I’m totally SOLD on HA and the infrastructure. And I LOVE using ESPHome with it for my MCU creations. Initially, I installed the HA OS on a CM4 (32gb eMMC and 8gb of RAM) seated in the standard IO carrier board and it is doing great!
Since I decided this was going to be my home automation platform, I decided to grab a HA yellow and another CM4 (same configuration) and it finally arrived today. Now I want to move it from my current install to the new hardware. So I have a couple of questions…
For one, I figure that the hardware is a bit different with the yellow carrier board. Is it different enough to do another full install from scratch of the HA OS? And if I have to do that, what is the best way to get all the hard work I did on my previous install migrated to the new hardware? I thought about taking the CM4 (with the install in its eMMC) and dropping it into the yellow. But is this a good idea?
I made a half-dozen backups and downloaded them to my Windows 11 laptop. My second thought was to do a clean install with the new hardware though, then use the most recent backup to get back to where I am now with my first installed hardware. Is this the best course of action? Are there any caveats?
Thanks for listening! As always, I look so VERY forward to your input and thoughts. This forum ROCKS and I have learned so much over the last week concerning home automation, HA, ESP32’s, etc. What a great discovery this place and platform is!!
32Gb eMMC is plenty, although I added a NVME SSD more as a test than for real requirements. The usual mix is to install HAOS on the eMMC, and your data on the SSD (which could include large Music Assistant files).
My Yellow has the OS images on eMMC, and user data (move data disk) to NVMe SSD.
It looks like newly installed devices HAOS 14 will ignore eMMC and install both OS and data on SSD to make upgrades easier (e.g. just move the SSD over).
I’m likely to upgrade from a CM4 to a CM5 eventually, and was thinking about a 32Gb eMMC + no WLAN + 4 or 8Gb RAM.
In reality my system ticks along at 1.3Gb RAM used, so a 2Mb RAM version would work fine - the small difference in cost to get 4Mb or 8Gb + eMMC disappears in the long term.
That said, (as I use a 250Gb SSD) a zero eMMC “Lite” + 2GB RAM CM4/5 would be fine for HAOS - but perhaps harder to locate, and might be less useful to re-use later for other projects.
Thanks for the info! I did run into a problem where I had a freshly formatted 250gb NVME SSD installed and tried to flash the eMMC. I followed the instructions to the letter but I never got a blinking yellow LED during the install process. Perhaps because of what you linked in your 2nd comment. Since I did not know that, I figured that the POE I was supplying did not have enough current to support the NVME also, as it is a gas hog being an older Intel model I had laying around. Anyway, figuring I could rectify that with a 12vdc 5a supply later on, I removed the NVME and the install completed as expected.
Migration from my previous install was seamless if not very speedy. I really like option to recover from a backup, which I downloaded from the first install onto my laptop. Then locating and uploading that backup worked perfectly.
I too will be moving to a CM5 based solution down the road, and I will always grab the biggest and best CM I can get only because I might use it in something else eventually, and scale back the hardware for HA as needed.
Thanks again for the suggestions and info! I certainly appreciate it and marked your first reply as the solution. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
I just read Jeff Geerling saying that the CM5 is a drop-in upgrade for most devices. It would be cool if I could swap the CM4 for the CM5 when I am ready. I am noticing some slow-downs with the Yellow, and some strange behavior. Nothing a restart didn’t fix but nothing like this happened on the simpler, more dedicated CM4 IO board. Anyway, wanted to add that info about the drop-in swap possibility. Thanks!
Hi,
I found the Yellow CM4 not much of a difference from a RPi4, albeit with a different SilLabs Zigbee radio. Upgrading to a SSD didn’t make any noticeable difference, and TBH, modem uSD cards seem to have caught up with wear levelling.
The much larger capacity of a SSD might help with extras like Music Assistant storage - but even then, I backed off as then every HA backup becomes HUGE with the media (FLAC for me).
The Yellow supports PoE+ so could offer power than the standard 12V * 3A PSU = 36W.
The main reason I see for a CM5 (apart from general rising expectations and features) is for local voice processing and the odd ESPhome compile speed-up.
I’ll second that. I am looking at a couple of options for voice processing on another lan server which would also help. But the ESPHome compile speed on the Yellow/CM4 is horrible. And about every other instance, the save button does not respond and I have to wait. Then it all magically appears, but then I install and get a blank window for a few, and it takes a couple of minutes. I also see ‘lost connection’ here and there. It would be nice if I could create the environment in WSL on my laptop and compile there. Maybe that is an option, remotely. I have a lot of research to do.
A SSD probably helps a little, but in reality ESPhome is just slow and worse, doesn’t seem to cache a lot of the previous object files created from earlier versions of source.
After developing some reasonably complex custom devices, the developer cycle was pretty slow and involved a lot of Earl Grey! It was actually sometimes quicker to use a YAML linter on the web than it was to try and puzzle out the local ESP home messages.
The end result is excellent and simpler than full Arduino development, but doesn’t always feel like that mid-debug.
I posted another thread in CONFIGURATION that outlines my next steps. I certainly see a need to be able to develop IoT devices on a heavy machine, but not sure how those will react with my live server on the Yellow. Especially when Node-red is considered.
For what you have already done I’m sure I could go back and forth with you all day (and night). I am really excited about what I can do with my ESP32’s, ESP8266 (legacy), and Pico’s, especially since I have 10x PI Pico 2 W’s coming in the hopefully not to distant future. It sounds like you crossed many of these lines to get what you want. And I am very intrigued!
this post!