Do you have a bulk food store nearby? We have one where you can BYO containers, tare and label them, and then fill them up at the store. Bulk food with no bags or single-use containers, it’s great.

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

Immich! It’s an amazing self hosted Google Photos replacement.

Zigbee definitely fun with HomeAssistant. I have an SLZB-06M adapter which has PoE (important for me) and is a fairly “open” product (don’t need to jump through hoops to flash firmware). I read somewhere that it may offer Thread support at some point but wouldn’t count on that.

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

It’s pathetic that I’ll happily recommend my Emporia Vue2 energy monitor to folks running HA — not because it works out of the box, but because the company is aware of the community integration projects and seems ok with it, even if they don’t actually support it. (ESPHome Firmware flash gives you local control — It’s been pretty great!)

As others have said, I’d play with routing/IP forwarding such that being VPN’d to one machine gives you access to everything — basically I would set it up as a “road warrior” VPN (but possibly split tunnel on the client [yes I know, WireGuard doesn’t have servers or clients but you know what I mean]).

Alternately, I think you could do some reverse proxy magic such that everything goes through the WireGuard box — a.lan goes to service A, b.lan to service B, etc., but if you have non-http services this may be a little more cumbersome.

Big difference for me between the RPi 5 and orange pi 5 Plus is more RAM and m.2 NVME support on board. It also has four additional efficiency cores and dual 2.5G NICs, but that’s less important to me.

Downside is it has a less polished ecosystem.

Overall though I’ve been happy! But I also love my collection of raspberry pis, so it’s a matter of taste I guess.

My current self hosted setup is my OPi running Immich, an RPi 4 4GB running Home Assistant and Pihole, an RPi 5 4GB “off-site” (with family, via WireGuard VPN), and a VPS with public IP as my entry point from outside. It’s a fun hobby :)

I’m fortunate enough to not be in a position where money is tight for food, but re: beans and rice, I absolutely love my instant pot!

Mexican-style beans are, IMHO, delicious, easy to make, and dirt cheap. I love them, our toddler loves them, and it’s easy on the wallet. Dry beans are really affordable, and a 25lb bag of rice is great to have in the pantry (note: careful with bulk brown rice as I think it can go rancid). A stove and a pot can do both, but an instant pot and a rice cooker makes it so easy.

I also drink a fair amount of coffee, but again, bulk or even just “make coffee at home” is very affordable. A few cups at Starbucks costs the same as a pound of beans (which yields many cups).

How many photos? It’s a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.

Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.

Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it’s just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.