HA yellow with RPI 5 installation seemed usb cable problem, but was rpiboot problem

Installation
1

After careful consideration I bought home assistant yellow, because it was said it is easy to install. Far from it, I cannot even get it to power up, lol.
Here is my journey and the part I solved, in case someone can help me and someone else can benefit from what I have learned.

  1. Can you use USB A to USB C cable?* I still don’t know…
  2. When it says this in the instructions
    "1. On the Yellow board, press and hold the recovery button.
  3. Power up the board."
    It means hold down the button, and connect the power cable**
  4. When I run the riboot, all it says is "waiting for BCM2835… What on earth does this mean?

*The HA yellow came with Pi module 5. Is using usb C cable to only option of installing the software? I only have cables where one end is USB A and one is usb C. The yellow is not powering up when I connect it (USB A to computer, and USB C to yellow)… I tried with another device, and the cable does power this device up.
Even if I buy a usb cable, I have only one usb c port on my computer - i hope it supplies power. What if it does not?
Can I use external power source same time with USB A - USB C cable to do this?

**Is there some where in the documentation the polarity of the usb jack of the HA yellow, I could not find it anywhere - so it took me a while to figure out what kind of adapter to use. When you look at the polarity picture, it seems the plus sign needs to be inside and minus on the outside

2

A computer USB A port will not have sufficient power. You have 2 options, a 12v 2A plug pack or power over Ethernet:

  • Power
    • 12 V / 2 A through barrel DC power jack (5.5 mm x 2.1 mm)
    • Ethernet: PoE+ IEEE 802.3at-2009 Class 3 or 4 (selectable via jumper)
3

Thanks very much for the answer. I managed to power it up with the power adapter. But seems that the rpiboot is not doing anything…it just says waiting for BMC2835… and the led light remains red.
Possible answer: I need to check that the cable supports data transfer. I assumed this was the norm (since firewire cables always do), but based on googling it seems not to be the case. Again, I wish there were another way to install the software than with usb c cable.

4

Are you following these instructions?

5

Yes, these very ones. My hypothesis of the problem is that the usb cable I sued does not support data. I will try to figure if this is the case.

6

Yeah set jumper JP1 to USB then make sure your cable supports use 2.0.

7

Thanks! I checked the JP1 already and it was right. I now found a usb C to C cable from my cable stack that supports data.

However, when I try to start the rpiboot, the rpibootwindow quickly appears and then disappears. I cannot find or see the rpiboot app on my open apps (on windows pc), or running any where. (the first time, before I had the right usb cable, the rpiboot app opened fine)

8

Thank you for your williness to help @tom_l . This is how it was solved: my friend with linux computer was able to trouble shoot the rpiboot (not possible with windows computer) and added the following command “sudo ./rpiboot -d /home/[username]/usbboot/mass-storage-gadget64”. After this the rpiboot succeeded, everything went smooth and I am a very happy user of HA yellow! (and there was nothing wrong with HA, instead with the rpiboot).