Anyone Using Waveshare IO Board, POE and Case for Raspberry Pi CM5 for Home Assistant

Installation
1

Hi, was wondering if anyone had tried running Home Assistamt on a Raspberry Pi CM5 mounted on the Waveshare IO board. The board has provisions for a NVME M.2 SSD, POE, WiFi antenna and case that can be wall mounted.

Only issue may be that the metal case could block an internal ZWave antenna, but may also help with interference.

2

Just ordered one specs look promising. got to be better than those unreliable home assistant yellow POE rev3s

3

I originally purchased a CM5 8/32 with wifi to change from a CM4 to CM5 in my Home Assistant Yellow, it got a lot hotter than I was comfortable with (no fan, just a heat sink).

I got a Waveshare case and IO board to try with the CM5, but it when you put the CM5 with the heatsink you can not put the case cover on (not enough room for the fan with a heatsink installed. I have just got the waveshare heat sink with a smaller fan installed to put in but haven’t had time to try it yet.

Another possible option would be to mount the fan on the outside of the case.

Waveshare suggested to not use a heatsink and use just the supplied fan.

4

Hello!
I ordered CM5 today along with Waveshare CM5 PoE BASE A (https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/CM5_PoE_BASE_A).
While I am waiting for my delivery, I am trying to find any information regarding the installation and configuration of Home Assistant on this kit. Unfortunately, there is not much information (or rather, it is completely absent), so I decided to ask the community for help on this forum.
As far as I understand, I will need to install the Home Assistant OS (Yellow) image on this kit?

5

I ended up in the hospital and have not back to it since getting out.

I see to options:

  1. Keep the HA Yellow and see if I can use pwm from the header.
  2. Scrap the suppied fan that came with the CM5_PoE_BASE_A and install a cm pi fan and heatsink inside the box.
  3. Move the waveshare fan outside the box, design a box to go around it, then 3D print it in the same foot print as the box.

I am leaning towards option 3. It wouldn’t take long for me to do. Just have to pour some concrete before we get a hurricane (live in Florida), change the oil in my truck and generators. I will upload the 3mf and stl files if I go that way to MakersWorld dot com.

6

could you elaborate what the problem is with the Yellow? I just ordered one, and I am not aware of issues? Still waiting for delivery, so I could cancel the order if there really is a structural problem present

7

The CM5 seemed to be running hotter than I like. The Yellow that I have does not have a fan plug that I can plug a fan into (PWM controlled). I would like to have active cooling on the RPi.

I also had problems getting it setup per the instructions to swap from CM4 to CM5, this may not be a problem with a new setup.

The only issue I have with the CM4 that I still using is the time required to update the ESPHome modules that I use.

8

what temps are you seeing? I think the closed case is also not helping, should at least have had some vent holes on top

You mean compiling ESP firmware, yeah Pi is pretty underpowered for such workloads. CM5 should be a little faster, but hotter as you mention so throttling could be at play also

@netwave still curious about the reliability issues you mention, I can’t really find hardware problems searching the internet

9

Hey all, came across this post as I’ve been working to setup my Waveshare CM5 PoE Base A board. I had similar questions to those posting here (e.g., needed a good alternative to the older [deprecated] HA hardware, needed [wanted] PoE, and the wall mount is a nice bonus).

This is my first post on the forum (so apologies for lack of any etiquette), and I haven’t got to PoE yet but I can help with my fan/cooling solutions so far.

I also ordered the Waveshare CM5 Dedicated All-in-one 3007 Cooling Fan, which is a heat sink and PWM fan which installed “OK” but lacked good/clear instructions. If you’re building your own hardware, you should be able to figure it out though.

I removed the case fan (pre-installed) and loaded HAOS, which is another activity without much cohesive guidance/documentation. After poking around forums and finding some good resources from Jeff Geerling (although still not fully clear), I was able to boot the board as a mass storage device Mac (using Homebrew and libusb) and install HAOS via the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Got HA up and running but that PWM fan was not running!

“Fan Control” documentation is available on the Waveshare wiki, but again lacking context. This is assuming you have a standard version of Rpi OS or some more “accessible” version of linux. So, some more configuration is needed!

After poking around more posts on “where the config.txt file is on HAOS,” here’s what worked for me:

  1. You (probably) need host-based SSH. I say probably because this is how I did it and don’t know if the SSH add-on will be sufficient. Home Assistant Operating System configuration | Home Assistant Developer Docs
  2. Get your fan configuration (i.e., dtparam=fan_temp0…) setup and ready to copy/paste see the Waveshare wiki.
  3. SSH into your HA host.
  4. Use the Vi Text Editor (was installed with HAOS) to modify the config.txt file: vi /mnt/boot/config.txt
  5. Copy/paste your config params.
  6. Save those changes.
  7. Reboot your HA host: ha host reboot

My CPU is idling around 32 C based on my configs below (altered from wiki baseline). You can check you CPU temp from the HA CLI using: cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

I inserted the below config block in the config.txt file:

#Added for CPU fan control on the Waveshare CM5 PoE Base A board
dtparam=fan_temp0=25000,fan_temp0_hyst=2000,fan_temp0_speed=75
dtparam=fan_temp1=35000,fan_temp1_hyst=3000,fan_temp1_speed=150
dtparam=fan_temp2=45000,fan_temp2_hyst=4000,fan_temp2_speed=200
dtparam=fan_temp3=55000,fan_temp3_hyst=5000,fan_temp3_speed=255

Good luck!!

10

I have for the most part given up on using a Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant and will be changing over to a Mini PC. A mini can be had for about $200 or less and should be a lot faster with ssd, hdmi, wifi, cooling and more cores.