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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

FYI - I had to buy a Pi 3B+ to run Unifi Controller, the forum posts said the Zero W didn't have enough juice.

When I used my Pi 3b+ it was flakey for UniFi. I bought a bunch of their cameras and got a cloud key gen 2 plus. Haven’t looked back and now I have a Pi for a few other things in my new house.

Seconding this... it'll just barely run on the Zero W, but you need 64-bit Java to remotely access your controller through unifi.ubnt.com, and there'll be long delays whenever the database needs any maintenance.

(I set up a Zero with the Unifi Controller -- connecting to the LAN using a Chromecast Ethernet Adaptor -- about a year ago, and had this problem, so I switched to a 3B, and all is well now.)

Boo! Might have to reconsider then. I used the Pi Zero W for FullPageOS for a while but performance was absolutely terrible, recently switched it out with the Raspberry Pi 3.

The Pi Zero really has an awesome form factor, but many of the projects I come up with either require more performance (i.e. needing a Rasperry Pi 3) or are simply better suited for a microcontroller such an ESP32 or ESP8266.

I guess it depends, but having the unifi controller on wifi isn't always the best of idea. If you misconfigure the wifi or just change the ssid/password the controller looses access as the settings are applied. And now you can't even connect to the controller to fix it.

I’m using an Ubiquiti gateway but not for access points (yet). So that’s not currently a problem. But that’s good to know!

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