Raspberry Pi RPi4

I used to do the same thing with a full RPi4. I’m pretty sure that was the first non-pi zero that worked in gadget mode. I was trying to make an attached Linux machine for my iPad instead of using a cloud VM. It was pretty effective, but at the time the ARM distributions were difficult to run what I wanted. Now, however, it would be significantly better.

Yes; it means you can, for example, install an off-the-shelf copy of Debian. See https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 . In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports. Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).

I used OpenCV and Yolo on an RPi4 for object detection. Worked great. Fun project and I learned a lot from the OpenCV community. I think the ability to learn computer vision from scratch (and free) like I did is one of the best aspects of open source generally. But yeah, an Arduino would be tough.

I put HAOS on an RPi4, plugged in a Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter, and never looked back. It runs 15ish Sengled RGB bulbs wonderfully, I've got all sorts of lights macro'd and timer'd (e.g. porch light comes on at sunset, turns off at midnight). Reliability is crazy, the UI is wonderful, I can access it from all sorts of devices and native apps...and there's a few other devices it sucks in too (air filter, Chromecasts, my NAS health, etc.) Now I haven't done any of the other actually useful projects I have in my backlog (thermostat, motion sensors, security cameras), but I'm extremely confident that HA can handle any that I throw at it. All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh) Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network. But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just t…