In recent years, I had repeatedly considered setting up a Home Assistant instance to bring together the many loose ends of my smart home landscape. In addition to the Fritz!Box with thermostats and a few switches, the boiler also has connectivity, and then there are a few things from Ikea, and the roller blinds can also be controlled remotely.

Matter was initially still an option I wanted to wait for. Wait until it was finally no longer criticised by heise and Co. It is obviously difficult to create a solution that can communicate with everything.

That said, Home Assistant can already communicate with everything, regardless of the protocol. I had concerns about the effort involved and kept putting it off. Now I had the time and set up a proper instance that can do a lot and has a dashboard that’s decent enough so far.

The sticking point in the recent past was that the scope of my Home Assistant instance was pushing the Raspberry Pi to its limits. It’s only a Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM. It does have an SSD via USB 3, but overall, it’s not exactly world-class.

My first thought was a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4, if not 8 GB of RAM. But that’s easily 100 euros, at least for now. With RAM prices currently on the rise, that may soon change.

You also need cooling, a case, a power supply and possibly decent storage on top. Where does that end up price-wise?

I decided not to bother finding out after remembering an article on heise.de that praised a thin client for being so versatile and inexpensive.

At the time, heise quoted around 70 euros, but shortly after the article was published, prices rose slightly. I just managed to get one for 45 euros on Kleinanzeigen, with a new SSD for another 15 euros. The built-in 4GB RAM is enough for me for now. I no longer have to worry about the case, cooling and power supply, and the Futro’s power consumption is also slightly lower than that of the Pi 5. So far, so good!

When the Futro was on its way to me, I noticed online that it’s not as easy to install Home Assistant on it as it is on the Pi.

Problems may arise with the hard drive, as it may not be recognised by the BIOS or may not be bootable.

But it’s not that serious if you’re not afraid of Live Linux and a little bit of terminal work. Below, I’ll try to summarise how I got it set up in no time.

Installing Home Assistant on Futro S740

Prerequisites

USB stick (FAT32 formatted) for BIOS update
USB stick for Linux Live system
Internet connection, of course

Part 1: BIOS update

Why is this necessary?

Older BIOS versions have problems with UEFI booting from the internal SSD. After installing HAOS, the SSD is often not recognised as a boot option. Updating to at least R1.13.0 or newer fixes this problem.

Download: You can find Admin Pack V5.0.0.13 – R1.14.0 here:

https://support.ts.fujitsu.com/IndexDownload.asp?SoftwareGuid=FA0A6053-4D47-4C28-93A3-021C2E530D93

Found via R3NE07 – Also a good reference for the device in general!

Procedure

1. Download and unzip the ZIP file
2. Format the USB stick to FAT32
3. Copy the contents of the ZIP file directly to the root directory of the stick (not the folder, but the files!)
4. Start Futro → press F12 → select USB stick, displayed as ‘FUJITSU Update Utility’
5. Confirm update with Y
6. After ‘Updating Flash: 100%’, remove USB stick
7. Confirm Capsule Flash Update with Y
8. Wait for restart

Part 2: Preparing the Linux live system

You can use Ubuntu Desktop or another Ubuntu-based distribution.

Ubuntu Desktop: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Linux Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Write the ISO to the stick using Balena Etcher.

Booting
1. Insert the USB stick
2. Start Futro → F12 → Select USB stick (UEFI)
3. Select ‘Try Ubuntu’ (do not install!)

Part 3: Writing HAOS to internal SSD

Open the terminal and download HAOS. You may want to set the keyboard layout to your preferred language in the settings first.

cd ~/Downloads

wget https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/17.0/haos_generic-x86-64-17.0.img.xz

There may already be a more recent version available, which you can find here.

Then, identify the internal SSD:

lsblk

Typical output:
– NVMe SSD: `/dev/nvme0n1`
– SATA SSD: `/dev/sda`

Be careful not to accidentally overwrite the USB stick! The internal SSD of the Futro will be nvme0n1, as it is in my case.

Write HAOS to SSD

NVMe SSD:

xzcat haos_generic-x86-64-17.0.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress

sudo sync

SATA SSD (`/dev/sda`):

xzcat haos_generic-x86-64-17.0.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress

sudo sync

If the version of HAOS has changed, the command must of course be adjusted. You can also simply rename the download to haos.img.xz.

The most important thing: Create an EFI boot entry

NVMe SSD:

sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --part 1 --label "HAOS" --loader 'EFIBOOTbootx64.efi'

SATA SSD:

sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sda --part 1 --label "HAOS" --loader 'EFIBOOTbootx64.efi'

Part 4: First start

1. Shut down Linux
2. Remove the USB stick
3. Start Futro

The machine will work away for a while. If, like me, you still have the Futro connected to a monitor, you can follow the progress on screen.

The first start takes 5–20 minutes. During this time, the partition is expanded to the full SSD size and Home Assistant Core is downloaded.

As soon as you see the Home Assistant terminal start screen, you should also start to see something at http://homeassistant.local:8123.

Part 5: Restore backup (optional)

If you have an existing Home Assistant backup:

1. Select ‘Restore from backup’ on the onboarding screen
2. Upload the .tar backup file
3. All settings, automations and integrations will be restored

Conclusion

Really, it’s no big deal. The most important thing is to write the EFI boot entry. In the BIOS settings, you need to make sure that Secure Boot is off and UEFI Boot is on. That was already the case for me.

Sources
1. Home Assistant Installation Generic x86-64
2. GitHub Issue – Boot-Problem Fujitsu/SATA

This post is part of my tutorials.

One Hand Operation + at the Galaxy Store

This post is part of my tutorials.

Some CalDAV providers, such as Nextcloud, seem to have issues when integrating with Thunderbird.

Particularly if you’re running your own Nextcloud instance, Thunderbird will ask for the calendar password every time you start it, even though it was saved correctly before.

As with so many things, the fix is dead simple: scroll down to the “Config Editor” in the settings, click on it, accept the risk and search for calendar.network.multirealm. See the featured image above.

Double-click the entry to set it to true, close and reopen Thunderbird. You’ll be asked for all your calendar passwords once more if you have multiple calendars set up. After that, it just works. Yay!

This post is part of my tutorials.

The solution is surprisingly simple: replace the Wi-Fi card!

A solid replacement is the Intel Wireless-AC 9260, whose drivers aren’t (fully?) open source, but represent a significant improvement. That’s a trade-off you have to be willing to make, though in my view the benefits far outweigh the compromise. There are also newer Wi-Fi 6 alternatives like the Intel AX200 or AX210 in the same M.2 2230 form factor, though I haven’t tested these myself.

The connector end of the card isn’t identical, but you can safely ignore that – and importantly, the hardware kill switches typical of Purism devices still work.

Just make sure you plug the cables back into Main and AUX the same way they were before, and reattach the small sticker over the cables so they don’t touch the casing.

This should work with any laptop. To be safe, you can grab the Windows drivers from Intel beforehand.

—
* Also listed under the model name Atheros QCNFA222

This post is part of my tutorials.

After some back and forth, and the typical tutorials that did nothing for me, I came up with the following scenario based on these (as of October 2018, with the 7490 and firmware version 7.0.1). As with all tutorials, read it through first! Unfortunately, as with all things, there is no guarantee of success, and if at any point this tutorial stops working or gives different results: you are doing this of your own free will!

Before you begin

• Windows computer or at least a computer with a proper Ethernet port that is not controlled via USB. Then it should also work with a Windows virtual machine. Because…
• … you have to run the recovery.exe for your Fritz!Box: Google search for AVM Recovery and your model designation, e.g. 7490, and you should get the FTP folder from AVM directly.
• The Fritz!Box is best placed on a table next to the computer (so you can keep an eye on the flashing power LED, which will help you get the timing right) and connected to the computer via a LAN cable.
• The computer or its Ethernet connection is given a fixed IP, 192.168.178.2 – the netmask is, as usual, 255.255.255.0, the rest can be ignored.

Preparation

• Open Command Prompt as administrator – press Start, type cmd, right-click, open as administrator (for whatever reason, FTP login works better this way).
• Enter ftp 192.168.178.1, do not press Enter yet.
• Run the AVM recovery.exe and take it to the step where you are asked to disconnect the Fritz!Box from the power supply. Wait here! After that you will be asked to reconnect the power – you will need this step later.
• Arrange the two windows, AVM recovery and Command Prompt, close to each other on the desktop – things will need to move a bit quicker in a moment.

Execution

You will know most of this if you have dealt with the topic before. The new thing (for me) is to run the recovery.exe immediately after the reboot:

• Remove the Fritz!Box from the power supply, have the Command Prompt in focus, plug the power back in.
• Several LEDs light up at once, then the power LED stays lit for a moment and then starts flashing.
• After the first flash, press Enter in the Command Prompt – the FTP login appears.
• User and password are: adam2
• Enter the following step by step, confirming each with Enter (each command should return a response code including 200):

debug bin
quote GETENV provider
quote UNSETENV provider
quote SETENV firmware_version avm

Now pause for a moment. The idea that occurred to me at this point is that the box now thinks it is a free/original Fritz!Box. But when it then boots up completely, the provider additive nonsense kicks in from somewhere. However, the recovery.exe can identify the box as a free one at the right moment and overwrites the additive stuff accordingly.

That’s why it continues like this:

• Enter quote REBOOT (Edit: using uppercase may be relevant for older devices), press Enter, wait briefly until all LEDs on the Fritz!Box light up… (Edit: or alternatively run a ping on the box’s IP in parallel)
• … and then immediately fire up the prepared recovery.exe to search for the Fritz!Box.

This should work straight away and overwrite all partitions on the Fritz!Box. If the version number of the box is not found, the Ethernet connection should be set to 10 Mbit/s, half duplex in the Windows settings of the network device (feel free to include this in the preparation as well). You may also need to disable the Windows Firewall or your firewall in general. In my case, it worked even with the Windows Firewall accidentally enabled.

The recovery.exe runs through accordingly, you confirm everything and the next restart takes a little longer. As I said, in my case the combination of these two things worked straight away, after many other tutorials had brought nothing at all. I then booted the box several times, set it up casually, reset it to factory settings – to see if it would stick. And it did!

Best of luck!

This post is part of my tutorials.

So, if you are preparing your stick on a Mac or on Linux you definitely know that some things should be considered. For example, to work with a FAT32 stick and don’t use a GPT partition table (for the very uncommon situation that you may have converted some of your sticks to GPT).

But, surprise (not really): even when you’ve prepared the stick the right way, Onkyo can spit out an error during the update. Mainly in the 80% region with an error code around 80, e.g. 7-84.

The solution is as easy as it is dumb:
– Take the power cord out
– Use a Windows system to prepare a FAT32 stick with MS-DOS partition table. Sorry, but yeah, really, use a Windows system!
– If you want to be really sure: use the built-in unzipper in Windows to extract the Onkyo firmware update zip
– Copy the unzipped firmware file onto your stick
– Put the power cord back in, start again with the new stick

In my case, after a couple of fails with the first stick which was prepared on Ubuntu, this stick did the job straight away. So I hope it will do the job for you too!

Pro tip: If you want to control your Onkyo (or Pioneer) receiver with a really good app, check out ONPC. It’s open source, free, available for Android and iOS, and can do a few tricks the official app can’t.

This post is part of my tutorials.