Can the ISY integration on my Home Assistant damage the Rasp Pi hardware I'm using for HA?

[bruceyeg]

When I set up HA on a RaspPi 4 with 8 GB, I added the UDI integration which allows HA to talk to my ISY. HA said it got 100 devices and 244 entities. All of these are Insteon devices that I manage with my ISY994/IR Pro. I've had a huge number of hardware or software problems with HA. It generally runs for about 2 days and then disappears from my LAN. I have a DHCP reservation and when HA stops working nothing is at the IP address my HA should be at. After this happened the first time,  I flashed the SD card with a new image of HA and started all over again. The same thing happened after a couple days. I third time I tried to reflash the SD card and start again, I learned the SD chip was ruined. 

Next I bought an SSD drive. I got my HA working again and I made a backup of HA on Google Drive. After a couple days the same problem occurred again. My HA just keeps disappearing from my LAN. I cannot access it. I had to reflash the SSD and start again. I did that and restored my HA software from the backup on Google Drive. 

Then the problem occurred again. But this was different. After I reflashed the SSD and tried to get it running HA didn't reappear on my LAN. It seemed as if there was a problem with the networkiing on my RaspPi. The Pi should have booted HA from the SSD image and appeared on my LAN. It didn't appear.

 

I then used another SD chip and booted my RaspPi into the Raspberrian OS that comes with the Pi. I had this setup to work with WiFi. HA was set up to use Ethernet. Anyway, my RaspPi booted up Raspberrian but it didn't connect to WiFi right away. When it wouldn't connect, I used the keyboard to put the Pi into debug mode. After about 30 seconds it seemed to fix the problem and Raspberrian OS starting running OK with WiFi.

It seems that my Pi had hardware problems that kept getting worse. Not only did it ruin the SD chip, it now appears to have damaged the networking chip on the PI.

Before installing the ISY integration on my HA I installed other integrations and didn't have any problems. I suspect that the ISY integration might be overloading HA. My HA remembers the states of all the devices and entities and plots a timeline showing the state of these over many days. The ISY integration added 100 devices and 244 entities with HA would have tracked over many days. 

My guess is that all the data HA is gathering and plotting from the ISY is overwhelming its database. HA goes offline after it has accumulated data for a few days.

Has anybody else experienced this?

I've just purchased a new RaspPi 4 with 8GB just like the previous one. I'm worried that if I set it up as before, I'll just have the same problems. However, my old Pi could have been defective. Should I try the new Pi and see if the problem repeats? If the problem is caused by data from 100 devices and 244 entities overwhelming the Pi, then the problem will just reoccur.

My ISY 994 is running the latest version 4 firmware. I haven't yet upgraded to version 5 firmware. Would that make a difference?

I've got about 20,000 lines of code running on the ISY. The devices in my house are constantly changing all day. My HA seems to track what all my devices are doing just fine until HA just disappears from my LAN and I have to start all over again.

I should probably post this as well is a forum with Home Assistant experts. HA should be robust and shouldn't crash under any circumstances. I'm posting this here because I'm pretty sure the problems are related to the ISY integration. I wonder if others have have had similar problems.

Thanks

Bruce

[MrBill]

12 hours ago, bruceyeg said:

HA should be robust and shouldn't crash under any circumstances.

I'm running HA on a PI4 4GB with the UDI integration adding 141 devices and 285 entities.  No Problem.  HA and the UD ISY Integration are extremely stable.   In total I have far more devices and entities than the UD integration is adding.

12 hours ago, bruceyeg said:

My ISY 994 is running the latest version 4 firmware.

I don't know if version 4 could be an issue, I believe the integration is tested and optimized against V5.  Does the HA core log have any information that would be helpful?  In any case would errors with an integration cause networking issues?  I'd be surprised, but nothing is impossible I suppose.  @shbatm may be able to comment further on ISY V4 compatibility or incompatibility. 

Is there a reason you're not upgrading to V5?  perhaps extensive use of "Adjust Scene"?

[apostolakisl]

I just pretty much think there is zero chance that your issues have anything to do ISY or your home automation tasks.  I don't use home assistant, so don't know much about it, but it sound like something is wrong with your RPI if it is damaging your SD cards.  The kind of overhead that doing this sort of home automation shouldn't even begin to challenge your RPI and even if it were running it to the max, that wouldn't fry your sd cards and ethernet ports.

[kpurintun]

a bit late to the convo..

But if you look at the cost of a high-end rpi, the SSD, a case, a power supply, a good SD card, and a fan...  you are basically within a couple of dollars of a Dell Optiplex Micro which will have way more power, ~6 USB ports, a nicer case, ability to upgrade to 32 or even 64 gb of ram, support for two hard drives (SATA and NVME), and all kinds of good features.  Considering the writiness of HA and all the fun features it has, it will absolutely destroy a microSD card in short time.  but definitely encourage you to look at these micro PC formfactors.  some can be just $210.  and go up to $1500.  

just plan what you want to do..  if you want to do VMs.  spend more for threads (6 to 8 threads) and ram.  does not seem to be a big reason to get an i7 when the i5's do just fine. (16-32).  otherwise, just HA..   a 4 thread i5 and 8gb of ram will be super affordable and arguably about the same $$ as a pi.

[MrBill]

11 minutes ago, kpurintun said:

Considering the writiness of HA and all the fun features it has, it will absolutely destroy a microSD card in short time. 

I'm not sure what "short time" means.  With HA, I'm using a MicroSD card with an A1 rating, and it's been running over 2 years.  I opted to go the Home Assistant Yellow route, which I won't have until July. (primarily because it has a Zigbee/Matter radio built in).  So I may never find out how long it takes to wear out an MicroSD card.  (the ISY uses one too and is constantly writing logs, and i didn't replace that one until it was about 4 years old.)

That said Pi's are scarce at the moment and that does make them more expensive.  But I do like that Home Assistant and it's add-on's are running on their own hardware, and that one of the add-on's is google drive backup, which is pretty hands off.   If the hardware or SD card ever fail, I can be back in business pretty quickly.

[bpwwer]

Pi's can be sensitive to the power supply.  A weak power supply will cause all kinds of issues, including the ones you've been experiencing.

I'd first look into replacing the power supply for the Pi.  Then I'd hook a monitor up to it so you can see what happens if it drops off the network again.

[kpurintun]

2 hours ago, MrBill said:

I'm not sure what "short time" means.  With HA, I'm using a MicroSD card with an A1 rating, and it's been running over 2 years.  I opted to go the Home Assistant Yellow route, which I won't have until July. (primarily because it has a Zigbee/Matter radio built in).  So I may never find out how long it takes to wear out an MicroSD card.  (the ISY uses one too and is constantly writing logs, and i didn't replace that one until it was about 4 years old.)

That said Pi's are scarce at the moment and that does make them more expensive.  But I do like that Home Assistant and it's add-on's are running on their own hardware, and that one of the add-on's is google drive backup, which is pretty hands off.   If the hardware or SD card ever fail, I can be back in business pretty quickly.

It was more of a 'your mileage may vary' comment...   there are better SD cards than others, my point was that dollar for dollar, the rPi actually represents a worse value than a readily available refurb OptiPlex with all things considered.  A class 40 NVMe SSD will outperform and outlast any MicroSD and also seem to have very competitive $$/GB, especially when considering its durability.

I also use the Google drive backup addon and like it.  I use UnRAID on the BareMetal of my OptiPlex with a parity drive that looks for inconsistencies weekly. I can recover here or use the backup.

I was looking at the Yellow..  let us know how it works when you get it.