FIXED - Home Assistant Yellow - new installation, failing at setup

SHL-Kelso · November 4, 2024, 11:33am

Newbie Hine Assitant user here, and decided to start my first experience with a Home Assistant Yellow build, but am failing at the first hurdle.

I followed the assembly/installation instructions

I built my unit, using a POE CM4, and a 256gb M2 SSD. I flashed the Pi OS image and followed the initial setup, but never saw any signs of the flashing yellow LED. After a couple of hours I tried power cycling the device and then got a solid red LED and a rapid flashing green LED with 1 second pause before repeat flashing (boot load failure?).

I’ve tried the process using RPIBoot too, and this did not work either - the process failed when it could not find certain files like config.txt, and the app shuts down soon after. See attached photo showing screen just before app closes.

So I’m stuck with hardware that I currently cannot configure successfully to even start the process of setting up.

Can anyone offer any tips or tricks to sort this?

Nick4 · November 4, 2024, 11:40am

Hi Neil, welcome to the forum!

Which instructions did you follow?
I think you don’t need PI OS at all…

SHL-Kelso · November 4, 2024, 11:48am

Hi Nick4, thanks for responding.

I followed the build and setup of the Home Assistant Yellow POE CM4+NVME instructions from the website…

I’m now back at the point where if I power up I just have solid green and red LED

Nick4 · November 4, 2024, 12:01pm

Howcome you used PI OS?!?

SHL-Kelso · November 4, 2024, 12:27pm

Sorry, thats my description causing the confusion - I followed the instructions exactly as listed in the Home Assistant Installation Guide for installing the software by followng the links to use Raspberry Pi Imager (links in copied text removed)…

Step 1

Installing the Raspberry Pi Imager

Install the Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer as described under xxx
If your platform doesn’t support the Raspberry Pi Imager, you can use another imager (e.g. balenaEtcher) and flash the Home Assistant OS Installer for Yellow directly from GitHub releases.
If you are using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) that already has software on it, this procedure does not work. Ignore this and the following steps.
- Instead, follow the procedure Option 2: Reinstall Home Assistant OS using rpiboot
- The reason is that by default, the CM4 tries to boot from the internal eMMC before booting from the USB flash drive.

When the intial process failed I then tried to use the RPIBoot option instead, which failed as shown in my first post.

Nick4 · November 4, 2024, 12:43pm

AFAIK: the system didn’t have anything installed when you bought it.
In that case, it’s just a matter of using the HAOS installer image from GH.

SHL-Kelso · November 4, 2024, 4:19pm

Yeah, I get that, but for some reason the HAOS image is not writing/installing over to the Yellow as described in the documentation. Will order a couple of new USB drives and try again just to rule out any issues there.

Nick4 · November 4, 2024, 8:18pm

Which software are you using to write the image, on which OS?
Before writhing the image, is you USB drive showing it’s full capacity in 1 partition?

SHL-Kelso · November 10, 2024, 1:22pm

Just to follow up, got a new USB drive but also finally realised how to properly use the RPI Imager software to write the correct HAOS image to the drive (sorry Nick4, as a complete beginner with RPi and Home Assistant I was not fully understanding your advice.

So now all is up and running and I’m slowly adding/testing integrations before I start to configure any automation between systems.

On the back of success here I’ve also successfully set up a separate RPi5 with dedicated Solar Assistant OS to link to my solar PV/battery inverter in readiness to help automate my EV and home battery charging with ToU energy tariff through HA.