Hi @edoardoo
I actually stumbled on your post a couple of weeks ago! Great writeup!
We certainly need contributors. We need help with everything from the visualisation of sensordata in the frontend (considering using d3.js) to mqtt/node.js backend for receiving and processing sensor data.
Please contact me or Johan for further discussions.
@Feliw05 Selecting the "right" controller is of course a matter of opinion and depends how far you want to go into the homeautomation swamp . Normally i don't give advice like this (and i agree with @mfalkvidd - It's great to discuss with a friend!) but here a my 2 cents... I think i've tried them all in the table but i always return to 2 alternatives: homeassistant and domoticz. If you want the fastest way to get started with good trend charts i still think Domoticz is a great choise. The UI is not the prettiest (even if you can fix that by setting up custom dashboards like dashticz or so) but it's very functional and i think it has a good default setup with trendlines per sensor for day/month/year using highcharts. I have a few weather station systems running remote and then i use domoticz in docker containers on off site servers (but i've also had it running on rasberry PIs). Very light weight.
Another alternative (maybe obvious) is homeassistant but it might be a bit overwelming since it's very flexible and can be run in so many different ways so you will find tons of howtos that doesn't work anymore. It has a very active community that isn't afraid of changing core concepts when needed which is both a strength and sometimes a weakness. For my personal homeautomation i have moved over completely to homeassistant and it's possible to create beautiful dashboards with little effort. Is has integrations for more or less everything and if not there will be soon or you can add it yourself.
Example dashboard that i have in the house with car heating/charging, cameras and tons of sensors and zigbee devices. Actually used and appretiated by everyone in the house
It's a bumpier ride at least at first but i think homeassistant wins in the long run - and it's open source!
I have a similar project: For my fathers boat, I want to use a Nextion as a central informations display. I will use a asr6501 as self containing gateway/controller, so maybe we can exchange experiences.
@mfalkvidd said in Best PC platform for running Esxi/Docker at home?:
@NeverDie ...You can also use the command line tool fstrim to manually discard unused data.
Looking into this, I think checking the "Discard" box on the "Hard Disk" tab of the "Create a Virtual Machine" dialog box inside ProxMox may automatically accomplish the same thing. Also the ProxMox dataset that the VM is saved on needs to be set to thin-client. So, those two things plus the ssd emulation that you mentioned, and of course automatic file compression like lz4 needs to be enabled. So, in total, four things need to be set correctly for it to work optimally.
Originally I was concerned that because, if using ZFS as the file system, ProxMox only allows storing a VM as a pre-allocated "raw" file (rather than as a qcow2 file as ProxMox would if ProMox were using a linux ext16 file system instead of ZFS) that the file would take up enormous space even if the raw file (i.e. the VM's virtual disk) is mostly empty. So, I did the experiment, and it turns out that is true if the ProxMox dataset isn't configured as "thin-client" or if automatic file compression isn't turned on, but fortunately the true size of the raw file does indeed shrink down if those two conditions are enabled.
So, having proved that to myself, I'll pass on the tip: I now create a VM's disk to be as large as I can imagine it would ever need to grow, and then I let the thin-client mechanism maintain the true size of the virtual disk to be only as large as what is actually necessary. This way I don't have to worry that I created too small a VM disk, or that the VM will later outgrow the disk size that was originally allocated for it.
@monte said in Best choise for a controller:
@neverdie but isn't Docker more efficient and simple solution compared to a VM? Considering it will be used for single process anyway.
Yes, I think you're right.
