“HA over iHost” Open Source Project is Officially Live!

Thank you for your feedback!

We understand the issue and will be updating the Supervisor to the latest official version shortly.
Once the update is ready, we’ll let you know in this thread.

Thanks again for your patience and support!

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Really? Any examples of such products? How about your own projects? Cube? Rubik? How about bridging HA with eWeLink? Today, it is impossible to make Zigbee devices connected to a Sonoff gateway (e.g. NSPanel Pro) visible in HA without the intermediation of the eWeLink cloud. Today, it is impossible to make Zigbee devices connected to a Sonoff gateway (e.g. NSPanel Pro) visible in HA without the eWeLink cloud. Matter is not a solution because it does not work well.

Regarding to HA’s license and examples of commercial products built with HA. You can read them on Home Assistant’s website, here is one of them: Apollo joins the Works With Home Assistant Program - Home Assistant

Regarding to bridging eWeLink and HA, you are absolutely right it is impossible to make Zigbee devices connected to a Sonoff gateway (e.g. NSPanel Pro) visible in HA without the eWeLink cloud. And I am totally agree with you that Matter is not good enough. But the question itself is not related to iHost Open Source Project, so I can’t promise what can we do and will do about it.

I’ve already read it carefully. And have you read it carefully? Probably not. The Works With Home Assistant Programme is about device compatibility, not HA commercialisation on hardware platforms.

Really? You don’t know what ESPHome is?



Apollo has also developed and sold Apollo Odroid which is a SBC running HA.

@ivan.v.babenko

We’ve updated the Supervisor to the latest version(2025.05.1).

You can try updating the Supervisor first, and then attempt the backup restore process again.
If you encounter any further issues, please feel free to let us know — we’re here to help!

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OMG! A spectacular achievement.

Hi, noob question, why isn’t it possible to enable automatic boot from USB? It would make everything much simpler, IMHO

If I’m not mistaken, they already said above that this chipset does not support booting via USB!

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@Unnamedi Yes, you are exactly right. @salvo80 The SoC’s internal BootRom only supports system boot from the following device:

  • FSPI Flash interface
  • eMMC interface
  • SDMMC interface
  • Async Nand interface

To support booting from USB, we will need to modify 2nd stage bootloader which is Das u-boot. Technically it’s possible, but it may not provide enough value to iHost Open Source Project users for the following reasons:

  1. The current hardware version of iHost only has one USB 2.0 port whose speed is less than SD/MMC 4.5.1 interface (TF card slot) .
  2. USB flash drive may still have compatibility problem.
  3. Our ultimate goal would be to support flashing HA/ioBroker/openHAB/etc. into internal eMMC, and boot directly from there. This way should provide a lot more speed, stability, and compatibility improvements.
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This is really really good news to come. Cant wait for the new 64 Bit IhostOpen Project with 5G Wifi, Zigbee radio, thread, in built speakers etc.

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That’s great news! I have been using the original project from Darkxs, and I’m glad to know that you guys are now officially supporting this. I’m looking forward to test on my own device.

A quick question: I noticed there is a official addon for the iHost specific hardware features. Is it in the plans to support the built in mic and speaker? That would be a nice addition to the Add-on. One of the possibilities I think is perhaps enabling the iHost itself as an HA voice satellite, so I could talk to HA Voice Assistant using the iHost hardware. Is this technically possible? In my limited understanding, the iHost may already have the necessary hardware for this: A mic, speaker and NPU to process wake word etc. Does it make sense?

My iHost is close to my desk at home. I imagine a lot of people also have the device sitting on an accessible place, instead of hidden inside a servers rack, so it’s easy to talk with it and use as a voice assistant, right?

Hi @fabianoarruda thank you for using iHost and your suggestions. We will be adding Speaker support in the next HA over iHost version which should be released on July 3rd.

As for the microphone, we have evaluated the current HA Voice Pipeline (openWakeWord, Piper, Whisper). We found out the performance was really poor on iHost (32 bit RV1126/1109 SoC). Actually, the performance of current HA Voice Pipeline is poor on many ARM devices, such as Raspberry Pi 4.

Home Assistant officially suggests leverage the voice providers (for speech-to-text and text-to-speech) included in Home Assistant Cloud, and if users do want to go local, then Intel NUC is a better option.

We plan to make the new iHost (64 bit SoC, and other hardware upgrades) work better with HA Voice Pipline.

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Hi,

Is there any plan to make the “Detach Relay” from Sonoff ZBM5 to work on Home Assistant?
@Daniel_Zhan

Hi @MichaelLearnsToCode,

I guess @Daniel_Zhan is not following this forum anymore.

Do you know the answer for the question above and how to proceed to update the Sonoff ZBM5 Smart Light Switches firmware on Home Assistant?
It’s saying always “Firmware unknown”.

Hi @renatoyamane

This is not an error with your setup. The switch will work normally—only firmware info is missing as we did not upload any firmware to ZHA yet.

When Sonoff releases a new firmware version, we’ll submit it to the ZHA project. Once merged:

  • OTA updates will appear automatically in Home Assistant.
  • The firmware version will display correctly.

We have implemented the Detach Relay feature on ZBMINIR2 ZHA quirk, unfortunately, we are facing the issue as the link below.

As this issue is fixed, we will apply to more devices with Detach Relay feature in ZHA.

Thanks. It seems it will be fixed on HA 2025.8.0 Beta

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