I’m looking to buy a cheap mini PC to run Home Assistant. I found lots on Amazon.es but I don’t want to give them my money. Looking for something like a cheap €200 n150 box. Any suggestions where I can buy this in Europe?
Question of curiosity: why not consider RaspberryPi for the task? It is definitely going to be cheaper and more power efficient when comparing to mini computer (even if you take new one), because has so much more computing ability per Watt. I’ve been running HomeAssistant + cups server + small file server on RaspberryPi 3b+ without any issues for few years, and it was pretty actively used.
Additional point, RaspberryPi is publically traded company on London Exchange, and was founded in Britain, which mostly matches the “Buy European” motto ;)
Yeah the RaspberryPi is perfect for those things. They also have Suggested hardware for that. I dont about your country, but here in Germany electricity is expensive.
Have you looked on eBay? You can either get second hand from someone local to you like I did recently or a just check on who / where the item comes from before buying?
edit to add more clarity
Seen as this is buyeuropean and you may not want to give eBay its percentage what I meant by check on who / where the item comes from is using eBay as an aggregator, checking for sellers and then looking for their storefront outside of eBay to avoid giving them their sales percentage.
As others have said, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 will do everything you need for HA short of voice support.
If you do want to set up voice recognition, honestly, my first stop would be Wallapop/eBay. You can find something marginally more powerful than a Raspi that way if you don’t mind the additional power consumption. Or, given what’s out there, I’d try to put something small together as a bit of a project from used parts.
If you stick to official sellers and sellers with plausible-sounding positive reviews, AliExpress can be fine, and shipping is often quick, though warranty support is a bit of a gamble. There are loads of cheap N100/N150 boxes and other Mini PCs on AliExpress.
One option is to look for used and repaired thin clients.
Have you tried https://www.pccomponentes.com/ ? You could try fnac too (although I’m not sure where are they from). There’s also pc box I think. You might try your luck in those
Not European so I can’t answer that part.
If you are only looking at running Home Assistant, why not look at one of their own boxes? Such as the Home Assistant Yellow. Or maybe something along the lines of a 1 liter PC such as the OptiPlex 3070 or whatever the best bang for the buck is on eBay nowadays.
Yes this! They sell HomeAssistant Green for 100$ and HomeAssistant Yellow does ship from various European sellers at various prices.
Otherwise agreed a used 1liter PC from a local IT refurbisher the best option if buying a general PC for HA.
I got a home assistant green and it’s great. I just plugged it and it works.
