26 January, 2020

Setting up Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi using generic Linux host method



Recently my installation of Home Assistant died. It appears that I burned up the SD card. I can no longer read the SD Card. When I run gparted against the SD card, the card mounts in read-only mode. After a bit of research, I came up with a plan.

Rough Plan


  • Install the latest Raspbian Buster image
  • Reconfigure the Pi to run from a hard drive
  • Install Home Assistant using the generic Linux host method

Steps

  • Downloaded Raspbian Buster with desktop from the Raspberry Pi website
  • Using balenaEtcher to flash Buster to an SD card (8GB)
  • Booted the Pi for the first time
  • Setup the language, keyboard, and timezone. 
    • Changed the pi user's password
    • Selected the WiFi network
    • Updated the software
  • Updated the packages
    • sudo apt update
    • sudo apt upgrade
    • sudo reboot
  • Followed the directions from the blog post 'Quick SD to SSD on the pi 4'
    • use the utility 'SD Card Copier' to copy the SD card to the hard drive
    • run 'sudo blkid' to get the UUID of the SD sard and the hard drive
    • backup the file /boot/cmdline.txt
    • edit the file /boot/cmdline.txt. Change the partuuid from using the SD card to the hard drive
    • reboot
    • Note: must leave the SD card in the Raspberry Pi
  • Changed the hostname of the Pi
  • Enabled SSH on the Pi
  • Setup ssh key on my main PC
    • ssh-keygen
    • ssh-copy -i ~/.ssh/key-name pi@ip.address
    • ssh-add
  • Disable Password Authentication on the Pi
    • sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
      • Uncommented the line 'PasswordAuthentication yes'
      • changed yes to no
  • Set a static IP for the Pi
    • edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf
      • added
        • interface wlan0
        • static ip_address=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
        • static routers=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
        • static domain_name_servers=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
    • reboot
  • Changed Pi Configuration to boot to cli
  • Followed the directions from the blog post 'Install Docker and Docker Compose on Raspberry pi 4(Raspbian Buster)'
    • curl -sSL get.docker.com | sh
    • sudo usermod -aG docker pi
    • sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev
    • sudo apt install python3-dev
    • sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip
    • sudo pip3 install docker-compose
  • Followed installer for a generic Linux system
    • sudo apt install bash
    • sudo apt install jq
    • sudo apt install curl
    • sudo apt install avahi-daemon
    • sudo apt install dbus
    • sudo apt install apparmor-utils
  • curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi4-64
  • Setup Home Assistant
There was an issue with Home Assistant connecting to the internet. I removed the changes to /etc/dhcpcd.config. This seems to have helped. 

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