I have been a big fan of Nymea for a while but I realized I’m still not sure what is the ‘best’ Nymea server (for Nymea:core). There is a good page for nymea core which highlights raspberry pi and Ubuntu/debian as the best ways to get started, which is great.
However, ubuntu/debian is a pretty big topic and could include a lot of hardware. I thought this could be a more permanent thread where people could discuss which hardware works best for various situations.
For example, I discovered that installing ubuntu on a USB drive with persistence is a great way to set up a Nymea test environment that you can take anywhere with you easily.
Should this be a higher level forum topic or can conversations branch under this thread? Not sure what’s best but I wanted to start the thread for myself and others. - Moderator - feel free to do whatever you like with this idea / post.
To start the discussion, I would like to know if there is a device like raspberry pi that is also low-power usage but runs simple ubuntu (which I am most familar with) but has a nice non-SD card memory (those die quickly).
To your last question: the Raspberry pi is perfectly able to run a version of Ubuntu which is actually provided and maintained by Ubuntu. There are various flavours, from headless to several different GUIs.
You can run a reasonably recent Raspberry Pi off an SSD. You have to run once a small utility program which is described on the Raspberry site. That’s my current setup for an experimental Nymea server. It used to be my setup for the Home Assistant.
Right now, I run Home Assistant on a Minix mini computer which is running Ubuntu (I believe it’s the version 22.04, could be 20.04).
Another Ubuntu server is running 7/24 in my home, and I am considering using this one for Nymea, if and when I decide to switch over to that platform. I also might run it in a virtual machine for better portability.
Fantastic and thanks for your reply. I looked up the Minix and it looks pretty neat. I found this link but wasn’t sure if this was the correct one that you use. Always better to use ones that have proven history I’ve found. If you could send exact link to the device you use and like that would be great. Also, what is this 7/24? Is that another kind of server? If so a link to that would be great.
Yes, it’s that very model, the NEO Z83-4U. It came with Ubuntu 18.04. More recent versions of Ubuntu Linux can be downloaded from their website. Standard images would not load on that device, but it turned out not to be a problem. (Instructions for installing Ubuntu on NEO Z83-4U | MINIX Forum)
But again: it does not take a Minix to run Ubuntu Linux. The Raspberry Pi can do that, too.
7/24 is just shorthand for running the server without any interruptions, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.
Thanks again. Lol. I say ‘24/7’ not ‘7/24’ so I thought it was a funky server model which would actually be a pretty smart name…
I’m fine with installing stuff onto raw ubuntu-ready devices, but mainly I’m concerned with having stuff breakdown. Raspberry pis running on SD cards are notorious for having cards die, especially in Nextcloud because of all the read-write work going on. For Nymea it might not be as heavy but I wanted to create servers that will be extremely low brain-damage for me. These Minix hardware look solid. I was also hoping that someone here has tried something like the rock64 from Pine64 since they have been very great at creating very open hardware for the world. I ‘might’ try this device for nymea if there is no reason not to…
You could also use DietPi which is debian based.
Default it’s a headless setup, but it’s fairly easy to get running in that state using SSH and setting up WiFi before first boot.
Tons of nice settings and runs on arm and x86 if needed.