Configuring Home Assistant to run off of a USB drive in a incompatible Raspberry Pi

 A problem with the earlier generations of Raspberry Pi's, especially the Pi 1 and the Pi 2 up to version 1.1, is that these cannot be configured to boot from an external USB storage device.

This is a particular relevant limitation for a number of reasons, including the fact that relying on an SD card for most of the storage needs is a solution that may have limited endurance.

The later versions of the Raspberry Pi (RPi 2 v1.2 and upwards), already offer some form of allowing external USB media to boot the operating system. 

Improving an RPI 2 based Home Assistant server for reliability and performance

For some time I have been using the same Raspberry Pi 2 v1.1 as the infrastructure for my Hass.io instance. It proved to perform quite reliably over the approximately 18 months I have been using it 24x7. From that time during approximately 1 year I used the same SanDisk Ultra XC I 64 GB MicroSD card:

Just for precaution I have later switched to a similar card, a SanDisk Ultra HC I 32 GB, and moved my Hass.io installation onto it:

Building a hardware watchdog timer for a kiosk or other system that needs to run 24x7 - version 2.0

My previous post covered a first version of a watchdog timer that I used in the past for another project. 

You may check it here.

As I mentioned there, I suspected that a somewhat different design would be necessary, because the target device could not have either GPIO pins available for allowing a keep-alive signal to be sent to the watchdog timer, or even if it had, it would be unlikely that the underlying linux OS on the Android system could not have the necessary drivers or support for changing the output of such pins.