new update looks good! Initially I'll install it on the Optiplex 5070 Micro that I used to run Blue Iris on, I'll then see how I find it and decide whether to build a dedicated NVR or whether to go with a separate UniFi NVR and run Frigate within HA. For me it comes down mostly to how well I can quickly pull up a camera feed on my phone and scrub through recordings when I'm away from home and get an alert.
@@camerongray1515 would be really interested in an update/video this if you get time. I've been using blue iris for a number of years (on three sites) with basic object detection as it works well enough (albeit it is frustating when a spider decides to set up camp in front of a camera creating non-stop alerts on the BI timeline). I added frigate to my home setup just so I could use go2rtc for only a couple of internal cameras to get A) low latency streams into HomeAssistant, and B) an ffmpeg audio stream that I run noise detection on. It would be interesting to see how a no blue iris setup compares for usability.
I will, although Orei have just sent me one of their higher end 8x8 HDBaseT matrices to try out so I'll be using that instead of the smaller 4x4 one I used previously!
@camerongray1515 brilliant im looking at the UHD88-EXB400R-K which im assuming is the same one? Quite a price jump from the 4x4! Looking forward to your review of it
It's the ITX version that has the DC jack, the mATX one has normal power connectors. Unfortunately when I bought the parts for this project, the mATX AsRock was out of stock everywhere.
Let’s be honest, you used a 2u case because you have all those empty slots 😂 If I didn’t have a PoE HA Amber, I would probably have something like this. N100 is perfect for taking advantage of some of the voice assistant and some other features that a PI is slightly too sluggish for
I made a dedicated video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/yp81cU1GVwk/v-deo.html. They're often sold under the name "lapdock" from various brands. They're normally intended for use with smartphones that can provide a desktop environment such as Samsung Dex but they also work great as portable KVM consoles
LVM is Logical Volume Management, and it goes between the block device and the actual filesystem. Proxmox actually uses LVM for most of it's filesystem management. In very quick terms, you assign LVM space to a Physical Volume (PV), group one or more PV's into a Volume Group (VG), and create Logical Volumes (LV) inside your VG's. Now you can do things like create snapshots of an LV, move an LV from one PV to another, merge an LV snapshot into another LV, etc.. It also allows you to dynamically allocate unused VG space to an existing LV, allowing you to grow a filesystem without having to do partition editing.
I have a few N100 servers and the blinking light bothers me so fucking much! Every time, I think there's something wrong with them. Is it really because there's no monitor connected, or did we both perhaps connect the wrong cables to the motherboard for the led??
At 27:08, is that an NVMe NAS server? If so, do you have a video about it or a link to the server/case? I had no luck finding a video about it and am pretty interested in it.
It's a SATA SSD based NAS, I made a video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/YkbP4mAEcBs/v-deo.html. Unfortunately NVMe gets really expensive when it comes to building a NAS with a reasonable number of drives due to the specialised hardware/PCIe switches.etc. Hopefully costs will come down as the technology becomes more widespread
Damn! I am disappointed, I am thinking of building something like this too, but have no idea about how to set up the software & you skipped it because "it's boring" well if it is boring people can scrub the timeline. Gutted!
Unfortunately I didn't skip it just because it's boring, I simply really dislike producing software setup videos, especially for something like this that I hadn't done before - I'd basically need to do it all off camera to figure out the process and then do it all again on video to get some sort of coherent video. There's plenty of other videos out there showing how to set up Home Assistant either as a Supervised installation or using Home Assistant OS that are miles better than anything I'd be able to produce.
It's around 12w with network connected but no monitor connected, not as low as a dedicated mini PC or some sort of highly optimised prebuilt, but better than I expected
not meaning to be rude, but id like to point out the PSU fan was placed down in the case where it will have issues breathing. If you flip it to where the fan is on top, it will breathe a bit better. and you mention the TPM, but you didnt add it, yet you put the screw in for it "for later use". hope this is taken as helpful. Happy home lab'ing!
I covered both of these in this video - I explicitly opted for a PSU with a rear 80mm fan so it would get optimal airflow in a 2U case without relying on the top vent which could be obstructed by other devices in the rack. As for the Coral TPU, I mentioned that it's something I may add in the future but I want to evaluate it first before I decide whether I want to use it in this machine, or build a dedicated Frigate NVR
I generally stick to Intel ethernet controllers on servers/networking appliances. It's not a huge deal but some software which as PFSense explicitly advises against controllers such as Realtek due to compatibility reasons. Likely not a huge issue with this particular setup though.
@@camerongray1515 I'm running opnsense on an Asrock board, and the primary ethernet is a 2.5G RealTek. Added a two-port Intel I225. Been running for a year now, with no problems. Did have to install the realtek pkg from FreeBSD, though.
I made a dedicated video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/yp81cU1GVwk/v-deo.html. They're often sold under the name "lapdock" from various brands. They're normally intended for use with smartphones that can provide a desktop environment such as Samsung Dex but they also work great as portable KVM consoles
Interesting idea for sure, maybe something I'd consider in the future although right now I can barely keep on top of group chats and messages from people I know in real life or my own email inbox, let alone a Discord server!
Surely, the time to give this advice would be BEFORE the system is built? I love the number of people who believe they understand the Cameron's needs and wants better than Cameron.
@@jackipiegga Pi uses way more than 1A at full load, it doesn't get very happy on that i know the 3a of the offical power brick has margin for peripherals but even with a conservative 2A, it will be 10W, 16W if it uses the full 3A(which Camerons might as he is using a coral TPU and will probably need a external SSD)
Power consumption is around 12w. As I said in the video, I wanted a neat, rack mount machine with enough power to handle a tonne of HA add-ons including influxdb and grafana for timeseries data logging along with potentially running Frigate in the future with a Coral TPU. I also wanted the reliability of a real SSD rather than an SD card. Sure, a raspberry pi would probably do, but what I've built here isn't completely unreasonable.
It’s not just home assistant, he also mentioned at least node red. Probably also mosquitto. Maybe zigbee2mqtt? Personally, my docker compose for home automation has like 7 containers, including postgresql. Getting all that to work on a pi could be tricky, and it’s nice to be on x86-64 because everything is compiled for it.
Perfect timing because I've wondered doing just this, building a rack n100 HA machine. Just putting together my first rack, and I have the HA running on an old nuc now, but this case looks so much better then those nuc rack mounts. Thank you, any more videos on all things around this will be much appreciated since I'm pretty new to every aspect of it
Buy parts used in this video on Amazon (Affiliate):
- ASUS N100I-D D4 Motherboard: geni.us/G243qP
- Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 SSD 500GB: geni.us/DAN8H
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- Brother PT-E550W Label Printer: geni.us/BzOiME
Other Parts:
- Seasonic SSP-350ES2 PSU: uk.rs-online.com/web/p/pc-power-supplies/2132358
- X-Case XPC-230 2u 300mm Deep Case: www.xcase.co.uk/products/xpc-230-2u-300mm-matx-rackmount-chassis
You could try connecting a HDMI Dummy adapter to the Motherboard. That might get rid of that "No Monitor" LED Code.
They are called EDID Emulator
@@Rodrigo-rq1dx If i search for edid emulator i'm getting passthrough adapters that probably change the edid information they seem to cost about 15€. If i search for hdmi dummy i'm getting products without a passtrough port for about 3€.
But i think you're correct in the way that they both supply fake edid information.
You could also stick one resistor in the vga port leaving the hdmi open for future use
I'm glad I'm not the only one crazy enough to hunt down a PSU with 80mm fan for 2U cases lol. I ended up having to get a used Antec Earthwatts, probably over a decade old. Works great though.
I subscribed to you in 2018, and until recently, youtube buried your channel for me and wasn't getting any recommendations. I am glad to have been reminded of your content and appreciate it's here.
Perfect timing because I've wondered doing just this, building a rack n100 HA machine. Just putting together my first rack, and I have the HA running on an old nuc now, but this case looks so much better then those nuc rack mounts. Thank you, any more videos on all things around this will be much appreciated since I'm pretty new to every aspect of it
If you have a 3d printer, or feel up to a tiny bit of metal work (drilling, filing, maybe a hack saw), you could use a PicoPSU that takes a 12v power brick, the make an adapter so that the brick fits in the ATX PSU spot with the IEC connector at the back panel. Then you would get higher power efficiency and probably spend less money. A bunch of replacement PSUs for vintage macs have been taking this approach, although since the motherboards don't use ATX connectors an additional adapter is needed between the PicoPSU and the Apple wiring hardness.
Gotta say, that HA rach-mounted machine looks pretty sweet. And that label is just so perfect. love it!
Recently found your channel and I’ve enjoyed the content so far.
Nice work! Definitely a smart move having a dedicated appliance and LVM snapshots.
Just so you know, there are RPi rackmount solutions out there(commercially available as well as 3D printable ones).
Your solution makes sense though given you may want some flexibility for things in the future.
Aaah Xcase! I remember visiting them a loooong time ago, they had really sexy cases and I got my first ever light up case from there!
I have an RPi 5 8GB running HA that is rack mounted...albeit with three other cheap Pi 4's in the same 1U chassis performing other tasks. Even running 4 Pi's it still doesn't consume more than 20W with all of them in use. They all have PoE & NVME hats as well. 1U chassis saves space, much lower initial cost and so little power draw. The 1U chassis was $40 US off Amazon. Worth a lot more now though since I painted Ubiquiti silver.
Another great video.
I've been very happy with Frigate, but I was coming from ZoneMinder which is archaic in comparison (PITA to configure and resource heavy with modern IP cams). Frigate's integration with HA works great, minimal resource usage, and it "just works" for me.
I had a ton of issues with the USB Coral TPU locking up on Intel USB controllers, so the PCIe/m.2 version seem a good choice. The base Frigate+ model (even with minimal training) was a big upgrade over the out of the box model that comes with Frigate itself, but the initial model is good enough to get a feel for things. But I have almost perfect identification day and night with minimal false positives with the Frigate+ model. Training is a bit of a faff.
Nice video, but as a tip from a retired IT Technician and system builder.
Always always, place the PSU first when building a new system. That way have the most space to move arround for getting the PSU in place and no risk of damaging the motherboard with one of the corners of the PSU. Install the PSU first, hang the cables outside the case, install as second the harddrive(s) and/or SSD(s) and install the motherboard with on the bench pre-installed CPU (and CPU cooler if needed) and RAM as third.
I am really looking forward to the videos about the HDMI distribution! I've looked on YT and the only videos available are very basic, and quite boring!
Nice build. My rack mount solution was to use a 1U rack mount that can support 3x NUC's or Rasp Pi's and spray painted silver to match the rest of my UNIFI equipment. I use one slot for a NUC running Proxmox for HomeAssistant and a rasp Pi for PiHole. I have been considering using the 3rd slot for a dedicated MQTT server. I notice that racknex do a very nice looking rack mount unit for an Intel NUC which had it been available 3 years ago I would have bought it.
Snap! I went for a 1U Pi Mount (Uctronics I think), and then gave it a splash of UniFi silver to match the rest of the kit.
I found this case too about 6 months ago after looking for a 2U case for aaaaaages that I could use as a compact all SSD Unraid NAS, it’s a really good case! Still going strong.
For the PSU, you could have gone with a SFF PSU. I built a couple of 2U TrueNAS units a while ago, and in them I used Corsair SF450 PSUs with AT to SFF adapter plates.
Alternatively, you could have used a Seasonic SSP-300SFG. I looked at using these for my NAS builds originally, but leads were a bit short and they didn't have many SATA power connectors.
1000th Like 🎉 Excellent video as always Cameron
Thanks alot I've been looking for a 2u pc case for a long time now and this is perfect many thanks
Smart move getting a motherboard with a preinstalled CPU. No thermal paste application for the comments section.
Well, i have the same board but, the Paste is near crap and should be renewed with Like Mx-6😅😂
I get going all out for the server, but this system definitely will cost more than a single board computer to run, and rack mounting is kind of an excuse as there are plenty of rack mount options even for Raspberry Pis in the community.
That said, great video. Home Assistant has casting options, so you may not even need the HDMI option.
Let us know how the Coral goes as there have been a lot of mixed reports with reliability directly on the Home Assistant machine.
Regarding RAM, well anything more than what the system uses is overkill. If your apps don't use more than 8gbps all up, adding more makes no difference. Sometimes the "more is better" just doesn't make sense, especially if it is a dedicated machine with known usage case and not likely to be changed often. Better to add the resources to your VM server that you play with more often
Power consumption is around 12W, sure, it's more than a raspberry pi but it's really not a big deal. Sure, I could have rack mounted a Pi however I also wanted the reliability of a proper SSD rather than an SD card, especially with the amount of timeseries data I plan on logging. And yes, 16gb of RAM is likely excessive, however it was £14 more to get 16gb vs 8gb, not an amount I'm going to lose sleep over. Essentially with this system I just didn't want to even have to think about not having enough power for everything I need to do including running a tonne of HA add-ons, potentially including Frigate for computer vision.
In terms of the HDMI output, casting is great for sharing dashboards to TVs but it's not necessarily what I'm going for here, the long term dream would be to use TV remotes to integrate with an OSD served from this machine to do things such as switching media inputs. This will likely require me to build something outside of HA itself. Of course time will tell if I'll ever actually have the time to build it, but it's nice to have the option!
Great video, I'm very tempted to approach something similar with my home assistant setup, it's currently hosted on a VM and yeah, the tinkering does become problematic.
I think for me I'd just get the motherboard with the external power supply and then mount the power brick where the ATX section is, maybe with some sort of 3D printed bracket. Appreciate that's probs a hassle though and getting a normal power supply is more convienient.
Great to hear you're using LVM for storage. I ended up creating RAID1 with WD Blue SA510 SSD and an NVMe drive for both the system drive and the larger media drive. The snapshot feature is really nice for doing reliable backups. How do you have it configured?
Really want to see your software setup for this. I've never really been able to fully get to grips with properly designing HomeAssistant screens to control everything.
Yeah me too. I really want to know how I can make a usable UI in home assistant coexist with my node red flows.
I might try and put something together if I get a chance, my previous setup was awkward to make videos on since it was heavily Node-RED with HA bolted on top at a later date so it was very "non-standard". In the meantime, from memory, my previous setup heavily relied on github.com/twrecked/hass-virtual/ which can be used to create "virtual" devices in HA which you can interact with through the HA UI and then also use in your Node-RED flows. I also heavily used the "input" helper integrations to provide buttons, slider inputs and dropdowns which I also had connected to Node-RED. Finally, I used helper buttons configured as links on the dashboards to split my dashboards up into several smaller pages that were easy to navigate on mobile or through small, in-wall touchscreens.
You can get a dummy vga plug if you want to get rid of the flashing LED without disabling the post codes entirely. That's the sort of little thing that would drive me nuts
I see they cut down on costs / retooling of existing cables by using ribbon cables made for floppy disks / hard drives / optical drives for the front panel header buttons. Smart thinking :)
I really would like to get into home assistant - i kind of just use 5 or 6 different apps and everything is a bit of a nightmare (also all of my stuff requires cloud things D:)
Nice build. THough I think I'd have bought a rack mount enclosure from Rapid Electronics, built a raspberry pi into it with some breakouts to mount the ports to the enclosure.
fun project , personally I would have bought a 1U Rack Mount for Intel NUC and gone with that
The ASRock board with it's brick is fine, just get a right angle adaptor (or 2) so your not putting strain on the connector and you can VHB the brick into the case, done that with mine with no issues. The ASRock board is also great for a quick and dirty test system, no stuffing around with big motherboard connectors if it's not in a case.
I'm also surprised you went with a 350w PSU. A Pico PSU would be a much better option, better power efficiency etc. Probably a 120w just to be sure (n100's can boost to 25 - 30w) and again, VHB the brick inside the case to keep everything neat. (on a side note, Seasonic are annoying they don't list the damn connectors for the industrial PSUs).
This is very similar to the build I did. Nice!
If the blinking power light is an error code for no display attached, you could plug in a dummy HDMI dongle - sometimes known as a Headless Ghost Display Emulator - commonly used for crypto- mining or BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) work. They're available for about £5 - £10.
That 80mm fan is a guaranteed failure point in the near future (bargain bin fan with awful sleeve bearings). Definitely worth swapping out now so you won't need to worry about it (or hear it screaming) in the future.
id love to see the software setup with the snapshots
You can get rack mount for raspberry PIs … it’s great
Nice! Do you know if they’ve managed to get ASPM working with the Coral TPU M.2 yet? I know it previously have had problems with the CPU timings so in some systems you’ve even got to turn ASPM off to get it to work. In a low powered system it’s always nice to actually be able to reach low C-states.
That would make a nice music computer case too wouldn’t it 😀 I like that it doesn’t have any gaming features too. Are you also a music producer or did I dream that?
(27:36) What I did with an old Intel J1900 based mainboard I have was put in a HDMI dummy plug (though you could also get VGA and DVI ones) that just transmits a fake EDID so that it thinks there's a monitor connected, and the one I have even lights up a blue LED to indicate when there's a display signal.
Agree, same approach I use for my NVR.
hey bro love ur vids im all in fir home servers and i try to reuse old stuff to save it going into the bin
The case does look like an an appliance so you chose well.
I have the same CPU in a tiny mini pc box running HaOS and Frigate with a Coral TPU replacing the wifi card. It runs with no issues with 6 cameras at 2k resolution...Coral TPU report around 5% usage and cpu around 20%. So you shouldn't have any issues running frigate on there.
Awesome, thanks, that's good to know!
I would have looked at using a Motherboard that can do Hardware RAID 1 across two SSD drives to keep the server running in case an SSD fails and you can power down and replace faulty drive and it will continue running
Why would you want to use 'hardware' (it's not.) RAID for that, when you can use a modern filesystem with redundancy and block level data integrity?
Love your videos ❤
For Frigate you will probably want a more powerful CPU that supports ffmpeg hardware video decoding. Frigate first extracts a subregion of the video feed where it detects motion before passing it to the Coral TPU, so for high resolution videos especially with several cameras it quickly uses a lot of CPU. You can mitigate this somewhat by using lower resolution feeds that some IP cameras provide in addition to the main feed, and Frigate can be configured to detect using the low res but record using the high res, but then you lose detection ability - especially for cats which is important for my application!
I'm using an Intel Core i5 several generations old for my Frigate instance, but I'm planning to move it to a Xeon D motherboard like you did a video on a few years ago and I'm planning to add an Intel Arc Battlemage GPU when they are released later this year. In addition to helping keep CPU usage low with several Frigate camera feeds, this will give hardware H.265 and AV1 decoding without consuming too much CPU, useful for Jellyfin running on there as well.
Someone else commented here saying their N100 works fine for Frigate with 6 cameras. It's a basic CPU but is definitely very surprisingly powerful, and supports QuickSync for video decoding.
@@camerongray1515 It will depend on whether they're using the low res or high res feeds from the cameras, and how they've configured Frigate's sensitivity to pixel luminance and contour area (which corresponds to detection sensitivity of small objects). There was recently a misty day (and a building fire in the area, possibly contributing) causing lots of visible particles in the air in front of my external cameras all day, which triggered Frigate like mad giving me constant high 90s % CPU load. During the night when a bunch of cron jobs triggered it led to 100% CPU and dropped frames and artefacts in the camera recordings. That's actually what triggered me to move over to a Xeon with GPU to be honest. I'm sure it will be able to work ok, just maybe not quite as sensitive.
@@slorpslorp N100 chip has Intel UHD graphics oboard-- a fairly modern GPU that has, among other things, QuickSync which is very good at transcoding video without CPU load. It's a 4k capable decoder, and will work fine with Frigate. It's still not a bad idea to use a lower res source for the Frigate / Coral object identification, so that you're not sending 1k clips to the Coral TPU, but many modern cameras will generate both. It will definitely out-perform your Xeon + GPU combination.
You can get dp or hdmi emulators that would, I assume, fix the flashing led.
i think this case looks clean and expensive
Oh good lord the stub length on that USB abomination.. That is the stuff of nightmares.
Great video. I assume you have seen the UCTRONICS Rack mounts for the Raspberry Pi ? I'm using that but have considered moving to a PC platform for Home Assistant.
Do you have any data on the power consumption ?
It draws around 12w with network connected but no monitor. A rackmount Pi is also an option but I wanted the reliability of a proper SSD rather than an SD card. Once you start outfitting Pis with NVMe shields and rack cases, the costs add up pretty quickly.
@@camerongray1515 thanks. Power consumption is much less than I was expecting. I might pick up this kit to some eval.
You mentioned control4. Out of curiosity, considering you’ve wired the whole house already, why didn’t you just get a control4 controller?
I'd love to try it out but unfortunately Control 4 is extremely locked down to "approved installers" who can get access to the relevant programming software.etc. There's apparently some dodgy ways to get hold of it but those don't really lend themselves to UA-cam content unfortunately
@@camerongray1515 fair enough. What about Elan controller? You can “diy program” for that one I believe. Possibly better than control4 anyway?
Frigate got a lot better with the v0.14 update. It's now comparable to commercial NVR solutions, though I still have my cameras record to UniFi protect as a backup since Frigate sometimes gives up with twitchy RTSP streams and needs to be restarted to reconnect.
The new update looks good! Initially I'll install it on the Optiplex 5070 Micro that I used to run Blue Iris on, I'll then see how I find it and decide whether to build a dedicated NVR or whether to go with a separate UniFi NVR and run Frigate within HA. For me it comes down mostly to how well I can quickly pull up a camera feed on my phone and scrub through recordings when I'm away from home and get an alert.
@@camerongray1515 would be really interested in an update/video this if you get time. I've been using blue iris for a number of years (on three sites) with basic object detection as it works well enough (albeit it is frustating when a spider decides to set up camp in front of a camera creating non-stop alerts on the BI timeline). I added frigate to my home setup just so I could use go2rtc for only a couple of internal cameras to get A) low latency streams into HomeAssistant, and B) an ffmpeg audio stream that I run noise detection on. It would be interesting to see how a no blue iris setup compares for usability.
Will you be using the HDMI Matrix switch in this setup, the OREI one you reviewed previously?
I will, although Orei have just sent me one of their higher end 8x8 HDBaseT matrices to try out so I'll be using that instead of the smaller 4x4 one I used previously!
@camerongray1515 brilliant im looking at the UHD88-EXB400R-K which im assuming is the same one? Quite a price jump from the 4x4! Looking forward to your review of it
Yep, that's the one! Looking forward to trying it out!
05:08 Interesting I have an Asrock N100M Mainboard and it has an ATX connector.
It's the ITX version that has the DC jack, the mATX one has normal power connectors. Unfortunately when I bought the parts for this project, the mATX AsRock was out of stock everywhere.
It's so strange seeing a small motherboard in a big case, but they need to make rack compatible, and you have room for upgrades later.
This I like!
I like this case, where can I find the same case in the u.s.a
Let’s be honest, you used a 2u case because you have all those empty slots 😂 If I didn’t have a PoE HA Amber, I would probably have something like this. N100 is perfect for taking advantage of some of the voice assistant and some other features that a PI is slightly too sluggish for
10:29, so in this case, pun not intended.
I'm just running a dedicated intel nuc for home assistant, low power consumption and still total overkill
Shame that motherboard only has the one SATA port. It makes software RAID for the OS drive more difficult.
What’s the ‘laptop’ you used for a display at the end? (Screen + keyboard & trackpad in laptop case)
I made a dedicated video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/yp81cU1GVwk/v-deo.html. They're often sold under the name "lapdock" from various brands. They're normally intended for use with smartphones that can provide a desktop environment such as Samsung Dex but they also work great as portable KVM consoles
Can you please measure the powerdraw?
Can you explain a bit more about the LVM backup? Do you have Proxmox?
LVM is Logical Volume Management, and it goes between the block device and the actual filesystem. Proxmox actually uses LVM for most of it's filesystem management. In very quick terms, you assign LVM space to a Physical Volume (PV), group one or more PV's into a Volume Group (VG), and create Logical Volumes (LV) inside your VG's. Now you can do things like create snapshots of an LV, move an LV from one PV to another, merge an LV snapshot into another LV, etc.. It also allows you to dynamically allocate unused VG space to an existing LV, allowing you to grow a filesystem without having to do partition editing.
thank you!
I have a few N100 servers and the blinking light bothers me so fucking much! Every time, I think there's something wrong with them. Is it really because there's no monitor connected, or did we both perhaps connect the wrong cables to the motherboard for the led??
At 27:08, is that an NVMe NAS server?
If so, do you have a video about it or a link to the server/case? I had no luck finding a video about it and am pretty interested in it.
It's a SATA SSD based NAS, I made a video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/YkbP4mAEcBs/v-deo.html. Unfortunately NVMe gets really expensive when it comes to building a NAS with a reasonable number of drives due to the specialised hardware/PCIe switches.etc. Hopefully costs will come down as the technology becomes more widespread
@@camerongray1515 Awesome, thank you very much for the reply, will give it a look.
A n100 mini pc is a better deal. Runs docker/casa without an issue
What are the scars on your arms?
Damn! I am disappointed, I am thinking of building something like this too, but have no idea about how to set up the software & you skipped it because "it's boring" well if it is boring people can scrub the timeline. Gutted!
Unfortunately I didn't skip it just because it's boring, I simply really dislike producing software setup videos, especially for something like this that I hadn't done before - I'd basically need to do it all off camera to figure out the process and then do it all again on video to get some sort of coherent video. There's plenty of other videos out there showing how to set up Home Assistant either as a Supervised installation or using Home Assistant OS that are miles better than anything I'd be able to produce.
Wondering the idle power consumption of this server.
It's around 12w with network connected but no monitor connected, not as low as a dedicated mini PC or some sort of highly optimised prebuilt, but better than I expected
👍👍
not meaning to be rude, but id like to point out the PSU fan was placed down in the case where it will have issues breathing. If you flip it to where the fan is on top, it will breathe a bit better. and you mention the TPM, but you didnt add it, yet you put the screw in for it "for later use". hope this is taken as helpful. Happy home lab'ing!
I covered both of these in this video - I explicitly opted for a PSU with a rear 80mm fan so it would get optimal airflow in a 2U case without relying on the top vent which could be obstructed by other devices in the rack. As for the Coral TPU, I mentioned that it's something I may add in the future but I want to evaluate it first before I decide whether I want to use it in this machine, or build a dedicated Frigate NVR
3:15 out of interest, what's the concern with Realtek ethernet?
I generally stick to Intel ethernet controllers on servers/networking appliances. It's not a huge deal but some software which as PFSense explicitly advises against controllers such as Realtek due to compatibility reasons. Likely not a huge issue with this particular setup though.
@@camerongray1515 I'm running opnsense on an Asrock board, and the primary ethernet is a 2.5G RealTek. Added a two-port Intel I225. Been running for a year now, with no problems. Did have to install the realtek pkg from FreeBSD, though.
Link for he lapdock kvm please
I made a dedicated video on it here: ua-cam.com/video/yp81cU1GVwk/v-deo.html. They're often sold under the name "lapdock" from various brands. They're normally intended for use with smartphones that can provide a desktop environment such as Samsung Dex but they also work great as portable KVM consoles
Live more dangerously, I even run my router in a VM.
Have you considered creating a discord server?
Interesting idea for sure, maybe something I'd consider in the future although right now I can barely keep on top of group chats and messages from people I know in real life or my own email inbox, let alone a Discord server!
@@camerongray1515 totally understandable with everything you a re doing, keep up the good work and great videos!
Beautifully overkill. A NUC would probably be sufficient of course. You might want to consider a PICO PSU for a build like this as well.
Surely, the time to give this advice would be BEFORE the system is built? I love the number of people who believe they understand the Cameron's needs and wants better than Cameron.
expensive overkill
Dedicated x86 device for JUST home assistant? You're burning money at this point. Just get a proper arm device for this like a normal human being.
Intel N100s are very low power you won't save much using a comparable performance arm chip
@@Motolav
5W full tilt raspberry pi vs your "low power" full tilt 15-20W.
@@jackipiegga Pi uses way more than 1A at full load, it doesn't get very happy on that
i know the 3a of the offical power brick has margin for peripherals but even with a conservative 2A, it will be 10W,
16W if it uses the full 3A(which Camerons might as he is using a coral TPU and will probably need a external SSD)
Power consumption is around 12w. As I said in the video, I wanted a neat, rack mount machine with enough power to handle a tonne of HA add-ons including influxdb and grafana for timeseries data logging along with potentially running Frigate in the future with a Coral TPU. I also wanted the reliability of a real SSD rather than an SD card. Sure, a raspberry pi would probably do, but what I've built here isn't completely unreasonable.
It’s not just home assistant, he also mentioned at least node red. Probably also mosquitto. Maybe zigbee2mqtt? Personally, my docker compose for home automation has like 7 containers, including postgresql. Getting all that to work on a pi could be tricky, and it’s nice to be on x86-64 because everything is compiled for it.
Perfect timing because I've wondered doing just this, building a rack n100 HA machine. Just putting together my first rack, and I have the HA running on an old nuc now, but this case looks so much better then those nuc rack mounts. Thank you, any more videos on all things around this will be much appreciated since I'm pretty new to every aspect of it