Installing HAOS on Orange Pi 5 / 5b - help needed

Installation
1

Hi all,

I’m quite new to HA and after doing some digging, I decided that I’ll go for Orange Pi platform and utilize my existing Zigbee 3.0 dongle.

I do have some confusion about which board to buy.

The 5 comes with an M.2 Nvme expansion slot which allows to install HAOS on a faster storage drive, however, that board doesn’t come with Wifi and BT capabilities - and if I want to add them, I’ll have to use the M.2 expansion slot for that.

The 5b comes with Wifi+BT but it doesn’t have the M.2 expansion slot, so I can’t connect Nvme SSD drive.

So I’m not too sure what to do, as I want the Bluetooth capabilities to add smart devices / BLE devices to HA.

Any suggestions? or maybe you can recommend on a Wifi+BT USB dongle that is known to work with linux?

2

Personally, I’d take the 5 for the nvme and add a (supported) bluetooth dongle.
That’s assuming you plan to use wired ethernet, of course.

1 Like
3

Do you happen to know which BT dongle is supported?

4

Bluetooth - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
Official supported BT

1 Like
5

Thanks you.

Can I also use the ESP-32S board as a BT device or is there a BT gateway device that can be connected to router and be used in HAOS to add many BT clients?

6

Yes you can, indeed. No need for a dongle in this configuration.

7

just to be sure, this is what I got:

image
image953×577 120 KB

8

Any ESP32 will do (don’t know if it’s just for illustration, but that one is crazy expensive :wink: )