Running into a brick wall getting Home Assistant running on a Intel NUC

Installation
1

Hello forum members,

I am taking my first steps on the home automation path an keep getting stuck, I could use your help. A little disclaimer up front: I am new computer operating system installation or installing booting and such. I have found that many of the guides assume this knowledge or take it for granted and skip steps that are not obvious to me, so please if you have advise brake it down to the lowest knowledge level.

I would like it very much to automate my home and switch on lights the bathroom fan based on my presence or the humidity and such. So I was thinking about using Home Assistant. After careful deliberations I choose the INTEL NUC, because I saw some youtube movies explaining that running it on a raspberry pie had some stability issues and running it on a mini computer would be more stable. So I bought a Intel NUC i3 with windows 10 pro. In the installation pages of Home assistant it looked pretty straight forward to install it on the NUC:

DOWNLOAD THE APPROPRIATE IMAGE

  1. Put the SD card in your card reader.
  2. Open balenaEtcher, select the Home Assistant image and flash it to the SD card.
  3. Unmount the SD card and remove it from your card reader.
  4. Once completed you will be able to reach Home Assistant on… (i have to break it off here I am apparently violating the number of links in this post…)

So, I also bought an SD card and started the installation: download balenaEtcher install it, flash the card, and nothing happend. (This is an example of what I mean that the guide assumes a lot of knowledge with the reader that I do not have and found after some some digging around.) I found out that the SD card only has the operating system on it and I have to boot the NUC up with it. That didn’t work apparently the NUC can not boot from the SD cardreader slot, I found that it can boot up from the sd cardreader and you have to have a card reader in the usb slot to make it boot from there. Since I didn’t have one I had to order it.

In the meanwhile I looked on the internet and found a youtube move explaining how to run Home Assistant under Windows 10 (I can’t link it in this post), it seemed pretty straight forward to me, so I did that and it worked! I could see my Sonos and could play it and I could turn on and off the HUE-lights, so I was a happy camper. I ordered a Sonoff humidity sensor to switch on or off the bathroom fan. For which I need a ConBee II Zigbee usb stick (…) After receiving them I tried to install the Zigbee stick in the NUC running Home Assistant under Windows 10. And It didn’t work, I could not find the serial device path, I assumed this was because it was running under windows 10 and because running Home Assistant under Windows 10 also does not support the hasio supervisor, I decided to try booting the NUC from the SD-cardreader that I also received in the mail.

After some fiddling around in the BIOS I could let the NUC boot from the SDcard in the reader. At least I think so, I saw some text flashing on the screen, and after a while this ended with a white prompt. So I thought: this must be it, so I tried to reach Home assistant from my other pc (from step 4 in the guide above), but none of the options work, both my windows pc and the NUC are connected to my local network via UTP cables to a router.

So I am out of options, if you can help me with what next steps to take or maybe use a different approach, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you,

Frans

2

Here are the tutorials I followed to get this running on my small PC. (Running Windows 10, using Virtual Box and bridging USB to get to the ZigBee/ZWave sticks.):
Migrate Hass.io from a Raspberry Pi to a Virtual Machine (Windows). Step by Step. - YouTube
VirtualBox USB passthrough guide | Connect USB to VirtualBox

3

I took the SSD out of my mini PC and put it in an external enclosure and flashed the image direct to it using Etcher on my Windoes PC. When finished I installed the SSD back in the mini PC and had a working Home Assistant system.

You can also copy the image file to a bootable Linux USB drive and flash the image to the SSD in the NUC that way.

1 Like
4

Thank you Russel,

I have tried the guide and set up a virtual box and I am running Home Assistant.

I couldn’t follow the guide till the end, because I didn’t have a raspberry pie to migrate from and I didn’t have a old IP address or an configuration file to install, so I skipped the fixed ip address setting, and tried to reach it from a browser.

At first I couldn’t reach it. I checked the modem and I saw it had an ip address, and tried to use that with port 8123 at first it failed, but after a couple of attempts I saw the ‘preparing Home Assistant’ screen. And that is where I am stuck now. I have been looking at it for over 20 minutes now, and it says it may take up to 20 minutes, so I guess something is wrong.

Do you, or anybody else have any tips to get it running?

Regards

5

I took the easy way.
I moved my Home Assistant from a Raspberry Pi 3 to an Intel NUC i3 running Ubuntu about 18 months ago.
Fast forward a year and my Home Assistant updates were failing- because Ubuntu was not an approved host. I tired Debian, but didn’t like it.
I decided to make a NUC dedicated to Home Assistant. I bought another NUC i3 (no operating system) and installed the Home Assistant NUC image. I am completely satisfied with this arrangement.
Oh, the first NUC is being used as an NAS, which is why I decided to buy a NUC just for Home Assistant.

1 Like
6

OK for all future noobs reading this post:

I did it, victory is mine!

It didn’t work so I removed the Virtual machine and deleted everything (it was not working anyway) and started over. I did 2 things differently: I downloaded the latest version of the VDI (I had the 1.12 version in the link below the youtube movie duh…) and I noticed in the first VM that I was running Oracle 64 OS instead of Ubuntu. In the guide move at 5:12 you see on his screen Ubuntu 64 bit (in mine it was Oracle 64 bit), so I changed it to Ubuntu (again), eventhough it set it to Ubuntu 64 a few steps earlier.

Anyway it works, thanks all for your patience :wink:

1 Like