Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.
Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed
Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5
256gb SSD
8GB ram
Advanced BIOS options
OpenVino support for Frigate
BIOS battery management. Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life
6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge
Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices
Fanless and completely silent
Built like a tank
Negatives:
Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop
No integrated Ethernet port
Mediocre screen
I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.
There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.
As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.
The #1 cause of lithium battery fires is improper charging, you can find anecdotes of phone and tablet batteries puffing up from being charged too much:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/yoitld/battery_bloating_in_wall_mounted_tablets/
But fair enough, you might be able to avoid a potential fire by setting a charge limit.
With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.
Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.