Installing Home Assistant OS on a Soyo mini PC

I have been using Home Assistant on a Futjitsu Futro S920 for some time.
The main reason for migrating to a mini PC is low power consumption and speed.
In other hand, I wanted to switch from Docker installation to Home Assistant OS image.

Solo Mini PC M2 Air

Solo Mini PC M2 Air – mini PC (Intel N4000 processor)
There’s no fan – cooling is passive

Device type:  fanless mini PC Processor type  TLM002
CPU: Intel Celeron N4000 (2 cores 64-bit)
Operation Frequency: from 2402MHz to 2480MHz
RAM: built-in EMMC memory chip 2 x UEMCGS03S0A with a capacity of 2 x 64 GBytes, LPDDR4 memory
DISK: 128 GByte eMMC memory  chip UEMDGS23T0
ETHERNET: 1000BaseT, 2280 Wired network (1 Gbps), SG24301 chip
WIFI: 802.11ac (2GHz+5GHz), Wireless FN-LINK 6221C-PUC wifi_chip
Wi-Fi support: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac.
Data transfer rate: Up to 433 Mbps. and Bluetooth v5.0.

Useful Features:
Video: Intel HD Graphics 500, HDMI and VGA Ports – 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, Micro SD reader and 3.5 mm audio output.
Support: M.2 slot for SATA SSD,  for formats 2280 or 2242.
Power Management: BD2670MWV chip (PMIC)
Peripheral Controller: ITE IT8987E multicontroller chip for I/O
Size – 120 x 120 x 22 mm Weight – 220 grams
Manufactured by Shenzhen Mogu Youpin Digital Technology Co. Ltd

The rang of power is about 4 to 7 watts.

On mini PCs is Windows 11 already installed.
I recommend you to note the Windows product key before completely uninstalling Windows and installing Home Assistant OS on it. (License key)
I couldn’t find the embedded Windows product key in BIOS.

Get the Windows product key

Connect the mini PC to a monitor, keyboard and a mouse and go throw the installation wizard, it will be proposed to select a language, region and  keyboard layout.
Once Windows 11 is up and running, you can find the windows product key by using regedit tool under  Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\BackupProductKeyDefault

And we check some BIOS settings:
– In the Advanced Mode menu, enable UEFI boot and in Boot the Configuration menu enable USB.
(normally this is already set or is on automact option, but just to check)

Preparation:

We’ll need one USB drives for live linux image and one SD card memory for Home Assistant OS.

Download the latest version of Balena Etcher and the latest Ubuntu LTS version (or any other linux distributionen) and using Balena Etcher tool execute the iso file on a usb flash driver to get a bootable live linux USB stick.
Open a web browser and download the latest Home Assistant OS version for x86 PCs and copy the .img.xz file to the SD memory.

Insert USB and SD card into the mini PC and boot it from the USB drive.
Ubuntu will now boot the PC. You select the “Try Ubuntu without installing” option (live environment).

To flash the mini PC’s internal hard drive with the Home Assistant OS image, we go to the File Manager tool and select the media directory and open SD card.

Right click on the haos_generic-x86-84-6.img.xz image file and open images with Disk Image Writer.
Select the internal disk of Mini PC as destination, in my case 128G, and restore to it.

This will remove the Windows from soyo and copy image it to.
When this is done, remove USB and SD card and reboot the PC and the Home Assistant OS booted!

Call the URL is http://homeassistant.local:8123 to finish the preparation and setting up of Home Assistant.
This This will remove the image from Windows and copy it to Soyo. This takes about 5 minutes.

Restore from backup

At this point, we have two options  restore from backup if we have one or create a smart home from scratch.

To restore a backup from old HA to this newly installed HA, we first need to create a backup of the old Home Assistant. To do this go to the Settings->System->Backups and create a full backup under System->Backup.
Download the backup on your local environment. (computer)
Call the URL is http://homeassistant.local:8123 and wait for the install to complete and STOP on the Welcome screen. In the middle of the on-boarding screen click on restore from backup.
Select Full Backup and click on RESTORE and once finished restart HA.

Resources:
Download Balena Etcher
Download Ubuntu iso file
Download latest Home Assistant Operating System