Hi,
After receiving a doom-laden email yesterday suggesting customs charges and UK VAT (Brexit - the gift they keeps giving ), my Home Assistant Yellow kit arrived unexpectedly TODAY!
Despite lots of great features recently added to HASS making the migration from a RPi4 to Yellow fine, the process was far from seamless, so thought a few learning points might help others.
TL;DR
- Crowd Supply are delivering HASS Yellow hardware right now. (Nice case and PCB design
)
- The Zigbee migration tool is great, but is based on having access to both old and new radio hardware at the same time to directly transfer settings. A full HASS OS backup might also work.
- Several integrations don’t automatically update IPv4 addresses, even if they were detected when first installed (e.g. MQTT)
- Full backup, and restore seems to loose device location information.
- Set aside a few hours for testing and reconfiguration - the migration works, but with more complex homes, you will need time.
A real migration
My migration process was as you’d expect:
- Create a full backup, and save locally on a client machine.
- (Try the new Zigbee hardware migration tool - more on that later)
- Swap Z-Wave stick over to the new kit
- First boot, restore backup
- Lots of HASS OS and software upgrades
- Go through all the missing entities, and test all devices
New hardware; New IPv4 address
mDNS hides a lot - typing “homeassistant.local” into a browser quickly resolves an IP address, and connects to the new hardware. Looks seamless to the browser, but as the hardware has changed, your router has allocated a new IP address (likely both IPv4 and IPv6) and you likely have broken configuration that needs intervention.
Here are the settings that needed manual change for me (MQTT):
- MQTT Add-In Mosquitto broker - new IPv4 address
- MQTT client devices (Tasmota/ Sonoff/ Shelly/ Octoprint) need manual updates to find the IPv4 of the broker as most config is done via IPv4 and not hostname + mDNS.
- Note - the Tasmota Integration has a great “VISIT >” button to go straight to the device web interface to change the broker IPv4 address.
- Note - Last I checked, HASS doesn’t work with IPv6 addresses, so be careful with hostnames as some routers will prefer IPv6 and break MQTT without clear error messages.
- MQTT Integration - this surprised me as it doesn’t update, and needs a manual change to the IPv4 broker address (even through it was automagically detected when first installed)
- Tasmota Integration - just worked once the MQTT Integration could connect to the broker again
Zigbee - migration doesn’t work the way I expected (but later recovered…)
The must useful feature in 2022.09 was the addition of a process to transfer Zigbee network keys and even the MAC address (IEEE address) from an old radio to a replacement, removing the need to reset and re-pair all devices to a new coordinator.
Whilst my existing Zigbee radio (a Sonoff 3.0 USB stick) would have worked connected to Yellow, migrating to the new SilLabs “SkyConnect” radio on the PCB seemed a great idea.
If you start the migration tool on the OLD hardware, it will:
- backup the OLD stick settings (good!)
- wipe the old stick back to factory settings (err…)
- Ask for the NEW stick to be inserted (darn, blast, …)
Of course, the new stick is soldered to the PCB of the Yellow so can’'t be connected to the OLD hardware causing much swearing (happy ending later).
The migration process looks to be designed based on this workflow:
- Create a full backup and remove the old Zigbee stick
- Restore the backup on new hardware, and connect the old Zigbee Stick
- Run the Zigbee migration tool with both OLD and NEW radio sticks accessible.
Thankfully, Full HASS backup/ restore must save Zigbee radio settings, so the prematurely wiped Sonoff Zigbee radio settings were able to be restored WITHOUT having to re-pair all devices.
- Create a full HASS OS backup
- Restore the full backup on the new hardware
- Upgrade all OS and HASS versions (took several steps on my Yellow)
- Delete the restored Zigbee integration (didn’t work as my error erased the old radio back to factory settings)
- Install a “new” Zigbee integration - this seemed to trigger the migration tool, and the on-board SilLabs Zigbee radio was configured with the MAC and keys from the old Sonoff device. Phew!
N.B. The location of the USB radio is not automatically configured - I had to try a few variations of/dev/tty/AMA1
until it was detected (hint - if you are asked for radio type, the path is WRONG)
Although this worked for me, I can’t reproduce the once-only process to properly document it and tell you how to trigger the migration tool from a backup properly - sorry!
Location, location, location
The full HASS backup and restore worked, but was not seamless. The biggest omission found was whilst locations themselves transferred over, devices/ entities such as Zigbee, MQTT, Z-Wave, etc were created WITHOUT location details.
For most entities this was easily fixable (e.g. Z-Wave, MQTT have location in their device config), but perhaps due to my mis-understanding of the Zigbee migration process, I ended up with several identical IKEA 5-button remotes, and Sonoff TH01 temp sensors.
Strangely, the device IDs seemed to be retained meaning those entities with automations could be traced as they were still linked with hints available in properties.
Remote controls are easy to identify - open the Logbook and press a button to see the event.
Telling 4x identical Sonoff TH01 Zigbee temp sensors apart became a challenge:
- All properties were identical (apart from current temp and battery)
- Several devices were relatively inaccessible
- The “Identifybutton” device property usefully flashes a small red LED on the device, BUT this can take over a minute for the device to wake up and poll.
Real patience is needed when using Zigbee “Identifybutton” with battery devices. Don’t be tempted to try another device, as you will end up with two flashing at the same time!
Conclusion
The HASS Yellow is a nice piece of hardware with a well designed case. The NabuCasa team has clearly been migration their own installations to Yellow, as features like the Zigbee migration tool are great (when you know how they are designed…) and very helpful.
I’m not seeing much difference from a RPi4 8Gb and Yellow with a RPi CM4 (2Gb of RAM, no Bluetooh, no WLAN) but:
- Adding a M.2 SSD for storage and access speed will help in the future.
- A cheap Bluetooth USB interface adds back what the kit CM4 lacks.
- The new SilLabs “SkyConnect” radio will support both Zigbee and Thread will be very useful.
- A 90-degree USB adaptor from Amazon works well with a Z-Wave USB stick, to have the radio stick upwards for maximum range.
- The UK kit comes with a UK 12V 2A PSU, but as I misunderstood, also ordered a separate PSU which is a UK 12V 3A unit.
Thanks to all who have worked to bring this hardware and software to market -
If this helps, this post!