HI all,
Long time no see! Hope everyone has been doing well...
Havent been playing around with HA for a while now (5 years or so). Last I left off, I was using Girder 3.x with a hodgepodge of x10 / misc. parts for random HA projects around the house. At the time I was running this on an htpc that was left on 24/7. I have since gotten rid of the htpc and started looking into something that would be inexpensive to purchase and to run 24/7. I orginally started to think about the raspberry pi and looked into possibly using a "stick pc", but those options seemed to be a piecemeal solution as I would be buying addons for everything I would need.
I came across this mini-pc http://global.shuttle.com/main/productsDetail?productId=1585 that seems like it would fit the bill. Newegg has an open box for $136 right now, coupled with some ram and a SSD, I could put it together for around $225...
Looks like it would run around 16-25w (probably on the lower end since I would be using SSD?), is fanless, and has 2 rs232 ports (something I need and want), it could serve video (not HD from what I have read) and music from my home network or most likely, my external harddrive. One major drawback is that it only supports windows 7 32-bit.
Are there cheaper or better solutions (in the same price point) out there?
I know x10 is old school, and I should upgrade and use something like the ELK, but I still have a ton of x10 gear laying about and back in the day it worked great for my needs. As for the Elk.... one day
Im not ready to pull the trigger, as I was just entertaining the idea of getting my system set back up... but since I've been out of the loop for so long I wanted to get some feedback to see if Im barking up the right tree.
Happy Holidays!
Treetop
Long time no see! Hope everyone has been doing well...
Havent been playing around with HA for a while now (5 years or so). Last I left off, I was using Girder 3.x with a hodgepodge of x10 / misc. parts for random HA projects around the house. At the time I was running this on an htpc that was left on 24/7. I have since gotten rid of the htpc and started looking into something that would be inexpensive to purchase and to run 24/7. I orginally started to think about the raspberry pi and looked into possibly using a "stick pc", but those options seemed to be a piecemeal solution as I would be buying addons for everything I would need.
I came across this mini-pc http://global.shuttle.com/main/productsDetail?productId=1585 that seems like it would fit the bill. Newegg has an open box for $136 right now, coupled with some ram and a SSD, I could put it together for around $225...
Looks like it would run around 16-25w (probably on the lower end since I would be using SSD?), is fanless, and has 2 rs232 ports (something I need and want), it could serve video (not HD from what I have read) and music from my home network or most likely, my external harddrive. One major drawback is that it only supports windows 7 32-bit.
Are there cheaper or better solutions (in the same price point) out there?
I know x10 is old school, and I should upgrade and use something like the ELK, but I still have a ton of x10 gear laying about and back in the day it worked great for my needs. As for the Elk.... one day
Im not ready to pull the trigger, as I was just entertaining the idea of getting my system set back up... but since I've been out of the loop for so long I wanted to get some feedback to see if Im barking up the right tree.
Happy Holidays!
Treetop