Id only bother if you want to option to revert back to iHost OS later.
I have installed HAOS onto the internal eMMC on mine, 8GB is obviously too small for HAOS though (initial install fits fine, but space would quickly run out with a few addons etc), so I then use the standard “data disk” feature in HAOS to move user data on sd card or USB after initial onboarding. This has the added benefit that you are not going to wear out the builtin eMMC with constant writes!
I have offline updates working now also, so atleast initially until OTA updates are working, you need the USB-A port to install updates. If data disk is also on USB would probably need a extra USB hub to support 2 usb drives while updating.
Good approach. My main intention is also to use the iHost as a device for Home Assistant. Therefore I don’t see a need to revert to the original OS.
The constant writes are a good point too.
boot.img.xz is the installer image that will flash the eMMC, but there is no indicator setup yet, so you really need to login to debug console to see what is going on.
Are you using Windows or Linux?
Once you enabled developer mode/maskROM, the device will either show up as maskROM device or it will boot from SD card. Once things are sorted out, I’d be glad to help with a step-by-step tutorial.
If you enable maskROM this way, you need to erase the eMMC flash ((using Rockchip’s RKDevTool or rkdeveloptool on linux) before it will boot from SD card.
@Schreibi The indicator is not hooked up yet on the OS image. It will always flash red unless you manually send commands to it.
However provided ethernet is connected you should get the landing page after about 10mins (it takes a while as it has to download various containers) in the usual place → http://homeassistant.local:8123
If you power your iHost from your PC, you can connect to a debug console via USB serial connection, that will give you a shell on the iHost.
Thanks @darkxst, my HAOS is now up and running. One funny thing i encountered, i used a fixed ip address, assigned to my iHost earlier. This is why i was curious and thought the red light would indicate and error. I seems my MAC changed…and my router assigned this installation an new IP. Well long story short - it’s working fine with some minor issues. I am still struggling to get the zigbee controller implemented. I used EZSP /dev/ttyS4 (baudrate is 115200) . Overall process was quite easy. - Replace right side from Ihost Cover - soder those two above mentioned pins - flash image and you are literally good to go. To be fair, the red Led, made me think i made a mistake and the changed Mac Address wasn’t also that obvious but overall it was really not that hard. If i could get Zigbee up and running & that red Led indicator shut off, i would go quite far and say this is a far better alternative than Home Assistant Yellow or Green. Thank you very much for your time and effort to port this Image on this Device! Great work @darkxst
The original MAC address gets blown away when you wipe the flash, but even if it wasnt no way to read it!. As we are using mainline kernel/u-boot, MAC address is generated from your cpuid and thus will be different than when you used the stock OS. Or in your case the flash is disabled, but still couldnt use if it wasnt!
ZHA seems to have troubles with the stock 6.7 firmware you need to update using ‘Silabs Flasher’ Addon with custom url. There are links on the Wiki page for 6.10.7 and 7.3.2 firmwares
Support for the indicator (and buttons) will be coming later. For now you can manually control it via the python script I linked previously. You can run this script in the Advanced SSH addon, but you need to add some python packages to the config:
Good evening, great work, but I think I made a mistake. I followed a linux mode/maskROM tutorial and thought about installing homeassistant but I made a mistake and I don’t know how to do it, thank you.
because almost 1 year after 1st release, there’s still no backup/export/import solution for this thing… if it crashes, you’re lost, and forced to start over again…
There are plenty more benefits to running HAOS rather than HA Docker, some of the main ones being access to addons and direct access to ZIgbee (via ZHA or Z2M).
