I’ve been running my Home Assistant instance on a very old Tinker Board S with a 16GB eMMC. This has been working fine for a month or two but I recently started getting notifications that my Home Assistant instance was out of drive space. Sure enough, even after removing all of my backups there is almost no space left.
I’ve already received reports from my readers about how much better of an experience Home Assistant is running on an Orange Pi 5. Not only is the CPU much more powerful than something like a Raspberry Pi 4 or Tinker Board S but it has a NVMe storage slot. These two things combined make it a great choice for running your Home Assistant instance.
My previous install is a core installation but I’m going to use supervised on the Orange Pi 5. In this guide I’ll show you how I migrated my instance step by step and evaluate the performance improvement at the end. Let’s get started!
Hardware Used
Orange Pi 5
The Orange Pi 5 the latest release from Orange Pi and is the most powerful model yet. It has a 6 core CPU and options from 4GB of RAM all the way up to 32GB of RAM!
The Geekworm copper heatsink set is designed to fit many different single board computers. It uses thermal conductive adhesive which many “cheap” heatsink kits for SBCs don’t have. Eliminates hotspots and reduces throttling. Can be further enhanced by powered cooling over the heatsinks.
The Kioxia (Toshiba) 128GB M.2 2230 PCIe NVMe drive is much shorter than most NVMe drives (full size is 2280). It fits great with single board computers / tablets / other smaller form factors.
The first thing we need to do is back up your existing Home Assistant installation. To do this go to Settings->System->Backups.
I recommend creating a fresh one right at the time you do your migration. Click “+ Create backup” in the bottom right of the screen. Choose to do a full backup.
Once it’s done click on the backup and you should see this screen:
Home Assistant – Backup
Click the 3 dots in the bottom right of the popup to get an option to download the full backup. Go ahead and download a copy now for us to restore later.
Check what the latest version of the OS Agent is here at their GitHub page. At time of writing it was 1.4.1. You should update the commands below with the latest version from the GitHub page instead of 1.4.1. Download the aarch64.deb version.
We’re now going to install the Home Assistant OS Agent with:
I wanted to give my Orange Pi 5’s installation the exact same host name as my core Home Assistant installation. To do this you can use this command:
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname homeassistant
I also changed the static lease in my router to point to the Orange Pi with the old IP address instead of the Tinker Board S.
Configure orangepienv.txt
We need to make some changes to the kernel boot parameters so that you don’t receive warnings related to AppArmor. Add the following line to the bottom of /boot/orangepiEnv.txt:
Now you should be able to navigate in your browser to your Home Assistant IP address on port 8123 with:
http://192.168.X.X:8123
You should see this screen:
Home Assistant – Restore
Click to restore from a backup as I’ve circled in the screenshot above. Choose your backup you downloaded earlier.
You’ll get a confirmation on whether you’d like to wipe the device and restore the backup. Confirm your choice and it will begin restoring the backup.
Final Result
Home Assistant – Unsupported
Since I used Armbian I get a “Unsupported system – Operating System” warning. You can safely ignore this warning honestly. They even give you an “Ignore” option.
The Armbian distribution is based on Debian Bullseye so I am not expecting any problems from this.
Everything is back to how it was:
Home Assistant – Final Result
Recompiling my devices in things like ESPHome is *much* faster now. I never doubted it because the tips my readers give me are usually outstanding.
I also now have access to NVMe storage which is not only much faster but much larger than my Tinker Board’s built in eMMC. I don’t expect my Orange Pi 5’s 128GB drive to get filled up very quickly but if it does I’ll put one of my 512GB or 1TB modules in there. This process was easy enough that swapping out the drive wouldn’t be too big of a deal (even reinstalling the OS).
I highly recommend the Orange Pi 5 as a Home Assistant host and will be keeping mine on there!
Merci pour votre post J’ai acheté un orangepi5 J’ai essayé d’installer HA sur OS debian 11 mais au moment d’installer le dpkg -i homeassistant-supervised.deb j’ai une erreur .. j’ai choisi l’os agent armv7 ? Est ce la mon erreur ? Qu’avez vous choisi comme image pour le système d’exploitation de l’orange Pi svp ?
Welcome! So the issue is that you won’t choose arm7 for the package type. That’s 32 bit ARM. You’ll want aarch64/ARM64:
os-agent_1.4.1_linux_aarch64.deb
That one should be the right one for the Orange Pi 5. Hopefully that helps!
michael
8 days ago
I am completely new to homeassistant in SBCs. Is it possible to install Home Assistant core on orange pi 5? If so can you provide a little guidance with that.
Why would you want to install core on there? Its exceptionally hard. It also doesn’t do anything different at all. I migrated from an “OS” install (which is better than core) to supervised. There’s also a third installation method using Docker. That’s called a “container installation” so there’s actually 3 different types.
You can go here to read the difference. There’s a checkbox list showing the difference between core, supervised and container as well as the full OS install:
You can probably see why I asked why you wanted to install core from this chart. There’s literally no reason to install core. It’s actually *worse* than mine! Look how much you’ll be missing if you installed core vs. supervised.
The only reason core exists is because they used to offer pre-packaged images for really old devices like the Raspberry Pi 4 and Tinker Board S. They stopped offering this because it was stupid. There’s new SBCs released every day. They’d never be able to keep up with them all.
Core is now actually one of the *worst* installations you can do. You will have the least amount of features. Do you want to use “Addons” for example? Not with core you won’t. You can’t install the full “OS” because that doesn’t exist for anything except Tinker Board and Raspberry Pi.
I don’t miss my core installation at all. This was actually easier to set up than core. I’m guessing most people just don’t understand the difference between core vs. supervised vs. container. If they did they would understand that core is the same (actually worse now) as supervised and they’re probably confusing it with containers/Docker.
I was going to link you to the installation instructions for a core installation just so you’d see them and immediately realize there’s absolutely no point in putting yourself through that. I actually can’t find any core installation instructions for you though for the Orange Pi. I don’t think anyone has ever done it (and nobody should). It wouldn’t be impressive at all if anyone did it. It would be sad. They would end up with an installation that can’t even install addons. Not a good outcome.
A core installation would be completely worthless to me because I use ESPHome (an addon). I actually came from a Tinker Board so I had a full OS install. Again, I lost nothing giving this up, and it performs a million times better on the Orange Pi 5. The full OS install only “manages your OS updates”. Do you know why? Because Home Assistant IS your OS on that one. If it didn’t you’d never get any updates. On mine I just use apt update && apt dist-upgrade as per normal. I can also use it for a lot of other things than just Home Assistant because it’s running a regular OS.
Core installations are basically obsolete. They only work on 5+ year old boards like the Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board and they are never planning on adding more because like I said core is obsolete. If they had gone down this path there would be *hundreds* of different Home Assistant OS images now. They stopped doing core/OS installations a long, long time ago. Years ago. It is the worst type of installation that you can do. I guarantee that the list I posted above will only continue to get worse for core and that any new features will be exclusively for supervised and container (and probably be backported to the full OS installs, for now).
The Docker/container one has more features available than that and supervised has all features available. The funny thing about people viewing Docker as the lowest tier of Home Assistant installation is that the one they think is the best (core) is still considered inferior to Docker by the Home Assistant developers/team. Core is probably the one they wish they had *never* done and has basically been halted for anything but the Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board.
Thus I’m sure you understand my confusion at this point. You’re asking me how to set up the worst and most difficult type of Home Assistant installation which will yield you the least amount of features of anything you can do. Needless to say this makes no sense and I highly recommend just using a normal supervised install. You’ll be up as fast as I was in this guide.
If you were doing a brand new install the only difference from my guide is that instead of importing a backup you’d just create a new account at that screen. That’s it. It should be exactly the same.
Bonjour,
Merci pour votre post
J’ai acheté un orangepi5
J’ai essayé d’installer HA sur OS debian 11 mais au moment d’installer le dpkg -i homeassistant-supervised.deb j’ai une erreur .. j’ai choisi l’os agent armv7 ? Est ce la mon erreur ?
Qu’avez vous choisi comme image pour le système d’exploitation de l’orange Pi svp ?
Cordialement
E.Roy
Hey Roy,
Welcome! So the issue is that you won’t choose arm7 for the package type. That’s 32 bit ARM. You’ll want aarch64/ARM64:
os-agent_1.4.1_linux_aarch64.debThat one should be the right one for the Orange Pi 5. Hopefully that helps!
I am completely new to homeassistant in SBCs. Is it possible to install Home Assistant core on orange pi 5? If so can you provide a little guidance with that.
Hey michael,
Why would you want to install core on there? Its exceptionally hard. It also doesn’t do anything different at all. I migrated from an “OS” install (which is better than core) to supervised. There’s also a third installation method using Docker. That’s called a “container installation” so there’s actually 3 different types.
You can go here to read the difference. There’s a checkbox list showing the difference between core, supervised and container as well as the full OS install:
You can probably see why I asked why you wanted to install core from this chart. There’s literally no reason to install core. It’s actually *worse* than mine! Look how much you’ll be missing if you installed core vs. supervised.
The only reason core exists is because they used to offer pre-packaged images for really old devices like the Raspberry Pi 4 and Tinker Board S. They stopped offering this because it was stupid. There’s new SBCs released every day. They’d never be able to keep up with them all.
Core is now actually one of the *worst* installations you can do. You will have the least amount of features. Do you want to use “Addons” for example? Not with core you won’t. You can’t install the full “OS” because that doesn’t exist for anything except Tinker Board and Raspberry Pi.
I don’t miss my core installation at all. This was actually easier to set up than core. I’m guessing most people just don’t understand the difference between core vs. supervised vs. container. If they did they would understand that core is the same (actually worse now) as supervised and they’re probably confusing it with containers/Docker.
I was going to link you to the installation instructions for a core installation just so you’d see them and immediately realize there’s absolutely no point in putting yourself through that. I actually can’t find any core installation instructions for you though for the Orange Pi. I don’t think anyone has ever done it (and nobody should). It wouldn’t be impressive at all if anyone did it. It would be sad. They would end up with an installation that can’t even install addons. Not a good outcome.
A core installation would be completely worthless to me because I use ESPHome (an addon). I actually came from a Tinker Board so I had a full OS install. Again, I lost nothing giving this up, and it performs a million times better on the Orange Pi 5. The full OS install only “manages your OS updates”. Do you know why? Because Home Assistant IS your OS on that one. If it didn’t you’d never get any updates. On mine I just use apt update && apt dist-upgrade as per normal. I can also use it for a lot of other things than just Home Assistant because it’s running a regular OS.
Core installations are basically obsolete. They only work on 5+ year old boards like the Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board and they are never planning on adding more because like I said core is obsolete. If they had gone down this path there would be *hundreds* of different Home Assistant OS images now. They stopped doing core/OS installations a long, long time ago. Years ago. It is the worst type of installation that you can do. I guarantee that the list I posted above will only continue to get worse for core and that any new features will be exclusively for supervised and container (and probably be backported to the full OS installs, for now).
The Docker/container one has more features available than that and supervised has all features available. The funny thing about people viewing Docker as the lowest tier of Home Assistant installation is that the one they think is the best (core) is still considered inferior to Docker by the Home Assistant developers/team. Core is probably the one they wish they had *never* done and has basically been halted for anything but the Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board.
Thus I’m sure you understand my confusion at this point. You’re asking me how to set up the worst and most difficult type of Home Assistant installation which will yield you the least amount of features of anything you can do. Needless to say this makes no sense and I highly recommend just using a normal supervised install. You’ll be up as fast as I was in this guide.
If you were doing a brand new install the only difference from my guide is that instead of importing a backup you’d just create a new account at that screen. That’s it. It should be exactly the same.
Hopefully that helps!