Pi 3 with touchscreen 7" - preinstalled in 8GB SDcard - how to proceed with HA without breaking the touchscreen

Installation
1

Hello dear community,

Another Newbie here.

Just fired up a pi with a 7" touchscreen to see if it works. Seems it does…

Can I ask kindly if someone could point me to the correct FAQs/ directions on how to set up HA on a Pi Model 3 with a pre-installed raspi install for a 7" touchscreen, without me breaking it. Touchscreen and pi seem to be happy with each other for the moment. Wifi not yet installed. I fear I break the touchscreen install if I run from scratch the HA install… :-S

Thank you already for your kind help.

Regards,

Annette

2

What is the screen supposed to be use d for?
The Home Assistant GUI? I’m not sure that is possible.
The GUI is web based

3

Hello Hellis81,

Thank you very much for your response.

Well, if Wifi is working and the screen is used for Home Assistant then web based Gui should work or is my thinking too simple?

Can’t you have a pi serving several purposes?
Like a one does it all - or almost all - reducing to have a million apps and so on? Seems I got the entire concept wrong.

At the moment I have Home Assistant on my ipad and all the apps for smart home.
I want to bundle this in one device that doesn’t eat up my ipad resources and should sit in the home with the touch screen for all house members to control devices.
My Dad turned 80 last year and is struggling a bit with sometimes lights or our smart home hoovers where I constantly have to switch ‘yes i have her too’ alexa with languages to get skills for different devices since they are just not offered in either German or English. switching is then temporary for whatever setting I want to change, quite a hassle in my opinion…
Maybe this background shows a little more where I want the journey to go… less apps, less accounts…

Thanks again and Regards,
Annette

4

I can’t answer for sure if it works or not. But my feeling is that to make it work you would need to install a different OS than Home Assistant and then have this OS run both itself and HA and the browser.
Some people think the pi 4 is too slow running just HA, and now you are trying to make an all in one 3.

I have my doubts on this, but I have not tried it myself.

5

You could make this work:

  1. On a much larger SD card (really, 8 GB is tiny) - 32 GB of bigger
  2. Using HA Container (native Docker) so you can install a distro with a desktop

Personally I think you’re better off running HA somewhere else and just using this Pi for the touchscreen.

6

Agree.
But then again, a 7" isn’t that much.
And it probably costed more than a tablet.
So sell it and get a tablet + pi 4 ( or something else)

7

Hi Hellis81,

Thanks for taking my plans off so quickly :wink:
Then I do not put any more effort into this 'project".

Although I will give it a try nevertheless, since I am just an annoying p…i…t… a when it comes to ‘not possible’…

However, back to the first question, so I have go through HA install and then see if can get the other packages going again with the touchscreen?

Thank you so much already for all your answers.

Kind Regards,
Annette

1 Like
8

You can’t use HAOS if you want to use the touchscreen

The only options are Container or Core, and you shouldn’t use Core

9

Hello Tinkerer,

SDcards laying around here from 16 to 64.

There I get lost, since here I am out of my depth

‘1. Using HA Container (native Docker) so you can install a distro with a desktop’

Still also laying around another Pi Model 4 or 3 if I remember right and did not give it away.
2 Pi 4 with inbuilt keyboard I just gave away last year, since I did not know what to do with them (were meant to be gifts… )

So a dedicated HA pi and a dedicated Touchscreen if I understand correctly.

Thank you so much.
I will go ahead and see were I land with just the HA dedicated pi.

Kind Regards,

Annette

10

@ Hellis81 and Tinkerer
one last question what would the touchscreen pi then be used best for?

11

Either running the HA GUI from a browser or some how building something custom that sends MQTT messages to HA.
Not sure…
I have been interested in those with screens but I have never found a real good use of them yet

12

Well, a bigger sd card isn’t very expensive. So take out the current sd card, as long as you don’t do anything else with it, you can always pop it back in and you are back where you started.

Experiment with HA on the new card, with or without using the screen, HA has no use for it.

If you install Home Assistant OS the screen may or may not work. I guess not, and if it does not you’ll probably won’t be able to change anything about that. If you use Home Assistant Container, you’ll be able to get the screen working again.

You could start with a copy of your original card and add HA to it using the container install instructions. Again, if it doesn’t work, you can always pop in the old sd card and be back where you started.

13

Thank you all so much for your advice.
This is of great help, since I do not run into different directions, approaches just to find it is a dead end.

If I get somewhere successfully I’ll let you know :wink:

Thanks again you are great.

Warmest regards and all the best for 2023

14

Keep in mind that any SD card that’s not endurance or similar (for example Samsung Endurance or WD Purple) have a relatively limited write life and will fail on you when used for Home Assistant. It may be months, it may be a year, but it will fail on you.

That’s what I’d recommend, if you even ever end up using the touchscreen.

15

@Tinkerer, Thank you again, I’ll print this all out and will then be able to go through all advice again.
Lots of new terminology for me, wish me luck :slight_smile: and if not success then at least fun trying… :wink:

good night for now and thank you

16

And this is the nicest and kindest way of saying give up on it :wink: - thanks Hellis81 for preventing me from banging my head against a wall.
Noone has ever managed to take me off from something that I wanted to achieve so quickly in such a nice way.

I will look into dockers and containers since I wanted to do that a long time ago and now I have a reason and a device to learn again even more

How do I close a topic? does it close itself or by admin or do I have to close it?
I’ll check tomorrow again. good night everyone

17

I think you will find the performance of a pi4 very acceptable to run HA. Serving the screen from another pi should prove fine too. Running both on a pi4 may (or may not) be acceptable, never tried it so it’s a try it and see situation. The number of other add-ons and integrations should be kept to a minimum.

I do agree a stand-alone tablet is a better option and at not much more cost, plus it’s cosmetically nicer

18

@xAPPO Thank you for your advice, almost was to bed when i saw yours but since you are all so quick and responsive I want to be too. Will add your comment to my ‘keep notes’ as well - wish a good night and sleep well

19

sigh and Thank you all for your advice

Just wanted to give you some feedback on how things are going.

Had a lot of trial and error already.

But managed to boot into an ssd (usb boot) raspbian os (PINN option in raspi imager misc tools)
From there managed to get docker installed (script option for raspbian os as in the install instructions)

hello world responded… (managed to get it respond rootless erk no sudo with adding group etc.)
then back to the instructions how to run HA in a container and stuck with ‘again sd card imaging…’??

side-tracked: 64 bit first try i thought is not good for docker (since i got errors, but on a clean install ssd they did not show up)
tried 32 bit too - performance is the same (chromium seem to push cpu a lot - cpu temp raised from 53 to 64 up to warnings with 67 degrees°C)

At the moment I am reinstalling (have to set up xrdp etc. again) with Pinn (rasbian 64 bit and aiyprojects (google assistant) but afraid that’s not the thing I should do.

At some point I took the wrong junction I guess.

Regarding endurable sd cards, they don’t state it clearly anymore at least not in the shops, got today:

scandisk extreme pro 64 (not explicitly showing endurable)
scandisk extreme pro 32 …
scandisk elite 256
Evo Plus samsung 256 GB (guess the least appropriate)

If I run OS / HA from a ssd (500 gb samsung evo 870 is that supposed to be burnt through by HA as well? That was the reason I tried with PINN which got me quite far.

As mentioned above I got stuck with how to download an HA image to an existing bootable ssd with rasbian os 64 and how to run it with docker…

But I keep going, however any advice greatly appreciated.

reinstall with pin finished:
oops, oh dear i seem to have ended up with google assistant voice projects as a boot option too now.
Will leave that alone for now…

20

If you want to use that Pi for other things then use Docker.

No, SSD lifespan is very different from SD lifespan. You’re comparing a teapot make from metal to one made from chocolate.