I’ve been curious about homebridge for quite some time and have been considering picking up a Raspberry Pi to run it. I’m interested to know about others experiences with it, and what sort of difficulties I might expect to troubleshoot in the future.
Is an RPi4 enough? Is an RPi5 overkill?
I had it running on a Pi3 using the official homebridge image without any problems related to the Pi itself. Usually when there is a problem it’s because of a homebridge plugin or a config error.
I recommend assigning a fixed IP for the Pi‘s MAC address in your router.
You will also want to update Node.js regularly, which can be done with the hb-service CLI tool that comes preinstalled if you used the image. Therefore basic knowledge of using the console is required. If I remember correctly the console can be accessed in the Homebridge UI.
Better than assigning a static IP on the system/router is probably to create a DHCP reservation instead, that way you can never run into an issue where 2 machines end up with the same IP, and you don’t have to mess around with the assignment pool scope.
This might be what you meant, but just to clarify for those who might not know.
I didn’t know there are multiple ways but we probably mean the same. It’s a common feature on routers.