New Adventures in WiFi

Last year I acquired a Raspberry Pi 4  for running Home Assistant and some of my other home automation tasks. I bought the stock case to go with it, and unfortunately since I've had it, it has been running really hot, at times reach as high as 80 degrees. This is a well acknowledged issue , which had improved slightly with some firmware updates in recent months, but regardless I was a bit worried it was going to diminish the lifespan of the Pi 4. So, I went looking for better cases, and came across a number of fanless heatsink cases, which seemed like a good solution as I'd already had some good experience with fanless heatsink cases for PCs. Anyway, I came across this heatsink case from Little Bird Electronics , from where I also purchased my Pi 4 , and decided to give it a go. You can see an image of the case below, so you know where this is heading.

The Raspberry Pi 4 arrived today. I was finding that the Raspberry Pi Zero W  I've been using as the centre of my smart home explorations was very sluggish, particularly running Home Assistant, and restarting after configuration changes. So, I'm hoping the Raspberry Pi 4 will improve that. Here are a few pics. I have also purchased a Sandisk Extreme 64 GB microSD card for storage. I've installed Raspbian Buster  on it. Now to get it set up and ready to run Home Assistant.

I found out about Home Assistant while searching for a solution that would let me control a Broadlink RM Pro  locally over the network. Already having access to a Raspberry Pi Zero W , meant that there was a reasonably low barrier to entry to get Home Assistant running. After a bit of reading , and given that I already had Rasbian Stretch installed on the Pi Zero W and am reasonably comfortable with Linux, I decided to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment (venv) . I also set up Home Assistant to autostart using systemd . The Pi Zero W is not really recommended for running Home Assistant, and I did run into some issues that may have been caused by low specs of the device. Specifically, I had installation of some pre-requisite packages fail, and some updates failed, which I suspect was due to some activities timing out. Also, the CPU usage would regularly sit on 100% for minutes at a time when trying to check the configuration or restart Home Assistant...

I'm now the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Zero W , and an official case . As a result of some changes to the Xively service I can no longer use it as an intermediate data conduit between the CurrentCost  web platform and PVOutput  for my electricity consumption and solar generation data (as described in this blog post ). So, I've needed to find an alternative, and my plan is to use the PVOutput Integration Service on the Pi. I've installed Raspbian  Stretch. Here is a pic of the Pi.