With the release of the Raspberry Pi 4b 8gb, interest in 64-bit kernel and userspace has grown. Along with the larger memory accessibility, there are a number of performance improvements for general computing for 64-bit apps on the Pi - there are, however, a number of quirks to be aware of.

The following is intended for Pi 4b and 3b+ owners looking to try 64-bit deCONZ on their platform. If you have been tempted to make the jump to 64-bit Ubuntu (using the Pi Imager, for example), hopefully this little HOWTO will help configure the system that you know and hopefully love.

64-bit quirks:

• WiringPi, the GPIO library developed under Raspbian, is unavailable on arm64 above version 2.50-0 for reasons. However, it is possible to work around this.
• Until the Pi4's VC4 drivers are integrated fully and functional on v4l2, video acceleration (including MMAL) for ffmpeg is non-functional. This will affect those looking to run ffmpeg-camera and the like under homebridge.

First of all, you need to know that you may be using .deb files designed for Debian Stretch, but in an Ubuntu system. This is a many headed-hydra, and comes with a health warning, though a mild one in this case.

First up, we configure the apt sources to point at the dresden-elektronik repositories - this step is similar to, but not identical to the usual ConnBee II Ubuntu Install Instructions:

wget -O - http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz.pub.key | \
           sudo apt-key add -

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz \
            stretch main' > \
            /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deconz.list"

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://phoscon.de/apt/deconz \
            stretch main' > \
            /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deconz.list"

In addition, the raw Debian beta packages are Here, which are handy if you wish to be far more manual about the process: use dpkg -I <pkg> after downloading.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install deconz

sudo apt install deconz-dev

You should now have an operational deCONZ install.

The UARTS on the 4b are somewhat differently arranged from previous Pis, and that has been accounted for in the later version of WiringPi, but, the source was never released - it remains unpackaged for Ubuntu and Debian as a result. The existing version will work but you will loose the bluetooth functionality (without further reconfiguration work).

This is a shortcut to a working raspBee: note that it doesn't take into account any other overlays that you may need. Thats an exercise for the reader (and if you manage to make it work, write it up here?)

• Add the following lines to /boot/firmware/usercfg.txt:

enable_uart=1
dtoverlay=disable-bt

Under Ubuntu, you don't have the nice clean raps-config, so a slightly more manual method for removing the serial console is required:

• Edit the file /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt and remove the reference to console=ttyAMA0,115200