Deploying Home Assistant on Seeed H68K/reRouter with OpenWRT

Home Assistant is the popular home automation control platform. Since HA needs to be online 7x24 hours, running on devices that are always on will be a good choice. The reRouter and H68K soft router from Seeed Studio support OpenWRT and Docker, so you can easily deploy Home Assistant and keep it stable online for a long time. That's my perfect device for Home Assistant. In this guide, we will use H68K to show you how it works, it also works for Seeed reRouter.

Step1: Flash the right OpenWRT image support Docker

• 1.1 Download the OpenWRT image for H68K with Docker.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IpScOfmj_hXmF0mnUiyzs6qjwVvzHru2/view?usp=sharing

• 1.2 Flash the image to a TF card

Insert a TF card to your computer and use Flash tool such as balenaEtcher to falsh

the image.

Click 'Flash from file'

Select the image you just download.

Select target TF card

Click flash -- Done

Step2. Connect to the OpenWRT backend

2.1 When the flashing is done, remove the TF card from the computer and install it into the TF card slot of H68K.

2.2 Connect H68K to computer and router with network cable.

By default, ETH0 works as WAN port to connect to the Router or switch, while ETH1/2/3 is LAN port to connect to your computer.

2.3 Login the backend of H68K

Check the ip address of H68K. Tap `win` + ` R ` key to open the Run of windows. Tap `cmd` to enter the terminal.

Use the command line

ipconfig -all

to get the ip address of H68K.

To find the Default Gateway address which is the ip of H68K. In my case it's

192.168.100.1

Enter the above ip address in your Browser to login the backend of OpenWRT.

The default username

root 

while the default password is

password

Step3. Install Home Assistant with Docker

3.1 First attempt to install Home Assistant

Click Docker, choose Image.

Enter

homeassistant/home-assistant:latest

Then click 'PULL' button

It will download the Home Assistant image. However, it will pop up a warning window:

No space left on device. First attempt failed.

3.2 Enlarge the space

The good news is that OpenWRT OS allows you to freely allocate the space size for Docker.

Click `System--> Disk Man`

Drag the progress bar and click the `EDIT` button

In the last line, write the size of the storage space to be added in the END SECTOR column. In my case, it's `+20G`. Then click `NEW` button.

Choose the `ext4` format, then click `FORMAT` button.

When it is done, you'll see a new 20GB space is added. However, it's a free space now, you need to mount it to the Docker

Then choose `System-->Mount Points`, find `Mount Point` section, click `ADD` button.

Choose the new space you've just created (You can judge by size, for example here I am using 20G = 20, 000M of space).

Choose the Mount Point `Use as Docker data (/opt)`. Don't forget to check the checkbox `Enable this mount`, then click `SAVE & APPLY` button.

All settings for the expansion are complete, just need to reboot to make it valid.

Choose `System-->Reboot`, click the `PERFORM REBOOT` button. Wait for OpenWRT to reboot and login again.

3.3 Correctly Install Home Assistant

The same as 3.1, Click Docker, choose Image.

Enter

homeassistant/home-assistant:latest

Then click 'PULL' button. After a while, you can find the Home Assistant image is downloaded in the image overview section.

Choose `Docker-->Containers`, click `ADD` button.

Full in as follow:

Container Name

Home-Assistant

Docker Image, drop down to select

homeassistant/home-assistant:latest

Network, drop down to select

host|host

Enviromental Variable(-e), According to your time zone.

Scroll down to the bottom and click on the 'SUBMIT' button

Check the Home Assistant, click the `STAR` button

Now enter the ip of H68K in the browser, add the port of Home Assistant to login the backend of Home Assistant. The port number is `8123`. In my case:

192.168.100.1:8123

All done, enjoy!

Step4. Following up

Please refer to MARK B's article "How to use Home Assistant with a Seeed Mini Router" for the detailed setup of Home Assistant.