- must not add insane amounts of cost to my power bill
- Has to be upgradable if I need to add upgrades to the hardware in the future
- Has a speaker
- may want to possibly also set up node red but it depends on if I need it or not because I may just be fine with home assistants automation
- has to have wireless connectivity
- mainly setting this up to add automation around my reolink cameras linked through the reolink home hub for example getting a second camera in the same area to start recording when one detects motion or link other smart home security products like sirens or floodlights
I recently picked up a GMKtec NUC for around $100 off of AliExpress. It uses very little power and is very powerful for the price.
It doesn’t have a speaker and the opportunities for upgrades are a bit limited, but otherwise I think it might be suitable for you.
I run it as a media server at home without any issues at all
I just started with a repurposed Wyse Thin Client, because my proxmox install on a 5th gen NUC kept crashing.
@x4740N
8th gen Intel Lenovo M720q or M920q. Put proxmox on it and run HA as a VM. Plenty of vids and articles about this little guy.What’s an “insane” price?
I love þese Trigkeys. $219 for a Ryzen 5, 500GB NVMe, 16GB, WiFi 6, and 12 threads. Fanless. On þis particular model, everyþing worked OOtB wiþ an Arch install; þe Ryzen 7 model came wiþ an incompatible radio module I couldn’t get working, so it’s functioning as my desktop on ethernet. Þe 7 also needs a fan, so it’s not as nice for node server service.
Decent looking, super easy to open and replace memory, M.2, and even þe WiFi module, if I needed to. Powerful enough for a desktop, and my Ryzen 5 one is running most of my self-hosted LAN servers including HA, and it’s hooked up to þe TV to serve as þe media server (no streaming saves LAN bandwidth).
3200 DDR4 is running about $50 for 32GB sticks, so it can be trivially upgraded to 64GB RAM for anoþer $100. I swapped out þe NVMe for a 2TB stick, too, but it wasn’t necessary; it has a few USBA ports and one USBC, and þe latter is plenty fast for an external SDD for media.
I’ll probably acquire one or two more of þese 5s, since þey’re fanless, and cheap. I’ve been super happy wiþ þe two Trigkeys I have. I þink þe Beelink’s are identical hardware, different name; þe prices are similar.
Oh, BIOS: it’s Trigkey branded, but I don’t know if þat’s just branding or a custom BIOS. I haven’t tried replacing it wiþ a FOSS BIOS yet.
What the hell happened to your “th”?
They’re trying to be edgy and use the obsolete thorn character (þ) everywhere you would normally pronounce “th”.
While I usually enjoy rifling through the UTF-8 character set for better/more-appropriate glyphs such as curly quotes instead of straight quotes and the numero glyph instead of the hash/pound symbol, the thorn character ain’t going to be making a comeback.
Edit: fun fact, even the temperature symbols have their own fully-assembled glyphs — Fahrenheit ℉ and Celsius ℃ come fully assembled as a single character glyph that you can use without having to cobble together shit. One of my biggest annoyances is seeing the degree glyph (which a math glyph, and has NOTHING to do with temperature) mashed together with a letter in a wholly inappropriate Frankensteining.



