ESPHome crashes HA on flashing - cannot reach node either

[GobblerGuy]

I found that my RPi3b+ could not handle ESPhome properly until I increased the swap file size.

@JZhass

Increasing the swapfile size (especially on a USB SSD attached to my test RPi 3B) is pretty typical when trying to get a Linux box to perform and generally be more stable…

After hanging around on this GitHub issue and watching the progress, I believe there’s a simple and repeatable way to increase the swapfile size.

This solution will survive reboots and upgrades. You also never have to actually open the shell itself.

Please keep in mind that this is strictly for HA OS not Raspberry Pi OS aka Raspbian which has plenty of instructions of how to create and manage swap space.

The simple steps:

• Have a functional HA OS box
• Enable “Advanced Mode” for the user profile in HA (click on the user on the bottom left navigation bar in HA and scroll down). If you don’t do this, you will not be able to see this SSH add-on. See the warning at the very bottom of add-ons which states to enable this when not seeing a full list.
• Install an add-on called “SSH & Web Terminal” — this is the UNOFFICIAL add-on. The official one will not work.
• Disable Protection Mode for the add-on
• Under the Configuration for the add-on, make sure to press the ellipsis (3 dots) on the right of the word “Options” and select “Edit in YAML”
• Change the username and password to something NOT simple because it does validate your entry against the “have I been pwned” database.
• Also under the Configuration for the add-on in YAML edit mode, replace the init_commands: [] line at the very bottom with the following and start the add-on:

init_commands:
  - if [ ! -f /backup/_swap.swap ]; then fallocate -l 2G /backup/_swap.swap && mkswap /backup/_swap.swap && chmod 0600 /backup/_swap.swap && swapon /backup/_swap.swap && echo SWAP_NEW_FILE_CREATED_USED ; elif [[ ! $(dmesg|grep _swap.swap) = *swap\ on* ]] ; then swapon /backup/_swap.swap && echo SWAP_USING_OLD_FILE ; else swapoff /backup/_swap.swap && swapon /backup/_swap.swap && echo SWAP_FINAL_ELSE_STATEMENT ; fi