Home-assistant yellow rev 1.3 PoE cannot boot from USB - CM4 without eMMC - Kingston NV2 SSD

Installation
1

Hello,

I got a PoE powered home-assistant yellow rev 1.3, and set it up with a CM4 that has no eMMC and some Kingston NV2 1TB SSD.

I can connect to the console over USB-C just fine, but I am not seeing anything on it when I power on the device.

I am trying to boot from a known to work USB thumb drive, I tried the [home-assistant installer], and all I can see is both the red and green LED turn on. After some time, the green LED flashes three times “Generic Failure to Boot” (see raspberry pi docs), and turns off. When I try to boot from the NixOS aarch64 installer, the green LED seems to stay on.

Does anyone know what I might be missing?

home-assistant installer: github/NabuCasa/buildroot-installer/releases/tag/green-installer-20240410

Note: I can only make two links as a new user…

2

I am realizing that my usual PC assumptions don’t hold here.

I tried to flash the USB drive using rpi-imager, to make sure things are setup as they should, but I am not seeing any improvement, and the console is still desperately empty.

3

Support has been following-up with me, and here is my current status:

  1. Connect the yellow to my computer using a known to work Apple-made USB-C cable ;
  2. Start rpiboot on my computer ;
  3. Move JP1 into USB position ;
  4. Press down SW3 ;
  5. Power cycle the yellow ;
  6. Wait for a few secs and release SW3 up.

Nothing happens, in particular I don’t see any new USB device getting enumerated on my computer at any point.

4

Just to close on that thread:

I was never able to get rpiboot to work, and I ended up buying an USB/NVMe adapter so that I could flash HAOS onto the NVMe drive.

I have been spoiled by x86, and I was naive to think I could install my “own” OS on the Yellow, it’s quite some custom hardware, and while it would be totally doable, preparing an appropriate kernel, boot loader and whatnot, would take more time that I am willing to invest. I am better off using a standard RaspberryPi with some recommended Zigbee dongle instead.