I had been running HA on a pi4b for several years, but I had to swap out machines so I could use it for another purpose. This led to me using a pi0-2w with HomeBridge for several months, as I couldn’t get my docker compose I had previously used (HA, mqtt, and zigbee2mqtt) to run reliably.
It was all good and well, but I really missed the Adaptive Lighting plugin I had used. So, I ordered a Radxa Zero. I spent the past couple of days trying to get it working, but I couldn’t find an image that ran well and enabled the serial port properly (I use a RaspbeeII).
So today, I did some more work with the Pi0-2w and am delighted to report it’s running really well. I stopped using mosquito for mqtt and z2m, and switched to ZHA, which oddly seems to be a little less resource intensive.
Make It So
I started with the minimal-64bit rpi image on an sd card.
Update
sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade -y
Increase Swap and install ZRAM
sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
edit to make swap larger I did about 500 mb which I think is overkill
sudo dphys-swapfile setup
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon
git clone https://github.com/foundObjects/zram-swap
cd zram-swap/
sudo ./install.sh
cd ..
Install Docker
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
Setup HA
mkdir ha
cd ha
nano docker-compose.yml
edit with the following contents:
version: ‘3’
services:homeassistant:
container_name: homeassistant
image: homeassistant/home-assistant:stable
volumes:
- ./:/config
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
restart: unless-stopped
network_mode: host
devices:
- /dev/ttyS0:/dev/ttyS0
Setup Serial
sudo raspi-config
then interfaces > serial > enable serial, disable console
Reboot and 
sudo reboot
cd ha
docker compose up -d
Install HACS
docker exec -it homeassistant bash
wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -
then
docker compose restart
At that point I was able to login in in the browser and set everything up. ZHA was able to grab my RaspbeeII and find all the lights. I then installed Adaptive Lighting via HACS and everything is chugging along right as rain.
I’m in a small apartment and I don’t have a ton of devices (≈45 devices). I would still like to be able to use the Radxa since it’s quite a bit faster, but I don’t know how many more days I can spend trying to get the serial working.
I am not currently running a mqtt server, but I’ll need one if I want to connect my blinds–they run Tasmota. Planning on using the Deno project opifex which I used in my interim setup and it was very lightweight. Once it starts up, the pi sits pretty much at idle, so not too worried about adding it in.
I’m actually really happy with the pi0-2w. WiFi latency doesn’t seem to be an issue, I swear the lights turn on before I’ve taken my finger off the button in the Apple Home app. And it’s nice to be able to utilize a piece of hardware I’m finding fewer and fewer uses for. That said, I probably will docker compose stop before I run system updates.
I also really like that I can plug it directly into the usb c port on the back of my router and there’s no cables running everywhere. Super clean setup. The whole thing is occupying 4.7G, so it would fit on the 16G eMMC in the Radxa… Next time in adventure land, I guess…