We follow the principle of doing one thing well instead of all things mediocre, so we use 2 solutions for what you asked. As others in the thread, we do use Tandoor, but only for Recipes and Meal Planning. It does this execeptionally well, but the shopping list part is fitting to our style of shopping.

As a shopping list, we use David Shays Groceries / Specifically Clementines. Why?

• It works offline when you are in one of those huge buildings that work like a faradays cage and you do not have reception anymore.
• It lets my partner attach a picture to a list item, so I can find that specific cheese when I am standing clueless in front of those shelves with 500 different cheese brands and that helps me find the right item before the shop closes.
• It works exactly the way we shop. We always arranged items in the order they are in the shop when you work through the shop from entry to exit. That is super efficient.
• It supports aisles. That means your items are assigned to an aisle. The super cool feature here is, that you can rearrange the isles for each shop. Veggies are at the entrance of Shop A, but at the middle of Shop B? Just arrange the isle for Shop A to the start of the list and to the middle of Shop B. Since all items are connected to an isle, they move with the aisle. This way you never have to turn around in a shop to get “those other things”. You just walk from entry to exit in one line and be done with it.
• With this software I never forgot to buy something I did not find in Shop A. How this software does it is that you create list groups that contain lists for every shop that fits. For example you group food shops together, or shops for gardening stuff. Within the list groups, you have your items. And when putting an item on a list, you can select on which list it should appear. Now when you put your favourite cheese on the List of Shop A and B and you bought it on Shop A, it gets ticked off on Shop B too. Or the other way round, I think you get the idea.
• I have to repeat that it works offline. A shopping list is useless if you can not use it when you are shopping.
• Accidentially ticked off an item because, well… touchscreens and you do not know what it was? No problem. Ticked off items just move down that list and you can pick it up again. With other apps stuff just disappears or gets send back to the global item list and now you do not have any idea what you missed. Not so with “Specifically Clementines”.
• It never let us down. It always worked, whether offline or online without any hiccups.

There is more, but this post got too long already. It also has User Management, Permissions and Live Sync. Yes, my Partner can see live when I tick of items on the list and can put stuff on the list while I am shopping :-)

Everything in that software feels like it was created by a person that goes actually shopping.

It has a very good web interface (which also has the offline mode AFAIK) and a very good Android App.

Does it look fancy? No. Has it everything we ever searched for in a shopping list app? Absolutely!

I am looking at those kind of devices for a few weeks now because I need to replace my DD-WRT Router with something more powerful and reliable. I am aiming for those Mini PCs / Appliances with 2+ 2.5GbE network ports and went through dozens of “manufacturers” (many are just putting their label on it) and read hundreds of Forum posts, watched videos etc.

To me it comes down, that they do not differ that much and on my journey so far, these are the things I discovered:

• Many manufacturers still implement previous CPU generations. This one has a recent N100, so that´s good. The newer gens are usually more power efficient and produce less heat, so you have higher chances to run them fanless without burning your house down.
• If you want 2.5GbE, it is almost always Intel i225 for the older models and i226-V for the newer ones. And those seem to have issues with ASPM, which you need to turn off, depending how you plan to use them. And this adds a few extra Watts.
• With many “nameless” China boxes that are actually tested by people in Forums / Videos etc. it happens often, that they have to mod them. They either add fans to them because they get unreasonably hot, or the internals are sloppy built, so that hot components do not even touch the case properly to transmit the head. So be prepared to mod them if you get one you did not found a thorough review yet.
• Some build their Boxes still with DDR-4 memory, although they are on a new platform that would support DDR-5. Sometimes you see this in the product description, sometimes you see it when you bought it and opened the box.
• For many offers I have seen there is no information about the BIOS/EFI and what you can do there. I have seen / read tests, where you could barely change anything in the BIOS/EFI and are stuck with what the manufacturer configured for you.
• With the “nameless” boxes, the biggest issue I have is, that they do not even have proper descriptions of the built in components on their product page. The place where they advertise their product. If this information is not even there, I suspect long-time support and build quality is not better either.
• Sometimes the RAM is fixed and you can not change it, but with the sloppy product pages, you sometimes can not see this or it is not that obvious, so pay attention to that if you plan to use it for a long time and might want to upgrade the RAM.
• Sometimes you find the exact same hardware just relabeled. I looked at the Thomas Krenn LESv4 for example and found out that it is from Iwill. This is one example where I thought I get it from a German manufacturer and pay a bit extra to support them, but it’s just a relabel from a Chinese company. That’s not bad of course, just a heads up if you insist on buying something that is not coming from China… which is near impossible anyway in my opinion, because what kind of Electronics is not from there nowadays ;-)
• I am following Hardkernel for a while and their new H4 Series seems to tick all the boxes for me at the moment… apart from one: The Case! But they announced a “GC-Style” Case that is injection molded and will post pictures in 2 weeks, so I will wait to see how it looks and how it is built. I love how they nerd out on their Product pages. There is hardly anything you can not find there. They use current technology and offer it for a very fair price. They also seem to pay attention that you have plenty of room to tinker with the settings in their BIOS/EFI and they seem to put quite some though into how they build their stuff, so it also consumes the least amount of energy (which should mean less heat) than others. They even have the guts to host their own Forum, which is a big thing nowadays when you have to fear one Shitstorm after another if you do something that one person does not like. Their H4+ with the Netboard (adds 4 more NICs) and a SSD in a cozy case would be sweet, so I hope the new case they will release soon fits my needs.

That’s my 2 cents for today. Sorry for the long post, but since this is a topic I am doing research for myself to get me a good, fast, low energy, low heat hardware for a new OPNsense Firewall :-)

I think nowadays you will hardly find Hardware in that area that is not made in China, no matter where the company sits that sells it. There are a few, sure, but hardly in that price range, unfortunately.

I run Nextcloud for many, many years. I hosted it for a very long time at Hetzners second lowest tier of Webspace they rent. It was not very fast there (you get what you pay for), but fast enough for our need here. Later I moved it to an Azure VM and after that to my Homeserver where it runs blazingly fast, especially since the last updates they pushed out.

In all that time I never reinstalled. I just upgraded to the newer versions when they were out. The only times I had problems upgrading was when I was hosting at the cheap Webspace instance at Hetzner and an upgrade process took longer than the PHP timeout my very cheap hosting instance provided. So it was never a fault of Nextcloud, but just that I hosted it on basically the cheapest hosting plan I could find.

We use it for file sharing, calendar + contacts (+ Sync with DAVx), Notes and of course Talk. For talk to make full use of Voice + Video calls, you should have a TURN Server, but if you do not use that (if you just text) it was running great even on the Webspace instance at Hetzner.

We are very happy in our family that it exists, that it is free and that it serves us well since many years.

You would think so, yes. But to my surprise, my well over 60 Containers so far consume less than 7 GB of RAM, according to htop. Also, of course Containers can network and share services. For external access for example I run only one instance of traefik. Or one COTURN for Nextcloud and Synapse.

I would absolutely look into it. Many years ago when Docker emerged, I did not understand it and called it “Hipster shit”. But also a lot of people around me who used Docker at that time did not understand it either. Some lost data, some had servicec that stopped working and they had no idea how to fix it.

Years passed and Containers stayed, so I started to have a closer look at it, tried to understand it. Understand what you can do with it and what you can not. As others here said, I also had to learn how to troubleshoot, because stuff now runs inside a container and you don´t just copy a new binary or library into a container to try to fix something.

Today, my homelab runs 50 Containers and I am not looking back. When I rebuild my Homelab this year, I went full Docker. The most important reason for me was: Every application I run dockerized is predictable and isolated from the others (from the binary side, network side is another story). The issues I had earlier with my Homelab when running everything directly in the Box in Linux is having problems when let´s say one application needs PHP 8.x and another, older one still only runs with PHP 7.x. Or multiple applications have a dependency of a specific library when after updating it, one app works, the other doesn´t anymore because it would need an update too. Running an apt upgrade was always a very exciting moment… and not in a good way. With Docker I do not have these problems. I can update each container on its own. If something breaks in one Container, it does not affect the others.

Another big plus is the Backups you can do. I back up every docker-compose + data for each container with Kopia. Since barely anything is installed in Linux directly, I can spin up a VM, restore my Backups withi Kopia and start all containers again to test my Backup strategy. Stuff just works. No fiddling with the Linux system itself adjusting tons of Config files, installing hundreds of packages to get all my services up and running again when I have a hardware failure.

I really started to love Docker, especially in my Homelab.

Oh, and you would think you have a big resource usage when everything is containerized? My 50 Containers right now consume less than 6 GB of RAM and I run stuff like Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Homeassistant, Mosquitto, multiple Kopia instances, multiple Traefik Instances with Crowdsec, Logitech Mediaserver, Tandoor, Zabbix and a lot of other things.

That is cool, thank you very much!

I was about to order a SLZB-06, but they were out of Stock. That one looks exactly what I want. I never really looked into NodeRed, but normalizing everything before using it makes sense. The SLZB-06 makes the Zigbee Network connections independent from any Servers and making everything going through MQTT makes you independent from any Software that has to communicate with the Devices. Sounds like a lot of flexibility and independence.

Matter and whether external connections are needed or not will be interesting to follow. My HA instance is internal only too, since it does nothing that needs me to access it over the internet. And Owntracks delivers to a separate MQTT instance that will have no internal devices. So my HA is shut off from the internet and I will pay attention to everything Smart Home I will buy, that it does not require an Internet connection too.

Thanks :-)

Thank you! Regarding the Sonoff Zigbee 3 Dongle: I see it has an external Antenna. Did you need a USB extension cord too or is this interference problem other dongles seem to have with USB ports mitigated by the external Antenna?

May I ask what Gateway / Dongle you use? Oh and that weather station sounds interesting, if you happen to have a Manufacturer / Model for me I would like to read up on that too :-)

I am leaning towards MQTT too because of other solutions that already integrate into that. It looks like a great way to throw different Data into a single pool to make them accessible in the same way, no matter if it is a switch, temp sensor, Camera, GPS Data etc.

I am leaning more towards something that might be complex to set up, but has broader support and is future proof. And the latter one seems something that is not really clear for any of the current protocols. Maybe in 10 years things will have settled and everyone uses the same protocol, but who knows what it will be :-) I am leaning towards Zigbee2MQTT for now since my impression is that you are very flexible to do with MQTT. I already use MQTT for Frigate and Owntracks and if other devices put their stuff into MQTT I will I have a pretty open pool for all the data / actions, even if I switch from HA to something else in the future. I feel MQTT is here to stay for a while, but well… that could all be wrong, Haha!

Thanks for your input! MQTT is not an issue, I have Mosquitto running on both my installs (one with HA + Frigate on a remote location, the other one HA for me which is also used by Owntracks), so MQTT is not a problem. I will even set up a second one and connect them together to have 2 Brokers for the setup where I need Internet access (Owntracks) to MQTT and I do not want to share this MQTT instance with the devices for my home.

My impression about Matter was too that it is not “done” yet and device support is poor. On the other hand you read at every corner that it will be the future. This is why the SkyConnect Adapter looked very interesting to me at first, but since most of the features I would use now (Z2M probably, Docker compatibility) do not seem to work yet, or at least not reliably.

To be honest, I might have mixed something up reading up on all those standards. After researching a topic, my browser usually ends up having a hundred Tabs “just in case I need that information again” and honestly… in all that information I can not find it specifically. My consensus reading all that information was: “Make sure for each device you buy that it works with your specific gateway, even if it says it works with protocol X”.

Thank you very much, that was very helpful! I am leaning towards Zigbee2MQTT and it seems to be a good choice.

ZHA is out of question now, since how often I have to restart HA for updates, I am sure it would be annoying to me. My Mosquitto Instance however does not receive updates as frequent, so Z2M might be the better choice for me.

Could you tell me what kind of Bridge / Device / Dongle you use? I often read Conbee II**, but this is not on the recommended list for Z2M. On the other hand I am thinking about getting a Network only Gateway (there are some on the recommended list too), so I do not rely on a USB connection that needs to be mapped to a Docker Container. Having pure Network connections and independent devices sounds like a more stable solution. Also I assume having a Networked Gateway instead of a USB connected one would be independent of restarts from my Containers or even the host.

**Edit: It IS on the Recommended list, I just got confused because it is not listed on the USB section, but under Other :-)

Thank you! I suppose you use a USB Dongle or is ist some kind of stand-alone Gateway that sits in your LAN?

We use Reolink wired with PoE and recently switched from ZoneMinder + ZMNinja to Frigate + Home assistant and are very happy so far.

I was just looking for cheap backup space recently and Hetzners Storage Box BX21 is 13€ per month for 5 TB, 20 Snapshots and unlimited traffic. I did not compare the service with backblaze yet, though.

Setup of the HMAC Key for the CouchDB was indeed the step I struggled with too. I think the first time I either made a mistake or used a broken Website to generate a Base64 value. The 2nd time my mistake was that I put in the Base64 value for the HMAC Key into the jwt.ini AND in the docker-compose.yml. But in the docker-compose.yml COUCHDB_HMAC_KEY, I had to put it unencoded and in the jwt.ini hmac:_default it has to be Base64 encoded. Maybe this is the thing you did wrong too?

I bet you are close!

On the other hand, if you are the only person using the shopping list and your current setup offers you what you need, maybe it is not worth it for you. For me it was (and updating when it runs is super easy, I promise!). The instant sync over all devices is great + it keeps working when I lose reception in a shop and syncs again instantly when I have internet again. But what makes Groceries for me are:

• The ability to have an item on multiple shopping lists if needed and if it is checked off from one list, it is checked of from the other lists too. I stopped forgetting buying stuff that was not available in the 1st shop to get in the 2nd.
• The ability to add items to aisles and move the aisles in different order for each list (every shop I visit has a bit of a different layout). This made shopping super quick for me, because I enter the shop and walk through it exactly once and have everything I need, because it is all in the correct order on the respective list.

Oh, and adding a photo to an item is super useful if you are like me and need very close instructions what to get for your partner if you stand in front of a shelf with 100 different types of cheese which look all exactly the same to you… having a photo is sometimes a life saver for me :-)