Great video. The coolest part of the HA Green is the power consumption and passive cooling. So impressive compared to a Pi 4 and all nucs and tiny PCs. I can’t go back to actively cooled computers.
Thanks for the info! Exactly what i was looking for👍 Only thing I'd mention is that the green seems perfect for some experts as well. I'm by no means a beginner (spent ten years as a linux sysadmin and am now a senior embedded engineer), and frankly have things I'd much rather spend my time on than installing and maintaining yet another server. I wanna plug it in and go directly to playing with the fun stuff. I've got enough servers in the cellar to maintain already 😉
You can always run Home Assistant on HA Green, while running "AI/image detection" in docker on a more powerful machine. I have been running HA in docker on my Unraid machine for years, but hate HA being down when i have to do maintenance on UNRAID. I might move HA and the low-resource dockers to HA green, and keep the high-resource (low-priority) dockers running on UNRAID. During maintenance, I NEED my lights working, I DONT NEED person detection.
Love my Home Assistant Yellow PoE edition (CM4 Lite, 4GB, WiFi/Bluetooth), very good with SSD nVME as well. Have the Zigbee/Matter/Thread built-in and excellent Z-Wave as well with the Zooz ZAC93 LR GPIO board (~$18). With all those protocols, plus good bluetooth, I'm well set for now.
I agree that Green is the best way to go. My experience with Homeassistant in a VM (all flavors of VM machines) was fun but too easy to break and that just got too much of a pain to keep fixing. Green has been great so far.
I think for the target audience a case that wasn't see through would probably have improved the acceptance factor but otherwise great little box for sure.
The one thing that's very slow on Green is compiling with the ESPHome add-on but that's slow on a Raspberry Pi as well. That's why I decided to run ESPHome on my fast server instead which makes tinkering and iterating with ESPHome relatively painless.
I am one of those people who never tried Home Assistant because I thought the whole process felt too intimidating. And I just ordered the HA Green last night because ease of use is its main selling point. I'm both excited and a little scared but I look forward to figuring out how to get all my stuff working together. It's just too bad that I will have very little local control. I bought too many wifi devices before learning that local was even possible. I'll slowly try to transition more to local, but for now I'll be happy if I can just get all my automations in one place with much better options.
When I first heard about HA Green, I thought the idea was great but that it would have a hard time reaching the consumer market. I'd love to be wrong about that. If your WiFi devices are Tuya based, there are ways to make them local. Just be aware that you need to go through the tedious task of setting up a Tuya dev account and copy/pasting auth keys into HA.
@@Toteniuz They're Treatlife switches, so yes they use Tuya/Smart Life. As for enabling them to work locally. I don't mind if it's tedious. But if it's difficult and I risk breaking it then I probably won't try it. But that's good to know. I'll look into it and see how difficult it is. If it's not too much trouble then I want to give it a shot.
Nice, welcome to the world of Home Assistant! It will be different compared to what your used to but stick with it and ask questions from the community and it'll definitely be worth it in the end!
Wait, what do you mean local? I'm pretty sure every device I have works over Wi-Fi. Is there anything wrong with that type of a setup. I'm putting together my home assistant server today.
@@nickbailey202 I mean local as in all your smart home stuff that either forms its own network(like Zigbee or Z-wave) or is connected to your local network(internet router) and will work as long as the power is on. All the WiFi devices I have from before needed the internet to work so I've been working on replacing stuff or getting a new Hub that will enable it to work locally via Matter.
Great video Lewis, and good advice. The sky connect should not be plugged directly into the USB port . The extension cable supplied is to give separation from the high frequency clock noise and will make the radio more reliable, as mentioned by Paulis.
Nice looking device to help people get started, great job HA team! I totally agree Lewis, whilst the CPU may be less powerful than a Pi 4, I think that using eMMC instead of an SD card will probably see the Green outperforming an HA setup on a Pi 4.
I can see this making it's way to independent workers (like me, on the side of my day job), where people ask for affordable automation without the hassle of really needing to know much and for the installer it will be way easier to maintain. On top of that, it greatly reduces the risk of points of failure, as there is no hassle with installing HA, keeping a light weight machine with Proxmox up and running, etc, etc. Looking forward playing with this. Great video! keep it up as always!
Great video! I was waiting for an official distributor in the UK, and jumped at the chance a few days ago when one popped up on the site. I didn't realise it was your store! I'm gonna do a video on it myself, let's see how my first HA setup goes!
Good point, Lewis! Although I prefer to use a regular PC, having HA accepted by a broader community (not only us, computer/automation geeks) makes the platform stronger, and that has benefits for all of us.
Thanks Lewis, another great video. I have just ordered one from your shop to test out having a remote HA instance to add another Zigbee network in a remote part of the house that the main servers Zigbee will not reach. If it works OK I will be ordering a couple more for my mothers house and the workshop.
Just received mine today thank you. Very impressed so far and is perfect for what I want. I will ordering another soon for a remote instance at my mothers house.
Nice price, but I would be careful with anything with Samsung NVME drives, they tend to brick themselves after a year or 2. No idea why they haven't recalled them. I personally had one fail, couldn't flash it before or after either.
Great video. I’ve dabbled with HA on an old laptop a year or so ago. Been considering moving back to HA but think the laptop keeps shutting down. This looks great for what I want/need so gonna order one with a sky connect from your site. Just to check the only think I can’t use are my old Wi-Fi bulbs. I only have a couple so it’s not a major thing to replace them out.
Thinking of getting a Yellow to take HA off my large Supermicro dual Xeon rack-mount server where it runs in a VM with dedicated cores. The whole monolithic server thing has worked well over the years, but it's a bit of a power hog when running 24/7.
i find it good for family members you want to get setup even it you're really experienced. It's just easy an fuss free. Nice job. HA is starting to really look promising for the future. I think this should just be a starting point device. If you wanted to add security cams, AI, plex, or other energy hunger features, these should just be addon hub/devices.
Lack of POE on the HA Green is easily sorted by a POE Splitter. Sure it's a bit more "clunky" than built in POE, but from a practical viewpoint it achieves the one-cable-for-data-and-power. In practise you won't notice the "clunk" as it sits at the back of the unit. Also, from an economics viewpoint, many new Green Users won't be paying for something they will never use and if it's something that becomes useful down the road, then it's a simple incremental cost. I got mine off Amazon for just over £10 (flash sale) for a full Gigabit splitter. Note that you can use a FastEthernet (100mbs) rather than a gigabit - this will be entirely adequate for any installs which don't involve streaming video
Hi, loved you video on Truenas Plex, helped me alot. But could you do a video on how to setup a UPS for controlled shutdown of Truenas server in a power loss situation ?
so I have a bunch of HomeKit cameras say about four I also have Reolink cameras the trackmix which one should I go with and I have a bunch of Lutron and PhillipsHue and ring also
Hi I'm at present running HA on a Pi3 and it seems to work well, butthe Green looks like a good update as pi is using sd card, my question is really around transferring from one box to the next i do have backups (thanks for the video on helping with that) but i do run quite a few Addons and will need to transfer the IP address as my Solar system points to the HA box as a Proxy before sending to the cloud.
I have a question for all who want to answer. How well is the integration with ST? That is my current hub and I do have both Zigbee and Z-wave devices. Instead of buying dongles for those, can I just use my ST hub to receive those devices, but automate everything through HA? If so then the green might be something I pick up. Great review.
Looks like it might work for those that are looking for a simple solution that just works. I could build a similar system with more power from parts, but do I get significantly more utility from that.
Could you do a follow-up to this, showing how to migrate from an existing HA setup? I've been running a Pi4 for a couple of years, so there is an investment in the addon's, scripts, etc that I use. I would hesitate at the Green because I would not want to have to recreate all of that from scratch.
@EverySmartHome Great video and tempting devices from HA. I have been wanting to try HA for some time now and use it with lighting, plugs, Thermostat and more as I learn its capabilities, I also would like to move my Security Cameras off Blue Iris running 4-6 Camera Feeds and onto HA if that is possible, I currently have Blue Iris running on my Gaming Desktop PC. Would one of these HA devices work for me? If not could someone please recommend a medium to small sized device setup that would not break the bank, that I could build or buy to meet my needs now and not need replaced any time soon if at all. I know enough (using the Web) to do things, I am not good at it but I eventually get the job done and not scared to learn. Any recommendations on any pre-built systems or something better I could do following a guide or video would be greatly appreciated. I have seen a number of interesting devices on this channel and others that seem good, I am just not sure if they can handle the always on Security Camera feeds I send to a 40” TV Screen in our Den and still do all the other HA things too? Thank You for any and all suggestions!
It has been a couple of weeks now and no response. Is anyone able to see this? or is it not a good UA-cam page to learn stuff like I am asking about? If not could someone please at least recommend a good UA-cam page or other online source that would be good to use?
I've definitely been looking at the Yellow myself as I've graduated from Home Assistant in Docker to HAOS on a proxmox vm. Right now I'm wanting to house what has become an important part of my dad's care (dementia), in a stand alone case that is backed up by battery. The VM I run now is on my big server downstairs, which is plenty powerful but it's Achilles heel is the storage options I currently have in it. I've already moved some critical network services off of it...and next up is my HAOS install. I don't think the Green is for me, as I'm more of a tinker than that is meant for. It's definitely a step in the direction of bringing HA to a wider market and I'm glad to see that happening.
Absolutely, sounds like you've identified what you need already and are on the path to finding something that works for you. That's the great thing about HA is the range of hardware it can run on
Any input on using chinese branded mini PCs to run HA? (beelink / GMKtec / MinisForum / Trigkey / etc). They seem to have very good specs for the price, but hit or miss on reliability. Curious on your take.
I have many old smartphones which all are more powerful than a raspberry pi. Recently tried to use that as a hass server cause this option is totally free. No official documentation I found for that. Some people on the internet made it run. I followed their steps. Either they were outdated. Or gone over my head. I am not new to electronics, networking or programming, far from that. Ran hass virtualised windows machine with diy esphome modules before. But my knowledge of linux and python are pretty limited. What's your take on that?
Hey Lewis, love your videos, I have been trying to switch from google home to home assistant for a while now. Bought myself a yellow but have had a HELL of a time migrating everything over/setting up my home assistant with all the your tips and tricks/suggested add-ons/integrations (especially with matter, I am so confused re possible redundant devices/services). I was wondering if you kept a running live document of everything to do step by step to set up a home assistant with your recommended add ons (system monitor, file editor, hacs, mariadb, etc etc etc) that you can update given questions from your audience? I know home assistant has a wealth of documentation on their website but its honestly too much, as I'm pretty code/network jargon illiterate. I honestly wish they would take all their documentation and feed it into a chatbot you could ask questions too, that would rule, but alas. Anyways I know all your videos have transcript articles but it might be cool to have a running document (unless you have one already in which case HELP A BROTHER OUT!). Love your videos man.
its so bad my yellow has just been sitting on desk not plugged in because im so overwhelmed by the setup. I tried the setup but everything was running painfully slowly, so I tried to introduce all the system monitoring stuff to diagnose the problem but the latency of every damn click was so painful.
Excellent video as always......We currently have HA on a QNAP NAS and we are selling our house and all the LED lighting in the house is controlled by Z Wave and we are taking the QNAP and all our wi-fi and networking equipment with us and we want to leave the house with automation for the new buyers and so I was thinking we could install a HA Green and plug the Z Wave dongle into the HA Green along with a wi-fi dongle then have a 15" or so HDMI monitor mounted on the wall connected to the HA Green.......would that work? Kind regards Bruce
I don't agree that 32Gb storage is enough. 10 days default recorder with not too many sensors that update to the second(power sensors is what I have in mind) and about 10 esphome compiles for different devices will fill it up. I lova HA but that default recorder days need to be lowered. Update: I changed my mind, I have way more rapidly changing entities than I thought, mosly esphome. I think I'll need to update my devices so that original power sensors become internal (more accurate riemann) and create template sensors within esphome itself that copy those sensors with a lambda and then filter it wih "or": throttle+delta.
Both my instances have a lot of sensors and probably about 30 ESPHome devices and nowhere near? Also with the default 10 days. Are you sure you don't have a bunch of old add-on images built up using the space? I cleared 16GB a couple of weeks ago from previous versions
@@EverythingSmartHome I had that problem too (checked with portainer) and also frigate starting to unexpectedly record locally triggered me to think HA needs more storage.
This device really seems like an answer in search of a question. Double the cost of a Raspberry Pi, the same or worse performance (depending on whether you're comparing to a Pi4 or Pi5), and zero radios onboard--not even Bluetooth (or WiFi, but any server--which this is--ought to be wired anyway). And only two USB ports. Yeah, it comes with HAOS pre-installed--but if flashing HAOS to a uSD card is problematic, HA just isn't for you. Is saving a few watts worth it? I wouldn't think so. A year ago, before the rPi5 and when the rPi4 was unobtainium, this might have made sense. Today? I don't think so.
Awesome video. Thanks to your videos, I started on my Home Assistant journey a couple years ago with a Raspberry Pi 4 install. I’d like to get a Green to have to upgrade to. I have an external SSD on my install now. Is the upgrade to a Green like the upgrade when I added an SSD? Thanks.
I thought it might be more like the yellow but with built in CPU so you don't need to source a CM4 module. The only good thing is HA is preloaded but I would argue if a beginner isn't willing to learn how to install HA they probably aren't ready for HA and if they are confident writing an image to an SD Card they can find a better SBC. The case does look nice though.
What is the difference between the yellow/green and the likes of Hubitat? And what would be best device for a beginner? Ps I do have a decent IT Knowledge
I have a question about what's behind you, the LED Strip, is it your Hyperion instance from I believe 2 years ago? Did you had any problems with it by that time?
Thank you for a great video. I’m using apple system. Can i just plug and set up with home assistant green? And do i have to do any extra steps? I tried virtual VMware but didn’t work. Thank you in advance
Hi good day. I am using eWelink with Sonoff. I have 60 devices, zigbee and non zigbee, with about 70 automations on my app. Will HA Green be able to handle/ run everythinh as well?
Hello, thank you for the useful information. I have few stupid questions. Will this work with Skyconnect? My country has frequent AC lines power cut. When power cut happens, will the hardware damaged? Will it start by itself when power is reconnected? Will i need to pay for any more platform to access the devices from worldwide?
I bought the Home assistant green but it doesn’t work properly. So I was trying to reset it to manufacture settings and start all over again but couldn’t find how to do it. Could you help me please?
Hi. My company was hacked seriously. So I'm taking care of the failed login. But don't know how to manage it on hassio and not clear information on the web...as safety is important. Could you make a topic about fail2ban and how to set it up...have a great day
I think this is a good device that has its place, but I do disagree with your assertion that it being "simple to set up" is a reason some people should get it. While that may be true, actually running and maintaining *any* Home Assistant setup is not simple. Being easy to plug in and switch on doesn't mean it's easy to live with. HA is great, of course. But I'm not convinced the software is ready for the kind of user who just wants to plug in and go. So is it wise to aim a product at that kind of user when they will inevitably have problems down the line?
The experience of HA after the initial setup is the same on any device though, the installation is the differentiating factor here. I think they've made big strides in the last couple years and they seem to improve with every release, I think given more time we will see more improvement still
Awesome and really helpful video, but one quick question: If I were to purchase HA Yellow, could I swap the Pi board on it with a Pi 5 that was just released? Finally, since this has a Zigbee radio on it, I am guessing that you would still need a Thread and Z-wave radio to work with said ecosystems. Thanks for the help!😄
Home assistant yellow uses a pi compute module 4, not a regular raspberry pi, if pi foundation release a compute module 5 that uses the same connector then its quite likely it would be compatible but no word if that's happening any time soon
@@EverythingSmartHomeI’m in the US, I might just be terrible at searching. I’ve not used rpilocator recently but, you better believe I’m going to now, Thanks for the exceptional content, as always!
@@EverythingSmartHome CM4 have been difficult to find without rpilocator-I've found there are still a lot of people who have never tried it out. But every day I see more CM4 becoming available now, which makes me happy! (Just bought a new Yellow for my office!).
Hi, I would like to send an Apple Shortcuts request to Home Assistant, and Home Assistant will return my phone's location. How can I do this? Thank you very much.
what flavour of HA is installed? Does the version installed support the community addons store, by Frenck (for example to install mosquitto, or nodered, or zerotier, etc)? Or can a compatible version be installed, getting rid of the preinstalled one? thanks!
if I use Home Assistant GREEN which has no WiFi on board I could control also my sonoff WiFi wall switch locally or I have to buy a Wifi dongle for the GREEN? Thank you for your help
You really don't make it easier to choose between yellow and green. If I understand it all correctly, if possible, it is that the yellow has everything that the green has, but can and has more. Or am I seeing that wrong. I would like to use this device not only for a home assistant in itself, but also to control things such as sprinklers and water addition in my private hydroponic system. Sprinklers, for example, must open for a very short time (seconds) and this can be done, for example, with a home app on the Android smartphone. The shortest time there is 1 minute. And that is why I would use this device, among others.
Great review. The most thorough one I have seen so far. A year ago I installed HA on a Windows 10 machine with VirtualBox and a GoControl HUSBZB-1 combo stick. I am so tired of MS monthly updates and reboots and was wondering if this is something I could "migrate" to using a backup and some config changes? I am using 10gig of space and around 2gig ram on average so I don't think that would be an issue. Any advice?
Oh goodness yes anything but a VM on windows 😅 haha kidding but the windows updates are really annoying like you mention and there is better solutions, green sounds like it'll be a good for for you!
@EdwinPWeston I'm in the same boat as you. It's sooooo frustrating when HA stops because MS decides to update. I've tried so many things to stop these auto updates but nothing works. I've decided to bite the bullet and go for the "Green". Fingers crossed it all works out !
I know it's more expensive, but I think I'll go for the Odroid M1 8/32 and plug in an NVMe drive for future data needs, and a Zigbee adapter too. Great video as always, I hope to see an Odroid M1 video soon. However, I will certainly order one before, so I may not like such a video if you don't recommend the M1 at the end of such a video😁
It's really annoying that the green doesn't have PoE and doesn't come with Zigbee out of the box. I get that most people don't need PoE so that's fair enough (but still annoying to not have it), but what really pissed me off was discovering that Green doesn't come with Zigbee out of the box. It's supposed to be the "easy" option but it's somehow less ready to use and needs you to buy extra components for it?! Daft! I'd have got a yellow if I'd known (and if there was stock at the time). I'm quite a techy guy in general and I love the amount of control you get with this system, but they really still have some room for improvement when it comes to being user-friendly, so many bits of the UI with messy strings, enormous lists of what are essentially phantom devices, it's not exactly obvious where to go to do your most common and basic things (some of the items hidden away in settings ought to be on the left nav). Scheduling stuff is limited to half hour blocks which also seems to defeat the point of having a system that gives you such finite control (you can't even schedule something to come on at say, 10 minutes past the hour? wtf?) Excited to get it working with more stuff but the learning curve on this thing is steep even for the "easy" version, and not happy I have to shell out more money to add key components that shouldn't be missing.
Wow, if potential users can't do the easy bit of d/l the img and flash a usb stick or drive, then they have absolutely NO chance of the nightmare ride they are going to get trying to get the cryptic, obfuscated Home Assistant sorted. Just a thought for any potential user to check out first, as I failed to get my 13 or so Tasmota's that have run on nodered faultlessly for the past 8 years to be seen/usable in various versions, including the latest HA. The installing is the easy bit, then comes the dark side.
Hopefully the HA Yellow will be able to supply enough power for a pin-compatible CM5, if one is ever released. The RPi5 definitely likes more power than the RPi4, to have full CPU performance and full USB power.
the aim is ease of use but the home assistant itself isnt really aim for ease of use. its more like for advanced users. I can only label HA as easy for newbies once they get rid off yaml on everything.
Plug and go?? How can you sit there saying it’s that easy ? Ain’t you forgetting about the automations ? If you can’t install a pi from a video or guide online how are you supposed to understand the scripting / logic of automations ? Heck . Even you have videos on the installations, this is not a barrier of entry, in my opinion it’s a approval of dedication to get it working.
Well. I bought the green to switch my mini pc to it. The biggest issue I see is lack of usb ports. Maybe you mentioned this, but I haven’t finished the video yet. Is there a compatible usb hub to use with this? I want to use a few HDDS for an idea.
Great video. The coolest part of the HA Green is the power consumption and passive cooling. So impressive compared to a Pi 4 and all nucs and tiny PCs. I can’t go back to actively cooled computers.
Thanks! Yeah the power usage is so low, impressive!
Thanks for the info! Exactly what i was looking for👍
Only thing I'd mention is that the green seems perfect for some experts as well. I'm by no means a beginner (spent ten years as a linux sysadmin and am now a senior embedded engineer), and frankly have things I'd much rather spend my time on than installing and maintaining yet another server. I wanna plug it in and go directly to playing with the fun stuff. I've got enough servers in the cellar to maintain already 😉
You can always run Home Assistant on HA Green, while running "AI/image detection" in docker on a more powerful machine.
I have been running HA in docker on my Unraid machine for years, but hate HA being down when i have to do maintenance on UNRAID.
I might move HA and the low-resource dockers to HA green, and keep the high-resource (low-priority) dockers running on UNRAID.
During maintenance, I NEED my lights working, I DONT NEED person detection.
Love my Home Assistant Yellow PoE edition (CM4 Lite, 4GB, WiFi/Bluetooth), very good with SSD nVME as well. Have the Zigbee/Matter/Thread built-in and excellent Z-Wave as well with the Zooz ZAC93 LR GPIO board (~$18). With all those protocols, plus good bluetooth, I'm well set for now.
Nice, yellow is great!
I agree that Green is the best way to go. My experience with Homeassistant in a VM (all flavors of VM machines) was fun but too easy to break and that just got too much of a pain to keep fixing. Green has been great so far.
I think for the target audience a case that wasn't see through would probably have improved the acceptance factor but otherwise great little box for sure.
I agree, the clear case gives am amateurish DIY look,, not a good marketing choice.
The one thing that's very slow on Green is compiling with the ESPHome add-on but that's slow on a Raspberry Pi as well. That's why I decided to run ESPHome on my fast server instead which makes tinkering and iterating with ESPHome relatively painless.
I am one of those people who never tried Home Assistant because I thought the whole process felt too intimidating. And I just ordered the HA Green last night because ease of use is its main selling point. I'm both excited and a little scared but I look forward to figuring out how to get all my stuff working together.
It's just too bad that I will have very little local control. I bought too many wifi devices before learning that local was even possible. I'll slowly try to transition more to local, but for now I'll be happy if I can just get all my automations in one place with much better options.
When I first heard about HA Green, I thought the idea was great but that it would have a hard time reaching the consumer market. I'd love to be wrong about that.
If your WiFi devices are Tuya based, there are ways to make them local. Just be aware that you need to go through the tedious task of setting up a Tuya dev account and copy/pasting auth keys into HA.
@@Toteniuz They're Treatlife switches, so yes they use Tuya/Smart Life. As for enabling them to work locally. I don't mind if it's tedious. But if it's difficult and I risk breaking it then I probably won't try it.
But that's good to know. I'll look into it and see how difficult it is. If it's not too much trouble then I want to give it a shot.
Nice, welcome to the world of Home Assistant!
It will be different compared to what your used to but stick with it and ask questions from the community and it'll definitely be worth it in the end!
Wait, what do you mean local? I'm pretty sure every device I have works over Wi-Fi. Is there anything wrong with that type of a setup. I'm putting together my home assistant server today.
@@nickbailey202 I mean local as in all your smart home stuff that either forms its own network(like Zigbee or Z-wave) or is connected to your local network(internet router) and will work as long as the power is on.
All the WiFi devices I have from before needed the internet to work so I've been working on replacing stuff or getting a new Hub that will enable it to work locally via Matter.
Great video Lewis, and good advice. The sky connect should not be plugged directly into the USB port . The extension cable supplied is to give separation from the high frequency clock noise and will make the radio more reliable, as mentioned by Paulis.
It sure is, it was just for a nicer shot during filming 😜
@@EverythingSmartHomenaaah, are you going Hollywoodish? 😂😂
Nice looking device to help people get started, great job HA team!
I totally agree Lewis, whilst the CPU may be less powerful than a Pi 4, I think that using eMMC instead of an SD card will probably see the Green outperforming an HA setup on a Pi 4.
I can see this making it's way to independent workers (like me, on the side of my day job), where people ask for affordable automation without the hassle of really needing to know much and for the installer it will be way easier to maintain. On top of that, it greatly reduces the risk of points of failure, as there is no hassle with installing HA, keeping a light weight machine with Proxmox up and running, etc, etc. Looking forward playing with this.
Great video! keep it up as always!
Nice did you order one? Enjoy!
Thanks! 🙏🏻
@@EverythingSmartHome yes I did ;-) via Switserland, as I'm in Austria 🙂
Great video! I was waiting for an official distributor in the UK, and jumped at the chance a few days ago when one popped up on the site. I didn't realise it was your store! I'm gonna do a video on it myself, let's see how my first HA setup goes!
Awesome, enjoy when the time comes! Thanks for the support! 🙏🏻
Good point, Lewis!
Although I prefer to use a regular PC, having HA accepted by a broader community (not only us, computer/automation geeks) makes the platform stronger, and that has benefits for all of us.
Absolutely! There is room for everyone here 😅
I just purchased the home assistant green from your shop! Can’t wait for it to arrive 😁👍
This video is undeniably motivating! - "Progress results from persistent effort..."
Thanks Lewis, another great video. I have just ordered one from your shop to test out having a remote HA instance to add another Zigbee network in a remote part of the house that the main servers Zigbee will not reach. If it works OK I will be ordering a couple more for my mothers house and the workshop.
Just received mine today thank you. Very impressed so far and is perfect for what I want. I will ordering another soon for a remote instance at my mothers house.
This sounds like the ideal device for me. I just want something I can plug in and use to get started with Home Assistant.
Nice price, but I would be careful with anything with Samsung NVME drives, they tend to brick themselves after a year or 2. No idea why they haven't recalled them. I personally had one fail, couldn't flash it before or after either.
can't wait for the "red"
There’s red coming out ? What’s that going to be like
Great video. I’ve dabbled with HA on an old laptop a year or so ago. Been considering moving back to HA but think the laptop keeps shutting down. This looks great for what I want/need so gonna order one with a sky connect from your site. Just to check the only think I can’t use are my old Wi-Fi bulbs. I only have a couple so it’s not a major thing to replace them out.
Disappointing that the green doesn’t support PoE, that would have made it an easy win in my books.
Thinking of getting a Yellow to take HA off my large Supermicro dual Xeon rack-mount server where it runs in a VM with dedicated cores. The whole monolithic server thing has worked well over the years, but it's a bit of a power hog when running 24/7.
Haha I feel you, still have my big servers!
I’m using a Mac mini 2014 (is my plex server) with virtual box. Would I benefit from buying a green? Everything seems to work fine at the moment
Is there a consensus that ARM is best for HA? I'm thinking add-ons being made more for ARM in general? Maybe other considerations
i find it good for family members you want to get setup even it you're really experienced. It's just easy an fuss free. Nice job. HA is starting to really look promising for the future. I think this should just be a starting point device. If you wanted to add security cams, AI, plex, or other energy hunger features, these should just be addon hub/devices.
This is a really good device, I've been running home assistant for a while on a raspberry pi 2, so this is an amazing starter solution
This would be a great little upgrade!
Lack of POE on the HA Green is easily sorted by a POE Splitter. Sure it's a bit more "clunky" than built in POE, but from a practical viewpoint it achieves the one-cable-for-data-and-power. In practise you won't notice the "clunk" as it sits at the back of the unit. Also, from an economics viewpoint, many new Green Users won't be paying for something they will never use and if it's something that becomes useful down the road, then it's a simple incremental cost. I got mine off Amazon for just over £10 (flash sale) for a full Gigabit splitter. Note that you can use a FastEthernet (100mbs) rather than a gigabit - this will be entirely adequate for any installs which don't involve streaming video
Hi, loved you video on Truenas Plex, helped me alot. But could you do a video on how to setup a UPS for controlled shutdown of Truenas server in a power loss situation ?
I've tried the used business pc to do promox/HA/nas/frigate. It's still sitting in the corner waiting to be setup. I just picked a Green up. LOL
so I have a bunch of HomeKit cameras say about four I also have Reolink cameras the trackmix which one should I go with and I have a bunch of Lutron and PhillipsHue and ring also
Hi I'm at present running HA on a Pi3 and it seems to work well, butthe Green looks like a good update as pi is using sd card, my question is really around transferring from one box to the next i do have backups (thanks for the video on helping with that) but i do run quite a few Addons and will need to transfer the IP address as my Solar system points to the HA box as a Proxy before sending to the cloud.
The price of green is perfect
I have a question for all who want to answer. How well is the integration with ST? That is my current hub and I do have both Zigbee and Z-wave devices. Instead of buying dongles for those, can I just use my ST hub to receive those devices, but automate everything through HA? If so then the green might be something I pick up.
Great review.
Can you add different bluetooth, z wave, mqtt, etc dongles to the green as well as additional storage via thumb drive or USB ssd?
Do you expect the CM5 to be compatible with the current Yellow board when it’s released?
Looks like it might work for those that are looking for a simple solution that just works.
I could build a similar system with more power from parts, but do I get significantly more utility from that.
Thanks Lewis! 💚
Appreciate you Jamie! 🙏🏻💚
Great video. Thanks. I did not see the Yellow on your page. Do you have a link?
Could you do a follow-up to this, showing how to migrate from an existing HA setup? I've been running a Pi4 for a couple of years, so there is an investment in the addon's, scripts, etc that I use. I would hesitate at the Green because I would not want to have to recreate all of that from scratch.
@EverySmartHome Great video and tempting devices from HA. I have been wanting to try HA for some time now and use it with lighting, plugs, Thermostat and more as I learn its capabilities, I also would like to move my Security Cameras off Blue Iris running 4-6 Camera Feeds and onto HA if that is possible, I currently have Blue Iris running on my Gaming Desktop PC. Would one of these HA devices work for me? If not could someone please recommend a medium to small sized device setup that would not break the bank, that I could build or buy to meet my needs now and not need replaced any time soon if at all.
I know enough (using the Web) to do things, I am not good at it but I eventually get the job done and not scared to learn. Any recommendations on any pre-built systems or something better I could do following a guide or video would be greatly appreciated. I have seen a number of interesting devices on this channel and others that seem good, I am just not sure if they can handle the always on Security Camera feeds I send to a 40” TV Screen in our Den and still do all the other HA things too? Thank You for any and all suggestions!
It has been a couple of weeks now and no response. Is anyone able to see this? or is it not a good UA-cam page to learn stuff like I am asking about? If not could someone please at least recommend a good UA-cam page or other online source that would be good to use?
How much RAM do you need and why? Can I use multiple Home Assistant servers?
Even the comments on here are too complex to understand, so id havr no chance of sorting out HA anytime soon.
I've definitely been looking at the Yellow myself as I've graduated from Home Assistant in Docker to HAOS on a proxmox vm. Right now I'm wanting to house what has become an important part of my dad's care (dementia), in a stand alone case that is backed up by battery. The VM I run now is on my big server downstairs, which is plenty powerful but it's Achilles heel is the storage options I currently have in it. I've already moved some critical network services off of it...and next up is my HAOS install.
I don't think the Green is for me, as I'm more of a tinker than that is meant for. It's definitely a step in the direction of bringing HA to a wider market and I'm glad to see that happening.
Absolutely, sounds like you've identified what you need already and are on the path to finding something that works for you. That's the great thing about HA is the range of hardware it can run on
Looks great. Would be cool to have an inward facing usb port to add the zigbee dongle on the inside
Yeah that would have been cool!
Any input on using chinese branded mini PCs to run HA? (beelink / GMKtec / MinisForum / Trigkey / etc). They seem to have very good specs for the price, but hit or miss on reliability. Curious on your take.
Thanks for this video! Ordered a Sky Connect from you guys - would order a green off you too if I didn't already have a big basket with the pi hut xD
Appreciate it!
I have many old smartphones which all are more powerful than a raspberry pi. Recently tried to use that as a hass server cause this option is totally free. No official documentation I found for that. Some people on the internet made it run. I followed their steps. Either they were outdated. Or gone over my head. I am not new to electronics, networking or programming, far from that. Ran hass virtualised windows machine with diy esphome modules before. But my knowledge of linux and python are pretty limited. What's your take on that?
Hey Lewis, love your videos, I have been trying to switch from google home to home assistant for a while now. Bought myself a yellow but have had a HELL of a time migrating everything over/setting up my home assistant with all the your tips and tricks/suggested add-ons/integrations (especially with matter, I am so confused re possible redundant devices/services). I was wondering if you kept a running live document of everything to do step by step to set up a home assistant with your recommended add ons (system monitor, file editor, hacs, mariadb, etc etc etc) that you can update given questions from your audience? I know home assistant has a wealth of documentation on their website but its honestly too much, as I'm pretty code/network jargon illiterate. I honestly wish they would take all their documentation and feed it into a chatbot you could ask questions too, that would rule, but alas. Anyways I know all your videos have transcript articles but it might be cool to have a running document (unless you have one already in which case HELP A BROTHER OUT!). Love your videos man.
its so bad my yellow has just been sitting on desk not plugged in because im so overwhelmed by the setup. I tried the setup but everything was running painfully slowly, so I tried to introduce all the system monitoring stuff to diagnose the problem but the latency of every damn click was so painful.
Are they going to restock the HA Yellow?
Excellent video as always......We currently have HA on a QNAP NAS and we are selling our house and all the LED lighting in the house is controlled by Z Wave and we are taking the QNAP and all our wi-fi and networking equipment with us and we want to leave the house with automation for the new buyers and so I was thinking we could install a HA Green and plug the Z Wave dongle into the HA Green along with a wi-fi dongle then have a 15" or so HDMI monitor mounted on the wall connected to the HA Green.......would that work?
Kind regards
Bruce
I don't agree that 32Gb storage is enough. 10 days default recorder with not too many sensors that update to the second(power sensors is what I have in mind) and about 10 esphome compiles for different devices will fill it up.
I lova HA but that default recorder days need to be lowered.
Update: I changed my mind, I have way more rapidly changing entities than I thought, mosly esphome. I think I'll need to update my devices so that original power sensors become internal (more accurate riemann) and create template sensors within esphome itself that copy those sensors with a lambda and then filter it wih "or": throttle+delta.
Both my instances have a lot of sensors and probably about 30 ESPHome devices and nowhere near? Also with the default 10 days.
Are you sure you don't have a bunch of old add-on images built up using the space? I cleared 16GB a couple of weeks ago from previous versions
@@EverythingSmartHome I had that problem too (checked with portainer) and also frigate starting to unexpectedly record locally triggered me to think HA needs more storage.
Great video! I'm curious what you think of HA Green (or Yellow) versus the new Homey Pro... would make for a great video.
This device really seems like an answer in search of a question. Double the cost of a Raspberry Pi, the same or worse performance (depending on whether you're comparing to a Pi4 or Pi5), and zero radios onboard--not even Bluetooth (or WiFi, but any server--which this is--ought to be wired anyway). And only two USB ports. Yeah, it comes with HAOS pre-installed--but if flashing HAOS to a uSD card is problematic, HA just isn't for you. Is saving a few watts worth it? I wouldn't think so.
A year ago, before the rPi5 and when the rPi4 was unobtainium, this might have made sense. Today? I don't think so.
RPi5 would have been perfect if it included eMMC (like the CM4), but disappointingly no...
Thank u for great summary !!!
Awesome video. Thanks to your videos, I started on my Home Assistant journey a couple years ago with a Raspberry Pi 4 install. I’d like to get a Green to have to upgrade to. I have an external SSD on my install now. Is the upgrade to a Green like the upgrade when I added an SSD? Thanks.
Nice device. But i have a Yellow so no going back.
I thought it might be more like the yellow but with built in CPU so you don't need to source a CM4 module. The only good thing is HA is preloaded but I would argue if a beginner isn't willing to learn how to install HA they probably aren't ready for HA and if they are confident writing an image to an SD Card they can find a better SBC. The case does look nice though.
What is the difference between the yellow/green and the likes of Hubitat? And what would be best device for a beginner? Ps I do have a decent IT Knowledge
I have a question about what's behind you, the LED Strip, is it your Hyperion instance from I believe 2 years ago? Did you had any problems with it by that time?
I been using non hue or zigbee light bulbs and smart plugs with smartlift do these become redundant if I start using a green HA??
Thank you for a great video. I’m using apple system. Can i just plug and set up with home assistant green? And do i have to do any extra steps? I tried virtual VMware but didn’t work. Thank you in advance
I know you have said it before, but what z wave dongle do you reccomend for HA yellow.
Hi good day. I am using eWelink with Sonoff. I have 60 devices, zigbee and non zigbee, with about 70 automations on my app. Will HA Green be able to handle/ run everythinh as well?
Great video! Thank you for help in choosing witch one is better for me 🙂
I ordered the home assistant yellow half a year ago and it's still not here. And now there's a new one already?...
I currently run HA on my iMac using VMware virtual drive. Is it possible to transfer my setup to a HA Green?
Hello, thank you for the useful information. I have few stupid questions. Will this work with Skyconnect? My country has frequent AC lines power cut. When power cut happens, will the hardware damaged? Will it start by itself when power is reconnected? Will i need to pay for any more platform to access the devices from worldwide?
I bought the Home assistant green but it doesn’t work properly. So I was trying to reset it to manufacture settings and start all over again but couldn’t find how to do it. Could you help me please?
I am building an arduino-based prototype: do you know if I can control the HA Green with an arduino UNO?
looks like that drawing turtle from the 80's. bbc or acorn computer i think. 😂 made our week in school that.
Hi. My company was hacked seriously. So I'm taking care of the failed login. But don't know how to manage it on hassio and not clear information on the web...as safety is important. Could you make a topic about fail2ban and how to set it up...have a great day
I think this is a good device that has its place, but I do disagree with your assertion that it being "simple to set up" is a reason some people should get it. While that may be true, actually running and maintaining *any* Home Assistant setup is not simple. Being easy to plug in and switch on doesn't mean it's easy to live with.
HA is great, of course. But I'm not convinced the software is ready for the kind of user who just wants to plug in and go. So is it wise to aim a product at that kind of user when they will inevitably have problems down the line?
The experience of HA after the initial setup is the same on any device though, the installation is the differentiating factor here.
I think they've made big strides in the last couple years and they seem to improve with every release, I think given more time we will see more improvement still
Awesome and really helpful video, but one quick question:
If I were to purchase HA Yellow, could I swap the Pi board on it with a Pi 5 that was just released? Finally, since this has a Zigbee radio on it, I am guessing that you would still need a Thread and Z-wave radio to work with said ecosystems. Thanks for the help!😄
Home assistant yellow uses a pi compute module 4, not a regular raspberry pi, if pi foundation release a compute module 5 that uses the same connector then its quite likely it would be compatible but no word if that's happening any time soon
What's it like are powering USB devices? I need both ZigBee and Zwave and use dongles for these
Shouldn't be an issue!
I see you have the USB sky connects on sale. Are they selling them out for something else or just a random sale?
Just to go with the Green as they pair perfectly, no other reason and nothing new coming (that I'm aware of)
I’m still looking for a CM4 for my yellow crazy. It’s been a year.
😱 Really!? What country are you in? Have you tried rpilocator?
@@EverythingSmartHomeI’m in the US, I might just be terrible at searching.
I’ve not used rpilocator recently but, you better believe I’m going to now,
Thanks for the exceptional content, as always!
@@EverythingSmartHome CM4 have been difficult to find without rpilocator-I've found there are still a lot of people who have never tried it out. But every day I see more CM4 becoming available now, which makes me happy! (Just bought a new Yellow for my office!).
Hi, I would like to send an Apple Shortcuts request to Home Assistant, and Home Assistant will return my phone's location.
How can I do this? Thank you very much.
Could the green be set up and controlled without a PC and solely with the mobile app to use with zigbee dongle
I have same question but wanting to use an iPad not an iphone.
It’s all done within a browser
what flavour of HA is installed? Does the version installed support the community addons store, by Frenck (for example to install mosquitto, or nodered, or zerotier, etc)? Or can a compatible version be installed, getting rid of the preinstalled one? thanks!
It's Home Assistant OS so yep!
if I use Home Assistant GREEN which has no WiFi on board I could control also my sonoff WiFi wall switch locally or I have to buy a Wifi dongle for the GREEN? Thank you for your help
WiFi devices connect to the network, not directly to the HA server.
The Home Assistant Green looks to be not wall mountable. Isn't that a little bit of an oversight?
You really don't make it easier to choose between yellow and green. If I understand it all correctly, if possible, it is that the yellow has everything that the green has, but can and has more. Or am I seeing that wrong.
I would like to use this device not only for a home assistant in itself, but also to control things such as sprinklers and water addition in my private hydroponic system. Sprinklers, for example, must open for a very short time (seconds) and this can be done, for example, with a home app on the Android smartphone. The shortest time there is 1 minute. And that is why I would use this device, among others.
Great review. The most thorough one I have seen so far. A year ago I installed HA on a Windows 10 machine with VirtualBox and a GoControl HUSBZB-1 combo stick. I am so tired of MS monthly updates and reboots and was wondering if this is something I could "migrate" to using a backup and some config changes? I am using 10gig of space and around 2gig ram on average so I don't think that would be an issue. Any advice?
Oh goodness yes anything but a VM on windows 😅 haha kidding but the windows updates are really annoying like you mention and there is better solutions, green sounds like it'll be a good for for you!
@EdwinPWeston I'm in the same boat as you. It's sooooo frustrating when HA stops because MS decides to update. I've tried so many things to stop these auto updates but nothing works. I've decided to bite the bullet and go for the "Green". Fingers crossed it all works out !
I know it's more expensive, but I think I'll go for the Odroid M1 8/32 and plug in an NVMe drive for future data needs, and a Zigbee adapter too. Great video as always, I hope to see an Odroid M1 video soon. However, I will certainly order one before, so I may not like such a video if you don't recommend the M1 at the end of such a video😁
It's really annoying that the green doesn't have PoE and doesn't come with Zigbee out of the box. I get that most people don't need PoE so that's fair enough (but still annoying to not have it), but what really pissed me off was discovering that Green doesn't come with Zigbee out of the box. It's supposed to be the "easy" option but it's somehow less ready to use and needs you to buy extra components for it?! Daft! I'd have got a yellow if I'd known (and if there was stock at the time).
I'm quite a techy guy in general and I love the amount of control you get with this system, but they really still have some room for improvement when it comes to being user-friendly, so many bits of the UI with messy strings, enormous lists of what are essentially phantom devices, it's not exactly obvious where to go to do your most common and basic things (some of the items hidden away in settings ought to be on the left nav). Scheduling stuff is limited to half hour blocks which also seems to defeat the point of having a system that gives you such finite control (you can't even schedule something to come on at say, 10 minutes past the hour? wtf?)
Excited to get it working with more stuff but the learning curve on this thing is steep even for the "easy" version, and not happy I have to shell out more money to add key components that shouldn't be missing.
my home assistant hardware i7-4710mq 4core 3.3ghz, 16gb ddr3 ram, ssd samsung evo 850 :D old laptop :D
Nice 😄
Wow, if potential users can't do the easy bit of d/l the img and flash a usb stick or drive, then they have absolutely NO chance of the nightmare ride they are going to get trying to get the cryptic, obfuscated Home Assistant sorted. Just a thought for any potential user to check out first, as I failed to get my 13 or so Tasmota's that have run on nodered faultlessly for the past 8 years to be seen/usable in various versions, including the latest HA. The installing is the easy bit, then comes the dark side.
Nope, nope,nope … I don’t agree with on security, safety and risk issue !!!
will ha yallow support cm5?
Hope so! It really depends on the Raspberry Pi team to make it pin compatible which none of us know yet but...we live in hope!
@@EverythingSmartHome me too
Hopefully the HA Yellow will be able to supply enough power for a pin-compatible CM5, if one is ever released. The RPi5 definitely likes more power than the RPi4, to have full CPU performance and full USB power.
A lot of folks will have a raspberry pi knocking around somewhere. :)
the aim is ease of use but the home assistant itself isnt really aim for ease of use. its more like for advanced users.
I can only label HA as easy for newbies once they get rid off yaml on everything.
What is it though I still don't know. whatever it is I guess the specs are nice.
Get rid of the eMMC, it should be M.2 only for the faster, cheaper, and larger storage capacity.
Plug and go??
How can you sit there saying it’s that easy ? Ain’t you forgetting about the automations ? If you can’t install a pi from a video or guide online how are you supposed to understand the scripting / logic of automations ? Heck . Even you have videos on the installations, this is not a barrier of entry, in my opinion it’s a approval of dedication to get it working.
Good video
Thanks 🙏🏻
Ndozvěděl jsem se co umí Home assist. Nevydržel jsem do konce. hrůza.
Well. I bought the green to switch my mini pc to it. The biggest issue I see is lack of usb ports. Maybe you mentioned this, but I haven’t finished the video yet.
Is there a compatible usb hub to use with this?
I want to use a few HDDS for an idea.
It sounds like you are looking to do something a bit more advanced so I would perhaps recommend a yellow or something similar
If only it had skyconnect onboard 😢
have you seen the zima blade yet looks cool