I’ve been running an instance of Home Assistant Supervised on a RPi 3B for nearly a year now. I used supervised because I am using the same RPi as a wall mounted control unit, it has a touchscreen attached and runs a minimal kiosk-like setup that displays the HA frontend in Chromium through OpenBox. It works for what I need it to do but (unsurprisingly) the Pi is not quite powerful enough to always respond quickly.
After researching a few SBC options I decided to get a secondhand laptop instead. I now have a Dell 3390 that I equipped with MX linux and installed HAOS in a VirtualBox. I also got a Sonoff Zigbee dongle with it, the zigbee controller I was using on the Pi was a POPP shield which cannot be connected to the pc
I made a backup of my system, and am ready to upload that to the new one. My questions are:
are there any things to watch out for when migrating, especially those of the category ‘do this first before you switch over’ ?
2 I was using some RPI specific addons or integrations. I will use different solutions for those in the future, but I have no idea what happens if I restore the backup and it finds there is no RPi.
3 Does it matter that I restore a backup from a supervised edition to an OS edition?
4 Is there a way to configure the zigbee dongle so that it takes over the role of the previous controller without having to pair all the devices anew?
Migrating the database can sometimes fail. Just stop the new system and copy your home-assistant_v2.db file from the old to new system if this happens.
It will generate errors but should not prevent HA from loading.
No that should not matter.
Not 100% sure but I think the pairings are stored on the controller. So you should be ok.
Well, that went pretty smoothly! There was one thing I would want to mention here for others that may encounter it in the future.
I uploaded the backup and HA started as expected. Of course, the ZHA integration didn’t work because the controller device was not the same. When attempting to migrate the radio for my ZHA integration, there was an error. The dialog screen that appeared had no ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons, and when I clicked ‘submit’ it came up with an unknown error. My guess is that this was because the migration attempts an automatic backup which was of course impossible because the old radio was not (and could not be) connected to the new computer. I had made a manual backup of the old radio on the Pi but there was no option to select this.
So what I did was to migrate the radio on the RPi (plugging in the Sonoff there). Then I made a new full backup of HA, which I restored onto the laptop. I also made a backup of the ZHA controller JSON on the Pi after the migration. I was then able to reconfigure ZHA on the laptop using that JSON backup.
It seems that the ‘migrate radio’ functionality is not prepared for a situation where automatic backup is not possible but a manually performed backup is available. Is that an issue I should report on GitHub?
No that’s designed for connecting to both radios and moving the configuration of the old stick to the new. Considering you were not moving the stick (which stores your network not the Pi) tat was the best you could hope for
Or. just carry the old stick to the new box. Make sure it’s specified by the by-id address (long honkin name) instead of the USB virtual address (TtyACM0/AMA0/1) before you do the move and yiu can just unplug it from the old and plug it in the new after you restore. At which point you could migrate the stick.
Either way do one THEN the other not both at once… Glad it’s working
Carrying over the old stick was not possible. As I wrote in the start post, the old one was a device that connects to the RPi GPIO pins, not a usb stick. ZB-Shield - popp.eu
I can see that my usb stick is currently specified by the by-id but I don’t see how I could change that if it wasn’t.
the laptops battery, most likely you will be leaving this laptop plugged in to the wall all the time, go check the BIOS/UEFI if theres a option that basically stops charging the battery at 70% charge. if there’e no option for battery charge management, I suggest you to open up the laptop’s innard and disconnect the battery connector to laptop’s motherboard, just to avoid the worst case scenario of burning your house, but most likely you will just get a unusual bulge on your laptop.
laptop’s fan, make sure to check it and runs ok, laptop fans are not really designed to work 24/7 operation. in fact this is the most common failure point on a laptop if used on 24/7 work case scenarios.
other than that, migrating the installation should be a breeze except that you may be need to address some minor stuff like the device path of your usb zigbee coordinator, it maybe using /dev/ttyUSB on your superviced install, that maybe changed once you migrated, if your already using the absolute path via device-by-id, then you should be fine and probably have nothing to worry about this stuff.