Just a minor point, but without it the Pi Zero won’t connect to your network. In the new file wpa_supplicant.conf a few extra lines are needed:
country=GB (or whichever your country is)
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1network={
ssid=“YOUR_WIFI_NETWORK_NAME_HERE”
psk=“YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD_HERE”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
Hi,
After following your exact instructions to burn the image onto the 32G Micro SD card and created the wpa_supplicant.conf at the root level directory with my wifi network and password key. I can’t see it connect to my home wifi at all on my list of clients. I even included a couple parameter as suggested by other posters “papasierra” and modified the directory accordingly (i.e. at /) but still no luck. Could someone lead me in the right direction, please? THanks.
TV.
1 reply
Is you network hidden? I found that adding scan_ssid to the wpa_supplicant file seemed to help. For reference, here is an example wpa_supplicant.conf file:
country=XX
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
ssid=“your_real_wifi_ssid”
scan_ssid=1
psk=“your_real_password”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
Just insert your country code in place of XX.
Hope that helps.
1 reply
One more thing to add. A Pi Zero W probably would not be my first choice to use to run Home Assistant. You might find yourself wanting something with a little more power later on.
Gumbo,
Thank you for quick reply, my wifi is not hidden but I added the scan_ssid parameter per your suggestion anyway and the country code is US, still I get no luck at all. For now I just want to get a feel of it with Hassbian on my Pi Zero W but may upgrade to full size Rasberry Pi later.
TV.
2 replies
About the parameter “ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev”
I don’t see such a directory structure in the SD card “boot” volume at all but just “/overlay”. Unless they are file systems that get mount later while the system is boot up .
TV.
That’s basically correct. There will be two partitions when you boot the card. There will be a fat partition and an ext4 partition. The fat partition is the one Windows can see. The ext4 will contain the files used by Linux including the wpa_supplicant file.
hello everyone i followed the instruction and got to connect my device to the network and i see the device online and write the commands in the shell and i go to the ip of my machine and nothing work i tried the url, the ip with port 8123 please help friend in need
thank you alot,
Unfortunately I’m not sure how long it was installing on my Pi Zero W, but when it completed, it looks like it automatically rebooted.
I run the command htop from the console window to see/view what is going on, and the top process was usually the homeassis user id, and in my case the last thing in the console window running was
/srv/homeassistant/bin/python -m pip install --quiet hass-nabucasa==0.13 --upgrade …
So I knew it was still installing. Hope that helps.
1 reply
Did you installed the version mentioned in the tutorial or the latest?
I ran all the steps. When htop CPU indicated that installation was over I ran “sudo systemctl” and it displayed that [email protected] was loaded but failed. Any idea of where to look for clues on why? journalctl doesn’t give any clue.
pi@hassbian:~ $ systemctl -l status [email protected]
● [email protected] - Home Assistant for homeassistant
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]; enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2020-11-17 16:30:41 UTC; 7min ago
Process: 919 ExecStart=/srv/homeassistant/bin/hass (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
Main PID: 919 (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
true, but you can use a Zero for some testing purpose… 
I do some tests sometimes on a zero.
Thank you for this topic. I want to install HomeAssistant on a “Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W” for testing. As Hassbian is no longer alive (R.I.P Hassbian - Home Assistant), what would be the best way to do similar thing nowadays?
I guess one way could be to install " Raspberry Pi OS Lite 32bit" and then do the trick by installing the following:
sudo systemctl enable install_homeassistant.service
sudo systemctl start install_homeassistant.service
Would this be the preferable method? Or is there an more elegant way?
Thank you very much in advance 
May I ask how this actually runs for people? That is not a lot of power. It might be interesting for HA in a car or something along those lines though.
I’m trying to do this on my Pi02W right now, using rpi3 64 bit image. I’m hoping it has enough juice to run raspbian desktop on top of Home assistant, I hope to use it in the car, just run home assistant app on android head unit and connect to the pi, I hope this turns out like a real fake dual os
You could try the current OS version, but I doubt the pi zero will have enough grunt.
HA Core 2022.11.3 (the latest at the time of this post) works on the Pi Zero. It’s relatively slow and probably not really usable beyond a proof of concept scenario. And that’s HA Core, the version of HA with the least overhead. The Docker and supervisor versions have a lot more overhead, they would probably be close to unusable on a PiZero.
It’s also worth mentioning that installation of HA Core onto a Pi Zero is pretty involved. There are packages required that are currently not mentioned in the official docs (rustc, cargo, libatlas, etc). And due to the lack of 32bit ARMv6 wheels for some of the Python packages, they have to be rebuild, which takes a long time (up to 20 hours).
I use the Pi Zero with HA for development work. I would not recommend it as general purpose HA hardware.
After waiting for more then a hour I stil receive the message “Connection Refused”. Can access the RPI via Putty. I’m using an USB Network adapter (so no Wifi)
Not recommended. Now you can see why.
Unfortunately the card is not recognized by a MAC computer …
Are there any procedures, to initialize the process on a MAC too ?