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.
Alder lake minis work fine with 48gb dimms
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1bd892o/intel_n305_mini_homelab_with_48gb_ram_by_one_stick/?chainedPosts=t3_13npvng
the ram support is just a recommendation, as that’s all that they’ve tested
The bloody morons… why they say 16 tops if it can do better? It’s not like they don’t have access to 16gb sticks to test 2 of them! Like, I get when it’s “this supports up to” and that’s the largest available at launch, but this is just stupid. Thanks for correcting me!