Installing Home Assistant On OrangePi Zero With Armbian

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Below is the random thought titled "Installing Home Assistant On OrangePi Zero With Armbian". Be aware that these thoughts may be based on opinion, and my opinion might not agree with yours. Also, the thought below may be based on mood, time of day, or any number of other factors. Please keep this in mind.

Had the day of from work so spent some time installing Home Assistant on an Orange Pi Zero running Armbian.

The Armbian Install Instructions for Home Assistant make it look pretty simple. But as with almost everything involving Linux and open source, a quarter page of supposedly easily followed installation instructions turned into multiple hours of chasing installation errors, tracking down dependencies and experimentation.

So in case someone else wants to do this, here are the steps I took to get it working.

These instructions apply to:

• Armbian 5.38, Orangepizero_Debian_stretch_next_4.14.14


• Home Assistant 0.65.0


• Python 3

Should work with minor version variations but as is everything Linux, who the hell knows...

Naturally, the instructions on the Home Assistant page don't mention a bunch of dependencies needed to install, or perhaps the PIP packages aren't complete. Who knows. But either way you need to install these.

So, follow the instructions on the Armbian download page to download the image, use Etcher to burn it to an SD card, and boot up the Orange Pi.

I installed Home Assistant as root, because I am dedicating my Orange Pi Zero to Home Assistant.

So once you have your Orange Pi Zero running, run apt to update everything to the latest packages:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

It seems 90% of the time when I run apt-get on a new Linux install I get an error that files can't be locked. If you get the same error, first find the process ID locking the file with:

sudo lsof /var/lib/dpkg/lock

Then kill it with:

sudo kill -9 [PID HERE]

Now run your apt-get update and upgrade statements.

Install Python according to Home Assistant instructions:

sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip

This doesn't install setuptools which are needed to install Home Assistant. So install it:

sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools

And upgrade it to the latest version:

sudo pip3 install --upgrade setuptools

Now install wheel (whatever that is) because it is needed for Home Assistant:

sudo pip3 install wheel

SQLAlchemy is also needed but isn't included in the Home Assistant package and doesn't download when installing Home Assistant. So install it:

sudo pip3 install sqlalchemy

Finally you can install Home Assistant. Do so by running:

sudo pip3 install homeassistant

This will take a while. Lots of stuff will install. Hopefully you see no errors. It took me about 5 attempts to track down the issues I was receiving during install due to the missing packages above.

If all is good, start Home Assistant with:

hass --open-ui

This will also take quite a while, and it won't tell you when it is done. Basically, just wait until it finishes and starts spitting out INFO: statements mentioning dawn, noon, dusk, etc.

If all is well, you can now access Home Assistant at http://IP_ADDRESS:8123/

Use Chrome, because it wouldn't work very well for me using Internet Explorer 11.

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