Home Assistant with full Armbian desktop experience?

[Robert Pace]

Is there an Armbian image with home assistant that isn't minimalistic? or Is there a way to install HA on a more robust desktop armbian 25.2 image for the Orange Pi 5 Plus? I feel the orange pi 5 is robust enough to handle HA under a desktop Armbian environment than other SBCs.

 

 

[Werner]

I don't think there are pre-built images with both ha and de by default. 

You can try to build your own by adding this extensions to your own userpatches and enable it: https://github.com/armbian/os/blob/main/userpatches/extensions/ha.sh

 

 

[eselarm]

The way I do it is to run HA (their HAOS) as a virtual machine. The instructions how to do that are quite clear for Intel, so I did that long time ago on 16GB old Intel Atom server board. Standard 32GB image with partition8 Ext4 data AFAIR.

Later on, I created a HA supervised VM for ARM64. I had already several VMs running on a RPI4 for other functions, same libvirtd/QEMU/KVM as on Intel boxes. If you don't know how to get that running, it might be easier to use a docker method, but I consider that as more maintenance (longer term) for myself.

I have no real use-case for HA as most I do with own SW. Node-RED, influxDB, Grafana, etc, so currently not running/used. It seems supervised method will loose support sometime, so if I would have to set it up now, I would make a HAOS image running on my ROCK5B (16GB) or NanoPi-R6C (8GB) and import a backup of the database from last year. I can share my serial output of electricity meter now (HW and SW wise) point-to-multipoint, so I will maybe have a look. It is mainly to see how and if metering works for my country/contract out of the box. It is all about the money, we need to pay here for delivering solar energy back to the grid. You need to be a financial expert more or less to get it right. And I am still waiting for cost numbers for energy company, they should have informed me before 2025-07-01, but it seems is it impossible to send an email with 2 or 3 numbers (cents per kWh).

[MacBreaker]

->a bit off topic<-

 

Okay, if you have enough time, you can play around with PXVIRT (formerly the Proxmox port). 🙂
(https://github.com/jiangcuo/pxvirt)

 

It's like Proxmox for ARM64 devices.

 

I've been playing around with an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4 with a 256 GB USB SSD lying around.

 

In short:

• I installed a self-made minimal image (RPi4b).
• Installed PXVIRT (https://docs.pxvirt.lierfang.com/en/installfromdebian.html)
• Created some LXC containers (e.g., Lyrion Media Server, Heimdall, Pihole, Portainer, etc.)
• Created a virtual machine (Bookworm with OMV)
• Created a virtual machine with HAOS / ->   bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/vm/pimox-haos-vm.sh)"

 

It's been running perfectly stable for 56 days now. 👍

 

Okay, it wasn't easy to set up and compile all the software components, but it's running perfectly.

 

I plan to buy an Orange Pi 5 Plus with 32 GB RAM for these tasks next time.

 

Regards, Markus

[Robert Pace]

12 hours ago, eselarm said:

The way I do it is to run HA (their HAOS) as a virtual machine. The instructions how to do that are quite clear for Intel, so I did that long time ago on 16GB old Intel Atom server board. Standard 32GB image with partition8 Ext4 data AFAIR.

 

Would this be a viable pathway to run Frigate NVR with HA/HAOS?

[eselarm]

8 hours ago, Robert Pace said:

Frigate NVR

It depends on what kind of- and if-  HW I/O is used. USB can be redirected. PCI-E can be re-allocated from host to VM when proper IOMMU (HW) is there, that I only go working for Intel PCs, there is interest in it for ARM64, but so far haven't seen anyone got that working. Other typical SBC HW I/O like SPI, 1-wire, GPIO high-low toggle, etc, can not be virtualized, so not available to a VM. Same for video codecs HW accell blocks. Storage and networking, all things typically relevant for enterprise/servers, is no issue.

[eselarm]

Maybe some further notes on w.r.t. running HAOS in a VM: As indicated, the process is described for Intel, see https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/alternative

For ARM, people have selected RaspberryPi and then ask why it does not work. That is because RPi uses proprietary bootloader (not U-Boot, nor EFI). You need the  haos_generic-aarch64 build/image, see https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases

 

I do not use qcow2, but just a flat img. That is easy to mount as loop device in case some changes are needed to partitions or so. I extracted the .img.xz file and changed the storage (VirtIO Disk) of my existing HA VM to use the new native HAOS instead of my old Debian+supervised_HA. It started without issues and I get to the webpage from where the rest is a standard 'HA getting started', e.g. restore its backup so all devices stats etc are back again.

 

I know many people ask for VMware or Proxmox (or some for VirtualBox), but Linux has anyway all the low-level stuff build-in and a GUI as well:

root@rock5b:~# apt install virt-manager
virt-manager is already the newest version (1:5.0.0-5).

I have this running on ARM64 since Debian Buster 64-bit beta RPi (and 1st early 64-bit Ubuntu server image for RPi4 and also Opensuse Tumbleweed 64-bit) so the commercial ones I dropped long time ago. Above is latest Trixie. Kernel is Armbian vendor currently, but that is only because I want video HW accel (ffmpeg codecs) to work. Otherwise Armbian edge or current offers better stability IMO.
 

Simple tests show that DRAM speed for RK3588 is same or better as for old Intel Core I7, so with also up to 32GB, is great KVM server and desktop same as that old Intel boxes, but 4 Watt idle instead of 40 Watt or so. 40W means about 40 * 9000 is 360 kWh per year, that is 108 Euros per year for my energy contract (30 cents per kWh).

Edited 10 hours ago by eselarm