Home Assistant on Rock pi 4

citruz · January 29, 2023, 11:28am

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.

Hichiro · February 5, 2023, 12:22pm

Hello,

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

Dbernt · February 18, 2023, 7:32am

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….

joimaggz · February 21, 2023, 9:36pm

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?

joimaggz · February 21, 2023, 11:58pm

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?

citruz · February 22, 2023, 11:59am

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?

citruz · February 22, 2023, 12:00pm

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

joimaggz · February 22, 2023, 12:21pm

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?

joimaggz · February 22, 2023, 1:25pm

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.

citruz · February 22, 2023, 5:11pm

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?

joimaggz · February 22, 2023, 8:34pm

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:

github.com

home-assistant/addons/blob/3af0ad8a398dd6d969e98ca8a5c5e2ead754f365/deconz/DOCS.md#using-a-raspbee

# Home Assistant Add-on: deCONZ

## Installation

Follow these steps to get the add-on installed on your system:

1. Navigate in your Home Assistant frontend to **Supervisor** -> **Add-on Store**.
2. Find the "deCONZ" add-on and click it.
3. Click on the "INSTALL" button.

## How to use

### Using a RaspBee

If you are using RaspBee, you may need to edit the `config.txt` file in the root
of your SD card in order for your RaspBee to be recognized and assigned a device name.

Add following to your `config.txt`:

```txt

This file has been truncated. show original

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???

joimaggz · February 22, 2023, 8:35pm

Reply above…

citruz · February 23, 2023, 9:42am

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.

joimaggz · February 23, 2023, 10:14am

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

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?

citruz · February 23, 2023, 4:50pm

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.

Elarion245 · May 19, 2023, 4:27pm

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:

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?

github.com/raspberrypi/linux

wlan freezes in raspberry pi 3/PiZeroW (Not 3B+)

opened 12:29PM - 11 Mar 16 UTC

dh-connect

Bug confirmed Waiting for external input Wifi Issue

I put the same sd card (running debian 8 jessie, kernel 4.1.19) from the raspber…ry pi 2 with usb wifi (EDIMAX EW-7811UN Wireless USB Adapter, 150 Mbit/s, IEEE802.11b/g/n) into the new raspberry pi 3 using integrated wlan. Since then the wlan freezes after while (several hours) of usage couldn't find out if it's due to havy wifi usage or not, because I haven't change the software I guess it has to do with the new hardware. When the wlan freezes the pi can't be reached any longer, neither ifdown + ifup nor restart networking service helps in this case, I have to reboot the system to get it back to work, syslog doesn't say much only this: dhcpcd[522]: wlan0: fe80::8af7:c7ff:fece:5912: expired option 25, I've tried to change these settings so far, but without improvement: sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces wireless-power off sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf at the end of the file add the following line vm.min_free_kbytes = 16384 sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt At the end of the line, add: smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N dwc_otg.dma_enable=1 dwc_otg.dma_burst_size=256

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?
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)

citruz · May 21, 2023, 5:34pm

WIFI not working

There is already another issue on GitHub by a user who noticed that Wifi doesn’t work on the latest release. I will try to look into that as soon as possible. The log line you posted is already helpful. You could try if the 20230204 release works for you, although there is no specific image for the 4C.

No CPU-Temp

I never looked into that. Does raspian or another distro support reading the temperature? If yes we could probably borrow that code.

The LEDs cannot (easily) be disabled.

It should be quite straightforward to create a device tree overlay which disables the heartbeat if this what you want. I am planning to include overlays in the next release.

In general, it would probably be better if you post these as separate issues/feature requests on GitHub so that we can keep track

Elarion245 · May 22, 2023, 4:13am

Thank you for coming back on this.

I am currently not anywhere near my Rock, so tests will need to be delayed by a couple of days.

I will open individual topics at Github. For the time being I can say the following.

For the Led:
An overlay would be great. For the time being I solved it via a great add-on (see led thread)

On the CPU Temp:
I have not tested it myself, but I remember reading that the native ubuntu server OS supports reading the cpu and gpu temps. I am running passive cooling, so some way of accessing them would be great!

Wifi:
Will test the older version.

tthenrie · February 3, 2024, 6:51pm

Hate to resurrect an old thread, but it seems to be the ONLY pertinent thread.

FYI, I downloaded the latest image (1706592026 from the above github link) for Rock4SE and burned it with Balena Etcher to a 64M emmc card and booted from the emmc with no issues, except that wifi is still not enabled.

The HA tutorial indicates that to boot from an emmc card, one has to update the firmware first. Apparently that isn’t necessary for the current Rock images.

UPDATE: I was able to get the Radxa4SE to connect to wifi after setting the wifi paramaters, including password, in the homeassistant settings on my desktop computer.

nookster · August 23, 2024, 3:39pm

How do you go about porting it? I need it working for the Rock 3C, can you advise? I’m going to try the ISO you’ve made, but I doubt it will work so if you could help point me in the right direction that would be great.

Thanks