Fixing Home Assistant OS 17.2 USB issue on RPi 4

09 Apr 2026

I use Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 400 (same as 4 hardware but with a keyboard case). When upgrading Home Assistant OS to version 17.2, I lost access to my Zigbee devices because I have a USB Connbee ii adapter. Per this GitHub issue, there is an incompatibility with old firmware that prevents USB from working at all. Since this is a bit of a specific issue, I thought I’d post this issue with a fix for visibility.

Updating RPi 4 firmware with HAOS, USB Keyboard and Display

Ultimately, the issue is an incompatibility with an old version of the firmware on what appears to be rev 1.4 and higher devices. Symptoms:

• No serial devices listed in the “All hardware” view (/config/hardware, or go to settings -> system -> hardware -> All hardware)
• Probably you’ll see no USB devices listed in the “All hardware” view
• If you have access to dmesg (available through “Terminal & SSH” app), you won’t see any messages added when you attach or remove USB devices like the Connbee.

Prerequisites

Ultimately, the solution is to upgrade the firmware. In my case, I did it from the “physical” console, which requires:

• USB keyboard
• A display capable of connecting to the micro HDMI ports

If you have access to “Developer SSH” already, I think you can use that to go directly to upgrade the firmware from that SSH console without downgrading the OS first.

Downgrade to OS 17.1

Since USB doesn’t work you can’t use the USB keyboard, so the first step is to downgrade the OS with the command ha os update --version 17.1. I used the “official” app “Terminal & SSH” (Settings -> Apps -> install app) to get a web terminal. Once I got that, I downgraded the OS to 17.1 by running the command.

When you run the command, it will take some time, so you’ll need to wait. Then the device will restart, and you should have USB working again and probably everything will function correctly. However, you’ll need to update the firmware to upgrade to 17.2 (and presumably later versions). To do this, hook up your USB keyboard and display, then you should see a terminal console similar to what you saw when you used the “Terminal & SSH”.

Upgrade the Firmware

Now, issue the command login and type enter, then you’ll be presented with a root shell prompt (#). Here, you can type rpi-eeprom-update and it will tell you the current firmware version and if there is an update. If you have an old version, you’ve confirmed the issue.

Use rpi-eeprom-update -a to update the firmware. Then you can run the command reboot for it to take effect.

After the reboot, the system should still continue to work (because you are still on 17.1), except now it is safe to upgrade to 17.2. You can use the standard web interface method to upgrade to 17.2 at this point.

Alternative Approach

What if you don’t have a keyboard and display? If you have a spare SD card, you can create an SD firmware updater card. I did not use this technique, so I can’t vouch for it directly, but it is documented to work. This method would not require you to use the “Terminal & SSH” or to downgrade the OS first.

The documentation I linked says to use the Raspberry Pi Imager to select “Raspberry Pi 4 -> Misc utility images -> Bootloader (Pi 4 family) -> SD Card Boot”. When this card is inserted on device bootup (shutdown, switch the cards, turn it on), it should update the firmware then blink the green LED.