Home Assistant on Rock pi 4

Hardware
11

Did you have any output on serial or HDMI?

12

Did you get it to work on your c+? I recently picked one up aswell.

@citruz I haven’t tried installing it yet, has any modifications been made since?

13

No, nothing has been changed in the meantime.
If you can provide debug logs, I am happy to assist with making it work.

I am a bit confused though. Is OKdo Rock the same as Radxa’s RockPi? It looks like that since they are linking to the Radxa site for downloading an OS image :thinking:

14

@citruz Went through the install, added a few stuff and it seems to work as intended so far! Will let you know if any hickups occur, thanks for your contribution! :100:

2 Likes
15

Awesome! I will add a list of supported devices to the GitHub repo. Looks like it is compatible with more rk3399 boards than I thought.

16

Hello,

I don’t know if this can help, I was using a rockpi to do it :

17

Hi! I tried for some time and decided to send it back and got a RaspPi 4B. Since I had HA running on a RaspPi 3B I was able to transfer all data via backup to the RaspPi 4. That suited me best….

18

Super. Thanks for the image file.

I am a bit new in this sphere and was trying to install with an installation guide to a “normal” Raspberry Pi, it didnt work. I am curious to why it did not work and what you had to do, in laymans terms, to get a working installation image?

19

Hey, Im trying to edit the config.txt file for an add-on.
I can’t seem to find it on SD card after flashing the image.
Any idea how I can do this?

20

Not sure if I follow. Did you try to flash the image to a Raspberry Pi or did you follow instructions which are meant for a Raspberry Pi but flash to a Rock Pi?
I assume the latter. Which steps did you do exactly? What does not work?

21

There is no config.txt, only haos-config.txt. But currently there is nothing to configure there.
What you want to do?

22

I am trying to set up Raspbee 2 HAT unit [RaspBee II Overview].

This requires putting in two lines of code in /boot/config.txt to disable bluetooth on the GPIO to make way for the Raspbee 2.

enable_uart=1
dtoverlay=disable-bt

I have seen the haos-config.txt file and tried to put the code there…doesnt seem to work. Are these the same config files or is haos-config something else?

23

Hello, didnt see there were two answers here.

I flashed your image for Rock 4 SE onto a SD card - and then inserted it in the SD slot of the Rock 4.
Home Assistant works perfectly.

Then as I described earlier, I am supposed to edit /boot/config.txt in relation to a configuration of Raspbee 2 Zigbee controller…but I can not find this file on the SD card with your Home Assistant.

24

These instructions are for a Raspberry Pi specifically and can’t be applied like that to another board. Do you know whether the Raspbee 2 is compatible with Rock Pi?
I could try to provide you with similar devicetree overlays but it seems like the module requires additional kernel drivers and other software which will be hard to get into the image. Is the Raspbee 2 supported by HAOS?

25

Raspbee 2 is supported by HAOS, doesnt seem to require much tinkering to work with a normal Pi.

Rock Pi is not on the official Raspbee 2, but I got an email from Raspbee support that with the correct configuration it should work, but they cannot dig into it. They sent me this link for innstall guide / configuration:

I picked up this qoute from another message board regarding Home Assistant + Rock Pi:

“Probably you know Rock Pi 4 doesn’t work out-of-box with HATs talk on RX/TX, actually neither Raspberry Pi 3. They have different problem but all have the same symptoms, RX/TX are occupied by other functions, on Raspberry Pi 3 it’s the Bluetooth, on Rock Pi 4 it’s the FIQ debugger.”

Was wondering if the Rock Pi needs an overlay to “unoccupy” the RX/TX…but not the same as a normal Pi…FIQ debugger???

26

Reply above…:slight_smile:

27

I think they are referring to pin 8 and 10 which are by default mapped as serial2 and used as the main serial output. It should be possible to create an overlay which undoes that and makes the pins available for the Raspbee.
Maybe it is even enough to modify the kernel commandline (cmdline.txt) and remove both of these arguments:

earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xff1a0000 console=ttyS2,115200n8

Then, the kernel would not occupy the serial port anymore and that may be enough. But that is hard for me to verify without the hardware.

28

Ok, I will try that.

I couldnt wait and bought the USB version of Raspbee → Conbee. That one works without trouble.
After reading some threads about zigbee controllers on pi, many people recommended using the USB version with an extionsion chord to get som distance from the Pi to minimize radio interference. So maybe this was all for nothing anyway :slight_smile:

But for curiosity I will try your proposal. Thank you for the HA port and for the help.

What are your plans for the HA-ROCK port, do you intend to update it alongside HA updates?

29

Yeah, connecting it via USB sounds much more convenient.

But for curiosity I will try your proposal. Thank you for the HA port and for the help.

Cool, I am also curious to know if this works.

What are your plans for the HA-ROCK port, do you intend to update it alongside HA updates?

Yes I plan stay up to date with new HAOS versions. As soon as it is more mature and has a decent user base, I would definitely like to merge it into upstream but I am not sure what the HAOS folks think about that and what their requirements for upstreaming are.

30

I just got a Rock 4C+ as well and tried the SD-card only way (there is no SSD capability on the 4C+).

I managed to boot just fine. Even restoring a full backup from a VM-version of HA which I ran before getting the ROCK worked perfectly. Below however are three issues bugging me:

  1. WIFI not working
    Under System->Network there is no WIFI option. On Github WIFI is listed as being supported.
    (I am well aware that using LAN is superior, yet I would like this to work)

I ran dmesg in VSCode terminal and found the following suspicious entries:

[ 6.991541] brcmfmac mmc2:0001:1: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.radxa,rock-4c-plus.bin failed with error -2
[ 9.867500] ieee80211 phy0: brcmf_bus_started: failed: -110
[ 9.873962] ieee80211 phy0: brcmf_attach: dongle is not responding: err=-110

Could it be that some kernel parameter is required to disable power-saving?

  1. No CPU-Temp
    Apparently the CPU-temperature cannot be read out. The sensor is not created in system monitor. There is also no thermal_zone* under /sys/class/thermal. Any way to fix this?

  2. The LEDs cannot (easily) be disabled.
    Please see this thread: Disable LEDs on Rock Pi - #2 by Elarion245
    It would be very nice to add some flags to /boot/haos-config.txt which enable/disable the various LEDs (just as is possible for Raspberry via the config.txt)