Hi,
rpi_gpio was removed and I, as an RPi Zero owner, am forced to stay with the version ‘2021.12.5’ of HA. I haven’t checked the state of the art for while:
Thank you!
I am sure there is a way around the GPIO issue - is GPIO support available on the RPI5? People will tell you to buy a NUC for the hardware instead.
I had an RPI4 8gig running HA Supervised due to several daemon’s running outside of HA on the host, and actually had utilized the GPIO pins directly from the host before the GPIO support was in HA (really just for RPI CPU fan control - fan control now being actually included out of the box on the RPI5)… The main drawback of HA Supervised on the RPI other than alot of manual upkeep of the underlying OS was, there is no way to easily use the Studio Code server addon for editing yaml directly on the RPI…
For both of these RPI’s shown below to access the host, I run them headless using VNC Viewer
I really wanted to upgrade and I really love the RPI ecosystem… I actually had an RPI5 sitting off to one side for about 6 months while I tried to decide what to do as I also was readng/discovering that an NUC would be much more bang for the buck. Also for a little while the RPI5 was not supported for HA Supervised - and there was no date for when it would be… (it is a different CPU architecture than the RPI4 - although it is now supported for supervised).
So here is my weird solution below. I may eventually give up on RPI ecosystem and switch over to a NUC but this is so much more fun -
Wanting to utilize HAOS but unable to because you cannot run anything else on the host (unless you run HAOS on a VM), and loving the RPI ecosystem enough to buy an RPI5 8G instead of getting much more bang for the buck with an NUC… I saw proxmox is the best VM solution in my opnion (and free) but it’s way too much for an RPI5 to handle… but as a goof I found on this forum a way to set up a VM running HAOS on the RPI 5 (search for KVM/QEMU). Migrating HA over from Supervised on an RPI4 to a clean HAOS on a VM was surprisingly easy, even with hundreds of sensors and 40+ integrations… After setting up the RPI5 with Raspbian as discussed below, I used a full backup using the google drive addon from HA supervised, then restored that onto the HAOS VM on the RPI5, was amazingly easy.
The only hiccup I discovered with the migration was of course, the items I had on the RPI4 host that had been updating sensors in HA (weewx weather station transmission status for example), was broken of course because HA had moved. So I decided to leave alot of the processes on the RPI4, and wrote some SSH code that would log into the RPI5 to update the HA sensors via the REST api.
I also discovered that from within a VM you cannot monitor the CPU temperature of the underlying host so that was broken as well - so I took the same approach in a 1 second loop from the RPI4 - I ssh into the rpi5 host (different IP address than HAOS), grab the CPU temp, then ssh into the HAOS VM and place that value into the sensor.
The last thing I had to do for those last two paragraphs above was to not just have those daemons run on startup for the RPI4, but also put some connectivity error handling (so it would just try to reconnect over and over in a loop) so the RPI’s would be able to reconnect and communicate even after one of them reboots or there is a temporary network connectivity issue.
So I use an RPI4 as well as an RPI5 together now. This is silly overkill but I got this case for the RPI5 which has several advantages (the ultimate geek executive desk toy) - and I have fulaccess to the host on both.
It takes abut an hour to assemble the case but you have to be VERY careful - there are lot of parts. Take your time, do it slowly, recheck your work. It even extends the GPIO pins (top right side) so they are not blocked, it gives me an nvme hat, replaces those ridiculous mini-hdmi connectors with normal size hdmi, even has a little screen on the front showing the status, includes a fan for not just the case but the cpu, there even is a utility for controlling the fans and changing the internal color scheme for the led’s. Note, you need to buy only a specific compatible nvme model, and also if you want that screen on the front to work properly you need to install raspbian and software they give you with the case - hence putting HAOS on a VM (the software for the OLED won’t run on HAOS).
I allocated 6GB to the VM, which is plenty for my HAOS setup, the other 2GB for the host so I can still, tinker under the covers.
You can see in the photo I have 4 ssd’s each 1tb in the photo (two unplugged) . Unfortunately the tiny KVM/QEMU does not allow a snapshot but to back both up fully from time to time, I do a proper shutdown for each then boot them both up with Raspbian Micro-SD Cards, plug in the external SSD and then just use the SD Card Copier which makes a full clone of the entire drive. So it one just dies I can plug in the spare:
For the full assembly here is a link from youtube - the physical assembly of the case starts aroun 2:46 of this 10:39 video. I noticed when placing the thermal pads onto the chips before they put on the fan, it looks like they didn’t do it but remember to remove the plastic from BOTH sides of the thermal pads before putting the fan in place (around 4:42). The label for the NVME ends up being upside down, but it isn’t hard to carefully peel it off and turn it around. Also the dust filters are cute but probably block some of the air. By 8:37 they take you into installing the utilities and the driver for the OLED screen. Instead of powershell for the headless connection I use VNC viewerr which makes it much easier to upgrade the underlying OS from time to time with a single click.
There is a PIRONMAN 5 dashboard addon available for HA - not used much (also they provide a url). Their instructions are very good - for assembly they provide physical documentation but it has links to their website for software configuration, etc. etc.
Hope the above helps to show one way forward. Not very practical unless you do this as a hobby and love the RPI
That has never been supported hardware.
However for GPIO use there is a third party integration. This is what people have been using since the core feature was removed.
You should really look at running HA on supported hardware though. Whether that is an old laptop, a NUC, a yellow or green box from NC or a pi4/5 is up to you. If you do choose something other than a pi and still need GPIOs you can run this on your pi zero:
To be clear that means running HA on something else, and running raspbian on the pi zero with the GPIO bridge software from flyte that connects to HA via mqtt. It works really well. I used it for years.
Thank you @tom_l . Quick question - do these GPIO integrations work if the RPI like my RPI5 above is running as a VM?
I have no idea sorry, I moved on from a pi before using the 3rd party integration became necessary. There’s bound to be a forum topic on it somewhere here.
Depending on the nature of the GPIO requirements, ESPHome may fill the bill. For me ESPHome provides everything that I need to do for GPIO, and I can easily place them closer to where they actually need to be. My concerns about GPIO support going away on the RPi HA server was very short lived.
