Pretty much the same here. Got a bunch of RPis in different states of disrepair from auctions and amassed about 6 of them in total. I used more and more of them for automation and it worked well for a while until some software required more processing power than one Pi could manage and it all slowly fell apart.
Sometimes they'd just randomly crash and shut down, some of the SD cards died, sometimes they'd just plain lock up and fail to respond despite appearing to be on, so I eventually just started using an old desktop with a first gen i7 in it to do everything. I slapped Linux on it and it runs a few VMs for OS level software like HAOS or stuff I need behind a VM and the rest just runs directly on the machine.
I've not checked but I don't think it's drawing that much more power than all the Pi's did, and now I have a bunch of them spare for simpler tasks like dashboards or other projects. I have one Pi4 that runs very basic things like PiHole and that's it. It used to run my camera system but even that was pushing it.
They're great for what they are, but if your home automation setup grows they can't really scale with it. Things like Jellyfin will require good hardware for decoding if it's required. Even my dedicated server struggles with 4k content but it can just about keep up and more modern hardware should be better. I had Plex running on a 3b+ and that could definitely not decode much.
Pretty much the same here. Got a bunch of RPis in different states of disrepair from auctions and amassed about 6 of them in total. I used more and more of them for automation and it worked well for a while until some software required more processing power than one Pi could manage and it all slowly fell apart.
Sometimes they'd just randomly crash and shut down, some of the SD cards died, sometimes they'd just plain lock up and fail to respond despite appearing to be on, so I eventually just started using an old desktop with a first gen i7 in it to do everything. I slapped Linux on it and it runs a few VMs for OS level software like HAOS or stuff I need behind a VM and the rest just runs directly on the machine.
I've not checked but I don't think it's drawing that much more power than all the Pi's did, and now I have a bunch of them spare for simpler tasks like dashboards or other projects. I have one Pi4 that runs very basic things like PiHole and that's it. It used to run my camera system but even that was pushing it.
They're great for what they are, but if your home automation setup grows they can't really scale with it. Things like Jellyfin will require good hardware for decoding if it's required. Even my dedicated server struggles with 4k content but it can just about keep up and more modern hardware should be better. I had Plex running on a 3b+ and that could definitely not decode much.