Intro: The primary objective of my project was to give some use to the Beaglebone Black that has been sitting in my workshop for years. For various reasons I ended up using the Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi more in my projects and the Beaglebone was being discarded. My current research involves the use of opensource platforms for home automation in Escape Room rooms. And I ended up opting for Home Assistant.

Installing Debian Bullseye on Beaglebone Black

I am adapting this tutorial here: https://paranoiaque.fr/en/2021/08/26/flash-debian-bullseye-beaglebone-black/

Few words about the BeagleBone Black. It’s a single board computer with a single core 1ghz Cortex-A8 processor, 512Mb of memory and depending of the version 2gb or 4gb of EMMC (my version is 2Gb). It is impossible to install the entire dependencies in this memory. So I am using a 32Gb SD Card.

Before flashing our BeagleBone Black, we need:

• A cable to connect the BeagleBone Black to the network
• A micro SD card
• A computer with a card reader, connected to the same network
• A terminal, to access to the system

Download the latest bone image from Robert Nelson’s website, (allways check if this link still works) : https://rcn-ee.net/rootfs/debian-armhf/2022-03-30/bone-debian-11.2-iot-armhf-2022-03-30-4gb.img.xz

Plug your card in your computer, it will be erased. You can create the card using balenaEtcher.

Just select the image that you downloaded, put the SD Card on your computer and click Flash.

Boot from the micro SD card

Plug your microSD card into your Beaglebone Black. Press the Boot button (S2) and plug your card to the electricity. When the 4 lights are on, wait 1s and release the button. The board will start using the micro SD card.

Connect to the Board

You can connect to your Beaglebone through SSH using its hostname (beaglebone) and the default credentials.

User: debian

Password: temppwd

ssh debian@beaglebone.local

Setting Up the time and upgrade the system

Beaglebone does not have Real Time Clock, and probably, the current date in your system will be March 30. To correct this, just type:

sudo timedatectl set-time "2022-04-25 13:35" # adjust the time according to your current setting
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo timedatectl set-ntp false
sudo apt install chrony 
sudo timedatectl set-ntp true

This will make the system update the date and time when connected to the internet.

Getting Python 3.9

Once the update is done, you can proceed with the dependencies installation. So you can run this command to install all the required dependencies:

sudo apt install wget build-essential libreadline-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev libffi-dev zlib1g-dev -y

Installing Python 3.9 on Debian 11

First of all, we need to download the source from python so we can proceed with the manual installation, so please run this command now:

wget -c https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.12/Python-3.9.12.tgz
tar xvf Python-3.9.12.tgz
cd Python-3.9.12/
./configure --enable-optimizations
sudo make altinstall

This should install your Python 3.9 at default system location.

To test it, just type:

python3.9 --version

Installing Mosquitto

sudo apt install mosquitto mosquitto-clients -y

Install Home Assistant Core

First, install all dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-venv python3-pip libffi-dev libssl-dev autoconf -y

Go to the right directory for the installation:

cd /srv/

Make a directory for the python virtual environment:

sudo mkdir homeassistant

Change ownership to pi user and pi group (default otherwise is ‘root’ user under /srv):

chown debian:debian /srv/homeassistant

Now, create a python virtual environment:

Python virtual environment is an isolated environment with its own set of binaries and dependencies. Projects running in a virtual environment will not interfere with the standard execution and sets of python on your computer.

Note. Don’t use ‘sudo’ in python virtual environment, I think this command might overwrite standard python files, outside the venv (virtual environment) and that defeats the purpose of an isolated environment.

python3 -m venv .

Note. Don’t miss the dot after ‘venv’, meaning ‘here’.

Activate the virtual environment:

source bin/activate

Note. See how the terminal changes after you activated the python virtual environment:

(homeassistant) debian@beaglebone:/srv/homeassistant $ 

In this environment, we need a python package. Install it with this command:

python3 -m pip install wheel

Finally, we can install Home Assistant:

pip3 install homeassistant

Make Home Assistant run automatically

If we want home assistant to start automatically on boot, we need to make some configurations.

First, we need to create a service file to control Home Assistant.

Create/edit it here: /etc/systemd/system/home-assistant@debian.service

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/home-assistant@debian.service

Enter these into the file: /etc/systemd/system/home-assistant@debian.service

[Unit]
Description=Home Assistant
After=network-online.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=%i
WorkingDirectory=/home/%i/.homeassistant
ExecStart=/srv/homeassistant/bin/hass -c "/home/%i/.homeassistant"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You need to reload systemd to make the daemon aware of the new configuration:

sudo systemctl –system daemon-reload

To have Home Assistant start automatically at boot, enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable home-assistant@debian.service

To disable the automatic start, use this command.

sudo systemctl disable home-assistant@debian.service 

To start Home Assistant now, use this command.

sudo systemctl start home-assistant@debian.service

You can check the status with:

systemctl status home-assistant@debian.service

Onboarding

Home Assistant’s GUI is web based, and you access it with a browser. (The installation comes with a webserver).

Open a Browser and go to http://beaglebone.local:8123

From now, you can follow this link: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/onboarding/ and learn how to configure it.