I would argue that a full plug and play option already exists since December 2020. I have mentioned it right at the beginning of the guide. It’s called Home Assistant Blue.
It differs from your vision in that…
It’s an Odroid N2 instead of a Pi 4B.
It uses eMMC instead of an SSD.
The Odroid N2 is a powerful SBC with a decent passive cooler and it easily beats the Pi 4 in performance. It has no WLAN but I guess you will not use the WLAN of the Pi anyway (metal casing? USB3 interference?). Besides you can always use a WLAN USB dongle.
The eMMC would rather be my concern. It’s more like SD than SSD. But from what I read transfer rates are still impressive (100 to 150 MB/s compared to 140 to 250 of Pi 4B with SSD). It also looks as if modern eMMC has wear leveling comparable to SSDs. So your Blue won’t burn out its “disk” with its constant history writes.
And it all comes ready to boot up and to import your snapshot.
I was able to boot from a simple cheap flashdisk but that led to corrupted installation.
Right now, I am trying the recommended Startech cable and bought 120GB SanDisk SSD. Screen goes dark when the disk is connected but monitor says it has a signal, the RPi is on net as ping works but nothing happen on the screen. Any ideas?
I solved the problem. For me, only 64bit version of 5.12 flashed by balena etcher worked. The 32bit led to dark screen.
Currently booting from SSD but honestly, it’s not as fast as I would expect. The booting part during which you see a log of booting HA is superfast but unmounting the HS when triggering “reboot host” from a supervisor is quite slow, maybe even slower than before from SD card. Some fine tuning probably necessary.
Can anyone confirm if they were able to boot the SSD from USB3 using the 32 bit image. I was told by the developer that the latest version of the 32 bit should boot? I got the same dark screen as @Vahaldor.
I did go with 64 bit. I have issues updating the OS above 5.4. The PI freezes after several hours to a few days. Before I moved to SSD I had 5.8 installed on the SD as 32 bit. Just trying different things to see if I can fix my freeze issue.
The freezing, even in the same periods as you have, was the issue that forced me to try some different setups. I moved my DB to MariaDB on my NAS. No change. Now, I am trying moving to SSD. I am running RPi4 model B with 4GB. Until now with SanDisk 32GB Extreme Pro. Since today, I’ve moved to SanDisk SSD with the recommended cable in the #1 post.
I have the StarTech cable (tried both 3.0 & 3.1) no difference. 5.4 never froze. Anything above this does. Lots of Github issues with this problem (1119 for example). Doesn’t seem to be a reason why for some there is no issue and with the identical controller and SSD there is. I keep experimenting with different configurations to see if it solves the issue. Make sure you take daily snapshots so you can easily restore if you have an issue.
Thank you for your great reply !! Will order the “Blue” for $160/- …will be in the wait list for a few months which adds to the thrill of expectations.
I measured my Home Assistant Pi 4 4GB in the Argon One M.2 case with a 240GB WD Green.
When booting it sometimes reaches 5W and in normal use it is at 3,5W to 4W.
Fresh installation. Image 5.9 or 5.10. I have a “Preparing Home Assistant” screen and something like this every time in log.
“21-03-12 09:37:04 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retry in 30sec
21-03-12 09:37:34 INFO (SyncWorker_0) [supervisor.docker.interface] Updating image homeassistant/raspberrypi4-64-homeassistant:landingpage to homeassistant/raspberrypi4-64-homeassistant:2021.3.3
21-03-12 09:37:34 INFO (SyncWorker_0) [supervisor.docker.interface] Downloading docker image homeassistant/raspberrypi4-64-homeassistant with tag 2021.3.3.
21-03-12 09:37:49 ERROR (SyncWorker_0) [supervisor.docker.interface] Can’t install homeassistant/raspberrypi4-64-homeassistant:2021.3.3 -> 500 Server Error for http+docker://localhost/v1.40/images/create?tag=2021.3.3&fromImage=homeassistant%2Fraspberrypi4-64-homeassistant: Internal Server Error (“Get “https://registry-1.docker.io/v2/”: net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)”).
21-03-12 09:37:49 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retry in 30sec”
You may want to try an older 64bit image. The biggest issue people had booting is the controller. Did you look at the list of the supposedly working ones?
I have zero issues with 5.4. Also verify your Pi 4 firmware version. Excellent directions on doing this in the guide above.
My RPi eeprom is updated according to guide above. I booted it but my issue with freezing continues, it freezed the first night. I made an instance in VM now and will run both together and will cut some integrations step by step on the rpi. I am suspicious whether some resident automations triggered every second looking for a state change are not part of the problem.
