i have an old Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2 and wanted to install Home Assistant on it. I know it will be very slow but I only want to use it for one task (automate Tados with Aqara Windows Sensors).
I have tried 3 different SD Cards but with all cards I can’t flash the image (tried with Terminal on Mac, Raspberry Pi Imager & Balena Etcher). I get the same error everytime: “The connected media could not be read by this computer.”
First I thought my Mac, Adapter or the cards are not okay, but I have tried another Image (directly from Raspberry Pi Imager) and it worked.
I got home-assistant running on my Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2 quiet well. I want to leave this documentation for you and maybe others who struggle as I did.
I didn’t try the home assistant operating system method, because I use the raspberry pi for other server tasks as well. The container method did not work. I think this is because it was build for another version of the arm cpu architecture. I received cpu instruction related errors.
But I managed to install the core mostly following the official manual. However, there have been troubles compiling orjson and cryptography. In the case of orjson, I’ve read that the arm architecture is unsopported and there have been linker errors.
It worked anyway following comment #129 in this thread.
Further, I wrote a file requirements.txt and listed these two very versions
Another hint: The raspberry pi model b rev 2 has only 448MB RAM and if you are using Raspbian Bullseye, the size of the swap file is set to 100MB only. You should modify
/etc/dphys-swapfile
Set for example
CONF_SWAPSIZE=1000
You can also consider to store the swapfile at another location (e.g. external SSD instead of SD card).
You should use an external memory anyway if you don’t want to kill your SD card with the home assistant’s database sooner or later.