A pi5 with 1gb ram will always be cheaper but that’s not enough ram for your usecase, search n150 at Aliexpress, you can often find some mini pc for around 150-160€ on sale with n150, 12gb lpddr5 (or 16gb ddr4 sodim) and 500gb SSD. https://a.aliexpress.com/_EQ5k2Uu This one was 153€ couple of days ago. Thay are other Chinese brand like soyo, beelink, bmax that have similar hardware. They are not as good as NUC, but they do the job for way cheaper.

Home assistant is a beast, not sure openhab can actually match it today. Unless you already have a pi5 and a SSD (avoid micro sd card), you could consider a mini pc with n150 (or n100) processor. It doesn’t consume much power (close to pi5) and it will be more powerful and more Ram which will be useful for immich.

Start with zigbee first, much more mature than thread. I don’t personaly use thread but i believe some zigbee dongle also can deal with thread at the same time.

About the setup. If mini pc, you can use proxmox so you will be able to create a VM for home assistant and another one for immich.

That might depends on how your AC is working, I recently did the same at my dad’s house and run into issues because the temp control for the unit is reading from the remote. So when I sent infrared command to turn off unit, it worked as expected for some minutes then turned back on because remote sent back command as temp wasn’t meet. Still need to do a lot of testing to find a way to make it work, might need to disable remote and use some temp sensors for the triggering part but not sure how that will work, might need to use some hysterisis friendly climate addon for that…

Can’t answer sorry

Comparison of self hosted photo library https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

I can’t remember any name but search for f2f (friend to friend) p2p. Basically a private way to share files over p2p to limited people you have accepted without any use of tracker like P2P use

+1 those are really great. And should be just below 150

I am mainly reading on iPad due to screen ratio, I’m self hosting yacreader library and use yacreader app (server is free, app is one time payment on iPad, does have an android/windows client but not developed as iOS version). If I remember correctly, I think there is also Panel on ipad that do the same (would need to check). On android, I need to check and can answer tomorrow (almost 1am here), could be cdisplayex but unsure.

i don’t know any on computer but some app offer that on android/ios. i guess they look for some kind of contrast pattern to determine each frame.

Did try and it does work really well on some but not all garphics novel / comics

Does it have access to boot menu? If so, change boot order so it goes to usb first. You will then only need to create a bootable usb stick with Linux on it

I’m using home assistant, with mqtt which acts for many things and I get notification in different way depending the needs. Could be home assistant app or telegram or lighting up some light or sending voice messages to a speaker. All notifications are triggered by automations looking at states. Haven’t done it but automation could be re launched automatically until (for exemple) I press a button or responding to telegram message

And if that’s doesn’t work, message me and we will try to solve this out

Have you tried a Factory reset?

Not the answer you are waiting but there is something wrong with your shield, I have a 2015 and 2019 Shield and both are just very good even if the first one has nearly 10 years

I’m not 100% sure but this might also depend which OS you are running on your pi. Did change from SD card to SSD few years back for my home assistant setup (now running with a mini pc) at the time I went for a geekpi adapter (can’t recall exact model).

Try a quick ducduck search “sata adapter #yourOS#” and see if a list come up. Here is one for HA (but surely more models are compatible than the ones listed here) https://community.home-assistant.io/t/working-usb-enclosures-and-adapters-with-hassos/212763

Edit: as for SSD, I went for Samsung EVO model

Sidenote: all SSD will be more reliable than a sd card because they are less sensitive to rewrite counts

I don’t see why you think those are web based, usually people run this at home but glad you find what you are looking for

As far as photo librabry, you can compare the different solutions at https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

Relying on 4 nvme drive for low power isn’t ideal as nvme drive needs about twice more power compare to sata SSD.

On your Xiaomi first time you launched app, you can determine wether you always allow or allow on prompt (but you should still be able to manage that setting afterwards). You also need to disable battery optimization for that app and set app to be able to auto launch in background. This is at least what I do with my home assistant app to determine GPS location in background (app record every 15mn) and no issues with battery draining.

Don’t have particular case to recommend as the one I have has been printed but get one where you can add an SSD. SD card are not well suited for home assistant due to the amount of overwriting.