With Home Assistant releasing it’s new HassOS based on Buildroot a new possible project appears on the horizon. People that know me a bit longer or for old time sake followers of this website, know that I have done my share on creating embedded devices firmwares during my KODI development period during which I was co-founder, CEO and lead developer of “The Little Black Box project”.
(Some j1nx history)
Athom – Homey is a great product! However not opensource and development seems to have stalled or at least not at a pace that it should be. As the device is based on a SOM from Solid Run using the i.MX6 SoC it should not be that difficult to create a standard Buildroot based OS that could be installed on the device. With a proper OTG-USB cable connected you can (un)set an eFuse on the device which enables the UART again. Kernel sources and U-Boot sources are available, so bare linux system is very much doable. However getting all the other hardware supported might be a challenge, but with UART acces and the full bootlog so basically full access to the Athom firmware it is at least not a mission impossible!
Anyhow: The Homey is rather expensive, so I have this planned as future project as soon as cash flow allows it.
Patreon / Paypal should get me in the position to get me a new or second hand device somewhere in the near future.
