Cannot install Home Assistant without ethernet on Raspberry Pi4

[Alomor]

Unfortunately I do not physical access to my router so I can’t connect the Pi4 via Ethernet to install Home Assistant OS. I spent a day searching for guides to install it through wifi but none of them worked. Here is what I tried:

1. placing a wpa_supplicant.conf file in the main directory of the SD card (after writing it with balena etcher) with this text:
   network={
   ssid=“ssid of your wifi”
   #psk=“your wifi password”
   I pugged the SD card into the Pi, gave it power but after ~30 minutes I still can’t find the Pi on my network

2. The two methods described here: Home Assistant Installation Guide 2021 - Tech Tech & More Tech , creating a “config” and a “network” folder inside the boot folder of the SD, and placing a “my-network” file inside, but still no luck

3. I tried giving the Pi an ethernet connection using the shared connection feature of Windows11. My desktop pc is connected via wifi and i connected the Pi to my pc using an ethernet cable. I can confirm that the shared connection is working (because I tried it with my laptop) but I still can’t find the Pi on my network…

4. I tried burning the SD card with Raspberry Pi Imager, using the shortcut ctrl+shift+X to set up my wifi ssid and password before burning the SD, but still no luck

I don’t know what to do… I know it is possible to install Home Assistant OS without Ethernet but none of the method worked for me… Maybe some syntax errors in the wpa_supplicant.conf or my-network files? Or maybe my router is giving trouble (it is a DVA-5592)? I installed Raspbian and made it connect automatically to my wifi at first boot with no problems using Raspberry Pi Imager…

[Stiltjack]

I used the instructions here (though some time ago now):

Setting up Home Assistant on the Raspberry Pi

The bit about setting up wi-fi is about halfway down the page.

[Alomor]

I already tried this method… But I can retry… Just to make sure I understand correctly: after creating the folders and the “my-network” files inside the SD card, I put the SD card into the raspberry, power it on, and then wait few minutes… After that I could be able to reach the raspberry at homeassistant.local:8123. Am I right?
Also, on the configuration page of my router I see that the wifi password mode is WPA2-PSK. Do I need to change “wpa-psk” with “wpa2-psk” inside the “my-network” file?

[nathanBob (Nathan)]

Hi, I would like to know if you solve your problem, i’m facing the same kind of problem since my ethernet is brocken on the pi…
I will be glad to have your solution if it exist…

[zsoltn]

I went through the same frustration (and ended up in this thread). After some digging, I found the solution based on the official documentation:

home-assistant/operating-system/blob/bd3cae5300092b9045378939c2de5385d1de3f1a/Documentation/configuration.md

and this thread:

How to access config.txt in Hassio?

Access config.txt on the HassOS FAT boot partition (Pi3b or Pi3B+) HassOS uses a completely different partition layout and format than the normal Raspberry Pi (Raspbian / Pi-OS) schema, with eight partitions rather than two. The first of these partitions (sd[x]1) is the equivalent of the Raspbian/Pi-OS boot partition, normally readable on Windows, Mac & Linux machines. But, when a HassOS format SD card/USB adaptor is inserted, partition one does not auto mount and it is therefore not easy to f…

Steps, assuming you use some Linux distro:

1. install HA with the raspberry PI installer
2. mount your boot partition (you can find it using lsblk), e.g.sudo mount /dev/sda1 /home/username/rpi-disk1/
3. create config folder sudo mkdir -p /home/username/rpi-disk1/CONFIG/network
4. create my-network file sudo nano /home/username/rpi-disk1/CONFIG/network/my-network with content:

[connection]
id=my-network
uuid=<RANDOM-UUID>
type=802-11-wireless

[802-11-wireless]
mode=infrastructure
ssid=<WIFI-SSID>

[802-11-wireless-security]
auth-alg=open
key-mgmt=wpa-psk
psk=<WIFI-PASSWORD>

[ipv4]
method=auto

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
method=auto

5. unmount partition: sudo umount /home/username/rpi-disk1, and unmount the SD card
6. after starting your PI, you will be able to access your HA server within 5 minutes

[yorb (Darwin)]

Thanks for this!

For anyone else on a Mac, step 2 is a little more complicated:

• You can use diskutil list instead of lsblk to find the partition (you’re looking for the first partition of 8, e.g. /dev/disk4s1)
• You need to specify MS-DOS as the filesystem type, like this: sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk4s1 ...

I spent forever going down a rabbit hole to get EXT4 partitions to mount, only to discover that the HA boot partition is just FAT, smh. You may be able to use the vfat type as well, but msdos worked fine for me.