Connect to Orange Pi with Armbian installed over the network:

ssh [email protected]

smarttone Is the name of the user you created when installing Armbian.

192.168.10.12 – ip address received by Orange Pi from the router.

You can connect to the Orange Pi via USB-OTG using, for example, Putty. The way we did when we installed Armbian. Or by connecting a keyboard and monitor to the Orange Pi.

Having connected, we pay attention to the amount of occupied memory of both eMMC and RAM. It looks like this for me:

Your values ​​may vary – it all depends on the updates and packages that you installed. When we finish the installation, compare with what we get in the end.

The Home Assistant smart home system is very popular and Armbian developers have made the installation process as easy as possible.

Run armbian-config:

sudo armbian-config

In the menu that opens, select “Software System and 3rd party software install”:

Further “Softy 3rd party applications installer”:

Find and mark the “Hassio Home assistant smarthome suite”:

Push “”, Installation of packages begins:

You need to wait a few minutes.

After a while, we are returned to the armbian-config menu. We see that in addition to Hassio, we also have Docker

Click again”

The menu is updated and we see the inscription: “(*) Hassio Active on http://192.168.10.12:8123”

We open in the browser http://192.168.10.12:8123:

We are again offered to wait 20 minutes.

At the end, they suggest creating an account to access the Home Assistant:

We create.

After that, fill in the initial data, such as time zone, location and metric system:

On the next screen, you can simply click “Finish”:

We can be congratulated – we installed Home Assistant:

Installing Home Assistant in docker has its advantages. One of them is the add-ons store. Go to “Supervisor -> ADD-ON STORE” and, as an example, install VSCode.

Click “Install” and again we need to wait a while for the installation to complete. After reconnecting to Home Assistant, you need to wait a bit again. On the “DASHBOARD” tab, we will see VSCode. Make small settings, as in the screenshot:

Go to the “Visual Studio Code” tab in the sidebar. To activate VSCode you need to click:

Visual Studio opens with all the configuration files.

Back to the Orange Pi console. Finish armbian-config. Let’s log in to see how much memory is now taken:

We see that we have not yet connected any devices, and we have almost no RAM left. And eMMC memory is almost half used up. Plus, from docker, it’s just not possible to access devices connected via USB, to GPIO, to UART, I2C, etc. If you plan to connect devices with a network interface to the smart home only – WiFi, Ethernet or Mqtt, then you will not have problems – you can fully use the installation in docker. True, the Mqtt server could also be hosted on the Orange Pi. But it looks like RAM will already be missed. But there is a way to save resources and get full access to hardware – you need to install Home Assistant directly into the system. This is not much more complicated than installing in docker.