Armbian Minimal and Armbian Home Assistant

When looking for Le Potato images, they have different flavours.  Two of them are catching my eyes:

• Armbian Minimal: lightweight Linux OS that runs on a Le Potato but without whistles and bells.
  What you get is a very minimalistic Linux system that runs without issues on a Le Potato.  It's also tested by the guys to guarantee it works.
  Just what I want for a Le Potato!
  And the nice thing?  In their distro, SSH is activated by default.  No messing around anymore to get SSH up and running, no more the need for a serial communication connection to be able to install SSH and so on...  Not that it has hurt to connect Le Potato to a serial monitor.  On the contrary, I learned a lot about how to access Le Potato "the serial way"...

• Armbian Home Assistant: an unofficial HA image that's created, maintained and tested to run on a Le Potato.  Since HA itself doesn't support Le Potato, Armbian Home Assistant remains an unofficial HA image.
  Since it's an unofficial HA image, the image doesn't contain the  HA Supervisor.  That means no auto updates, no offical support and so on.
  But the nice thing: they do have the Apps section (before, it was called Add-ons) where you can install applications that you want.

To get the Armbian Minimal distro, go to the Armbian website.  Then select Boards in the top menu bar and in the search bar somewhere in the middle of the page, type "Libre Computer" (with the space).  You will see some 8 supported boards, one of them being Le Potato.

Click on the Le Potato image and you will be presented with the latest version of the Armbian Minimal CLI (version 26.2.1 as of this writing, July 28th 2026).  You can click the image and the download will start.

Note that you cannot download other images that are available for Le Potato here.  For this, you have to use the Armbian Imager.  See next secion.

There's a far more better method to get not only Armbian Minimal, but a lot of other images too.  For this to be done, you have to download the Armbian Imager.

Once downloaded and installed, open Armbian Imager.  The current version as of this writing, is version 2.0.2
Click the Start now -> button.

The first thing you have to do, is to select the manufacturer brand.  Search for "Libre Computer" in the search bar.  You should see the LibreComputer logo and a message saying there are 8 boards.  

There's also a label called "Silver" and I think this has to do with the amount of (financial?) support a manufacturer gives.

The next  screen will show you the 8 supported boards, spread over 2 pages.   Le Potato is already at the first page.

When you select Le Potato, you will see all the images that are available for Le Potato.  Among a lot of others, the Armbian 26.2.1 Minimal (or whatever version is the current version).  If  interested, you can start downloading that image.

However, if you scroll down you will see a lot more supported repos.  This is an overview of the supported repos:

• Minimal CLI

• Desktop

• Minimal / IoT

• Dedicated Applications

The very interesing one in the Dedicated Applications section is the Armbian 26.2.1 Home Assistant (or whatever version is the current version)!!!

This means Armbian has made a distro that only contains Home Assistant.  Isn't that nice!!!
But still, since Le Potato is not supported (yet?) by Home Assistant, this Armbian image remains unsupported.  Consequence: no supervisor present.

The Armbian people have also provided a Home Assistant image for Le Potato, which is great!

To get that image, use the Armbian Imager and do the following after you clicked the Start now -> button:

• Search manufacturer: Libre Computer
  As of this writing (August 2026) there are 7 boards supported

• Select Le Potato board

• For the Operating System, you have a zillion choices.  Scroll down to the section Dedicated Applications and then choose Armbian 26.8.1 Home Assistant (or whatever version is current at the moment of checking) 

• Select the disk on which you will flash the image.
  BEWARE!!!  All data of that disk will be wiped out!!!!

• Once the disk is selected, start the erasing and flashing procedure.  This will take a moment, so be patient.

Once the image is flashed onto the SD card, remove the card and put it into Le Potato.  Start up the board and if you have a serial connection to the board (which you should, by the way!) you can follow the startup sequence.  At some moment in time you will see a message Waiting for system to finish booting ....  That can also take some time.

At some moment in time, you will be asked to provide a password for the user root.  Next to this you have to choose between the use of a bash shell or a zsh shell.  Choose whatever you prefer (me = bash!!!).

Next, the system will create a new user for which you have to provide both user name and password.  Later on, the real user name will be requested.

After that, the timezone will be shown (Europe/Brussels in my case) as well as the question for the language based on the location.

You will have the opportunity to choose a locale, but I always go for option 6. Skip generating locales.

What happens next, is important!  You will see a screen named Preparing Home Assistant Supervised.  A progress bar will run and run and run... and run...  It looks like the installation went coco loco but this isn't true.  You have to be paitient and wait.... wait.... wait.... and wait even more ... and wait...  In the meantime, you can peel off the potatoes.

After quite some time, the installation will ask to reboot.  Reboot the system

From now onwards, Home Assistant should be up and running.

Check the IP address of your device using your ISP router (or the device assigning IP addresses), open a browser and type in the IP address, followed by port 8123.  So: http://<IP_address_SBC>:8123.

Once you type the IP address and the port number in a browser, you will see the Home Assistant onboarding page.

The first thing is to create a smart home (in fact, a new "smart user"...).  Press the blue button Create my smart home.

Next is to fill in your whole name, followed by the username you want to use and finally a password (+ confirmation).  You can also choose the language, I leave it to English.

Press the Create account button once all the data is given.

The next thing Home Assistant needs to know, is your location.  This will be used later on for triggers/scripts/... that are based on, for instance, sunset or sunrise (and a lot of other things too!).
Type in the street name, number, postal code and city/village.  Press the search icon on the right of the address!

Chances are the system is finding your addres.  Check the proposed address and if correct, press the blue Next button on the right corner side.

In the next screen you can activate options that helps the developpers to improve Home Assistant.  You're not obliged to do so, but I did activate them all.  Quid pro quo, right?

Press the Next button: chances are that Home Assistant is proud to present it has found some devices already.  However, you can't do anything with it yet.

Press the Finish button and you finally have made it to the home screen of Home Assistant.  Well done!!!

Changing the theme

Once you have Home Assistant up and running it's time to personalise it.  The first thing I've done is to change the theme from light to dark.

To do this, click on your name in the left-bottom corner of the screen.  A new window will open.  Somewhere halfway that page you will see the current theme.  It's set to Auto, meaning during the day the theme will be light and during the night the theme will become dark based on the sunrise/sunset in your region.  Remember you had to give your exact location during the onboarding?  Well, this is already the first situation where this can have an influence on Home Assistant.

However, I don't like the light theme at all, so I switch to the dark theme.

Installing MQTT

In Home Assistant I want to work with the Zigbee protocol.  The reason for this is that there are a zillion of devices out there that are working on Zigbee.  Above all, lots of those devices are battery powered, so it makes it easy to put them anywhere in the house without the hassle of needing external power supply.

Examples of such battery powered devices are:

• Presence detection

• Door sensors

• Window sensors

• Temperature sensors

• Air pressure sensors

• Switches

• ...

In Zigbee terminology, such devices are called end devices.  Since they are battery powered, the intention is they consume as little as possible energy.  Only when a status changes (temperature changes, person is detected, door sensor is activated) they're sending out information.  For the rest they are in a kind of sleep mode, so the power consumption is very low.

To capture Zigbee signals, you need a Zigbee coordinator.  Such a coordinator is responsible of setting up a Zigbee network and at start up will sense for Zigbee devices in the reachable area.

For this, Home Assistant has a built-in application called Zigbee for Home Assistant (a.k.a. ZHA).  However, the big disadvantage of ZHA is that it's not supporting all new devices on the market.  Next to this, device manufacturers have their own "protected" market and to use those devices you have to buy also their Zigbee hub, which is "protectionistic" at least...

Therefore, a Duch guy called Koen Kanters (https://github.com/Koenkk) made a general Zigbee2MQTT application that allows almost all devices (at least much more compared to ZHA) to talk to that application.  Zigbee2MQTT is then translating the message into an MQTT message.

Another advantage is that devices outside of Home Assistant can also subscribe on those MQTT topics and act upon.

Since I also heavily use MQTT in my current domotics system, I too will go the Z2M way.  But before you can use Z2M, you need an MQTT broker in Home Assistant.  So, that's what we're gonna install first.

See HP EliteDesk: Start up sequence -> Add MQTT application to install MQTT.  It's for my HP EliteDesk mini PC but the procedure is exactly the same.

Installing Zigbee2MQTT

The next thing to do is to install Zigbee2MQTT.  This is already described in the section Install Zigbee2MQTT the app way.