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Setting up a Radxa ROCK 3a for Home Assistant

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A Rock 3a single board computer

The Radxa ROCK 3a

Since we got a new thermostat, along with a new heat pump last year, we’ve been connecting that to the Open Source home automation software Home Assistant.

This hasn’t been to do anything fancy, but Home Assistant produces graphs that are a bit prettier than those from the app that is provided with the thermostat, and as the thermostat is accessible via HomeKit, it was straightforward to add to Home Assistant.

Such graphs have been useful to tune the heat pump for maximum efficiency while getting the house to temperature. I’m also intending to look more closely at options for accessing Home Assistant while away from the house and might then move to use that to schedule the heating, but for now the only use is to see the graphs.

To date, we’d been running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3A+, just because that was what we had rather than that it was really suitable. It’s been sort of OK, but it has felt sluggish and we were seeing ‘Home Assistant is reloading’ instead of the graphs on a slightly annoying basis.

I’d been prevaricating for months over what to replace it with.

I’d been assuming I’d get some kind of more-powerful Raspberry Pi, and going through a thought process like: “probably a Pi 4… but should I get a 5 to be future proof… although it would cost more and need a different power supply… and what case should I get… maybe I should hold off ordering in case I want to combine postage with some other electronics… maybe I should wait for a secondhand one… Oh! the prices have gone up now RAM is more expensive…”.

An advantage of the Raspberry Pi is its complete ecosystem, and I’d discounted other single board computer (SBC) options worrying about how easy they would be to set up and how viable it would be to find help if it didn’t ‘just work’.

However, when it came to my attention that SBCs similar to Raspberry Pis were being given away for free (I think it was part of some kind of mistaken order for work, and didn’t enquire too deeply), I jumped at the chance. “Yes please! Me, me, I’ll have one!”

The boards in question were Radxa ROCK 3a. The CPUs in the Rockchip SoC (Quad core Cortex-A55 @2.0GHz) might not offer quite the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4 (Quad core Cortex-A72 @1.8GHz) but it has 4GB of RAM, which I knew should be more than sufficient for Home Assistant, and definitely a big step up from the Raspberry Pi 3A+, which has a slightly older generation CPU, but probably more importantly only a bare 512MB RAM.

Home Assistant installation options

Home Assistant offers two different installation types - Home Assistant OS and Home Assistant Container. To install Home Assistant OS directly on the hardware (without a virtual machine or container), you need either standard PC hardware with BIOS/UEFI or one of the boards for which Home Assistant provides images (these are available for Raspberry Pi and Odroid devices). This being the case, I’d be following the Home Assistant Container flow.

The containerization software that Home Assistant provides instructions for is Docker.

Installing Linux

My first step to setting up the ROCK 3a was to install Linux.

I decided to try my luck with one of the Armbian images for the Rock 3A. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu desktop image, as I assumed that might be easier to get started with. When that went smoothly, I reconsidered and decided that the minimal command line interface (CLI) Ubuntu image might be better as I wouldn’t be needing the desktop environment and it could only use up resources.

To put it on the SD card, I first uncompressed it with:

unxz Armbian_26.2.1_Rock-3a_noble_current_6.18.8_minimal.img.xz

I then used the gnome-disks program ‘Restore Disk Image…’ option to put it on the card. Maybe it would have been even more straightforward to have used the Armbian installer, but either way the card was programmed successfully.

For initial configuration, I connected a screen (there is a standard HDMI output unlike recent models of Raspberry Pi, which use micro HDMI ports) and USB keyboard and mouse. You’re guided through some steps for basic configuration, including setting passwords for root and user accounts. After this is done, you no longer need the screen etc. and can access the board via ssh.

By default the hostname was something like ‘Rock-3a’. If you want to change it you can edit the /etc/hostname file and restart the board.

sudo vim /etc/hostname

Installing Docker

I installed Docker Engine using the steps from the apt repository. It would probably also have just been fine to install it from the Ubuntu repos (I seem to remember just using apt install on the previous Raspberry Pi).

And finally, installing Home Assistant

For Home Assistant, I followed the steps to install Home Assistant Container. Well, there was actually only one step:

docker run -d --name homeassistant \
  --privileged \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  -e TZ="TZ=Europe/London" \
  -v /homeassistant_config:/config \
  -v /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro  \
  --network=host ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable

That sets up a new instance of Home Assistant. When you first use it, there’s an option to load data from a backup if you’re migrating from Home Assistant elsewhere.

So far it all seems to be working fine despite having not yet modified the Home Assistant config to avoid loading any unnecessary integrations, something we had definitely done for the Raspberry Pi 3.

Turning off the ROCK 3a’s blue LED

By default, the board has a very bright, rather annoying flashing blue LED. This forum thread gives clues on how to turn that off. The commands that worked for me were:

su
echo none > /sys/devices/platform/leds/leds/blue\:heartbeat/trigger

Conclusions

Well, so far, so good. Somehow this felt like a less-well-trodden path to get it working than with a Raspberry Pi (the documentation definitely doesn’t seem as polished) but no major snags. Hopefully, it will be reliable longer term. Overall, the smooth experience has made me feel a bit more open to trying non-Raspberry Pi boards in future.

Extra shots

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