GeertVc

Since my first contact with Home Assistant some week back, I learned a lot. One of the things is that with a recent version of Home Assistant the section is no longer called Add-ons, but Apps. And Apps is present in the Armbian Home Automation image. I was a bit mislead by this (well, quite a lot in fact... 😉). Like I said before, I went the "docker" route for a while (that is, install Armbian Minimal and then Home Assistant and Zigbee2Mqtt using the container approach) but I now went back to the Armbian Home Assistant way. And that's working very well for the moment, although I'm still exploring and discovering things. Home Assistant isn't a simple thing, it has a quite steep learning curve. But the return is great. It's an amazing piece of software of which I currently only know maybe 20% of its capabilities. And even that is already impressive... But I'm happy I can already control a Somfy LT50 8/12 CERES roller shutter in combination with a Shelly 2PM GEN4 switch, calibrate it and so on. That was for me a first "victory" and a nice achievement. Going further now, exploring new and amazing things. The YAML language to make scripts is the next step. Luckily, there are great YouTube videos out there of people who are willing to share their knowledge and experience. Something I can only deeply appreciate! Thanks guys! But again, that takes time... Best, --Geert

@eselarm: First off, thanks for your extensive answer and the effort you've put to read and answer to my question. I'm by far not such an expert like you yet, but to start with, I can tell you the following: I had two Le Potato SBC laying around doing nothing and I wanted to give them some work to do. I was already looking for a while to start with HA (I have currently an own written home automation system that works together with openHAB through MQTT). The Le Potato has (at least mine) 2GB of RAM on board, twice as much as all of my Raspberry Pi's I currently have or in use, or laying around doing nothing. So I think that should be sufficient to do what I want to do with HA. Le Potato is not a racing car, but I don't think this is necessary for me. Unless you have so many add-ons like you have. That's another story. I want to use Zigbee as a protocol for my sensors. I bought recently a whole bunch of them: presence detection, door and room sensors, temperature sensors. All of them from Aqara. I also bought a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle P (later on, I read that I should have taken the E version but yeah, that's the "learning price" you pay if you step into an unknown world...) Next to that, I also bought presence detectors from another brand (HOBEIAN, model ZB-PL/ZB-p: this seems to be a Tuya clone), just to see how HA can cope with all those different brands. Finally, I also bought 4x 2PM GEN4 Shelly boxes to contol roller shutters later on. The nice thing about those is that they "understand" quite a few protocols, among others, Zigbee I also want to be able to "listen" to what the Zigbee components are sending to HA. Therefore, I want to use Zigbee2MQTT in HA instead of Zigbee Home Assistant itself. It's for Zigbee2MQTT that I really wanted a HA version with supervisor capabilities to be able to add Zigbee2MQTT through the Add-ons feature. Alas... that's not seem to work... So, my Le Potato should only be able to run HA in combination with MQTT and Zigbee2MQTT. The specs of Le Potato should be sufficient to cope with this I guess (I hope). And if the future demands me to add more features, well, then we'll see. But my first goal is to learn HA and its surroundings. And since I anyhow had those SBCs doing nothing.... So, since the "official" Armbian Home Assistant image didn't have the Add-ons feature, I took a brave and daring move: I went the HA docker way... Therefore, I took another SD card and flashed Armbian 26.2.1 Minimal to it. Just to have a very bare bone Linux distro (I have to admit that I do know something about Linux, I'm just not a HA expert yet...). After installing the distro on the SD card and doing the necessary "Armbian onboarding" stuff (create root password, create new user, and so on), I first installed Docker. Again: I have no experience yet with Docker, so again another big gamble. But I like challenges, so I don't mind. After installing Docker, I installed the HA docker image. I then opened the HA web UI and could also start creating a "first user" (which is apparently given administrator rights). But of course, again not the Add-ons feature in the Service section. But this time I could understand; this is normal since I didn't use the real, official HA repo. I could install ZHA, however, which I did. Just to see if my Sonoff dongle was detected and used by HA. After installing ZHA, I activated some of my devices and yes, they were detected! But that only proved my Zigbee dongle was working fine. Nothing more, nothing less. Still, very important! Then I installed Zigbee2MQTT "the Docker way". This was absolutely not a walk in the park, but in the end I got it up and running. My devices are getting detected, I know now how to change topics. I can receive MQTT topics on my MQTT broker running on another Raspberry Pi, I can filter the MQTT JSON objects so that I only receive what I would like to receive (by default, the JSON object exposes all entities of a device, but I'm not interested in all of them), I can convert the standard MQTT topic "prefix" used by Zigbee2MQTT on the fly and so on. Overall, I'm very satisfied with what I currently have and I will continue to follow that road. Maybe until Armbian has a fully supported HA image for Le Potato that contains the Add-ons section. Maybe I will switch to a more powerfull server too in the future. I read on the inet that a lot of people are switching from a RPi4 to a so-called Intel NUC server (whatever that is, no experience with it, no idea about its specs) for performance reasons and they're very satisfied. Maybe I'll do that too in the future, only God knows... We'll see, but still lots to learn about HA and its overall environment for the moment. Thanks again! Best, --Geert

Update: if I wait long enough, then I finally see the Reboot screen. After reboot, I can go to http://<IP_address_Le_Potato>:8123 and I do see the Home Assistant intro screen. After creating an account, giving the location parameters and so on, I finally get the Home Assistant screen. I see in the command terminal that the following containers are available: hassio_observer hassio_supervisor See attached image. However, when I go to Settings, I don't see the Add-ons section. I admit I'm not a Home Assistant expert yet (first steps into HA) but I thought that the superviisor was just to have the Add-ons section available to the user? That's the reason I tried the Armbian Home Assistant image, hoping the Add-ons section would be available. Do I have to make myself a "supervisor" (again, I'm not a Home Assistant expert yet...)? If so, how can this be done? I need MQTT and Zigbee2MQTT, hence the need for the Add-ons section, which I currently don't have... Best, --Geert

Hi, First post here. I'm fairly new with Armbian. I have a LibreComputer Le Potato that I want to use for Home Assistant. To avoid all the hassle of setting up Home Assistant with docker, I used the Armbian imager to install the Armbian 26.2.1 Home Assistant on an SD card. Once the SD card was flashed, I put it into the Le Potato board. The board starts up fine, asks for the root password, creates a new user and so on. Later on, the Preparing Home Assistant Supervised window appears. However, after the first round to 100% I get a "RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument" on the screen. The preparation goes on and on, moving the progress bar over and over to 100%. But the installation seems to never stop. See the image attached for the error I get. Anyone any idea? Best, --Geert