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 😉

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.

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.

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.

This video is undeniably motivating! - "Progress results from persistent effort..."

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.

Thank u for great summary !!!

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!

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!

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.

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.

Thanks Lewis! 💚

This sounds like the ideal device for me. I just want something I can plug in and use to get started with Home Assistant.

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.

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 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.

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 pondered the green, you confirmed I would be better off facerolling the yellow. tyty

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Great video! I'm curious what you think of HA Green (or Yellow) versus the new Homey Pro... would make for a great video.

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😁

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

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

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.

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

Great video. Thanks. I did not see the Yellow on your page. Do you have a link?

Can you add different bluetooth, z wave, mqtt, etc dongles to the green as well as additional storage via thumb drive or USB ssd?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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??

I know you have said it before, but what z wave dongle do you reccomend for HA yellow.

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

@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!

I currently run HA on my iMac using VMware virtual drive. Is it possible to transfer my setup to a HA Green?

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 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?

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 am building an arduino-based prototype: do you know if I can control the HA Green with an arduino UNO?

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!😄

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

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

have you seen the zima blade yet looks cool

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

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.

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?

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.

Even the comments on here are too complex to understand, so id havr no chance of sorting out HA anytime soon.

can't wait for the "red"

Looks great. Would be cool to have an inward facing usb port to add the zigbee dongle on the inside

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.

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!

Are they going to restock the HA Yellow?

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

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.

Good video

RPi5 would have been perfect if it included eMMC (like the CM4), but disappointingly no...

I see you have the USB sky connects on sale. Are they selling them out for something else or just a random sale?

Nice device. But i have a Yellow so no going back.

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

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.

I ordered the home assistant yellow half a year ago and it's still not here. And now there's a new one already?...

What's it like are powering USB devices? I need both ZigBee and Zwave and use dongles for these

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.

Could the green be set up and controlled without a PC and solely with the mobile app to use with zigbee dongle

A lot of folks will have a raspberry pi knocking around somewhere. :)

‘Not everybody has the knowledge or experience to download an image from the internet’ And you expect them to get to grips with HA? Lol. 😂

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.

my home assistant hardware i7-4710mq 4core 3.3ghz, 16gb ddr3 ram, ssd samsung evo 850 :D old laptop :D

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.

I’m still looking for a CM4 for my yellow crazy. It’s been a year.

The Home Assistant Green looks to be not wall mountable. Isn't that a little bit of an oversight?

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?

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.

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.

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.

If only it had skyconnect onboard 😢

Hi, i have tried using HA but i find the coding part difficult ie YAML, with getting the green or yellow, will i still need to do coding or easy it plug and play?

The most important disadvantage is that home assistant is not free like smartthings. I was used to turning on the lights using Alexa, which in home assistant you have to pay for. Home assistant is hopeless compared to smarttings. Examples: sometimes it shows that the lights are on when they are not on, sometimes the thermostats are offline, then after 2 days they are online, Motion sensors sometimes work and sometimes they don't work. I thought it would be faster because it is local compared to smartthings - it is not. I am disappointed with how it works after watching videos praising the home assistant. I think most of these videos are sponsored.

Nope, nope,nope … I don’t agree with on security, safety and risk issue !!!

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.

will ha yallow support cm5?

Get rid of the eMMC, it should be M.2 only for the faster, cheaper, and larger storage capacity.

Zigbee = obsolete The future is Thread.

What is it though I still don't know. whatever it is I guess the specs are nice.

Why do all of these videos focus on the hardware instead of what it can actually do?

Problem is home assistant itself. It is not easy software to use.

The official Home Assistant devices are not worth buying as a new user or existing hobbyist type user in my opinion. If they're going to advertise it to new users they need to produce a device which for the most part out of the box is a one stop shop, with decent Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, Bluetooth (Everything) included out the box. All that buy our product and then start having to buy additional dongles to make something work which should have been there and working in the first place for a novice is retarded. As is not including something out of the box (a decent processor) that enthusiast and hobbyist users might at some point want, like the need to use a cam/s (doorbell), that's equally retarded. How about they produce a slightly larger product, make sure everything is packed in there which will hit everyone's expectations and just charge a bit more money. People in the smart home scene have spent hundreds on shitty subpar doorbells, limited google assistant touch displays and way too much on money on overly hyped subpar Aqara FP2 occupancy sensors riddled in bugs, glitches and ghosting issues. I'm pretty sure smart home users would foot the bill for one clean one stop shop smart home hub with a decent bit of processing power grunt, ram, hdd and all of the necessary wireless integrations that cover all current existing wireless protocols and devices out at the moment.

Let’s be honest here. Green is the overall theme. Drop 100 greenbacks for device. If you want zigbee and zwave, drop another 30 greenbacks. If you want thread, yeah you got it drop another 30 green. If you want to use it with your favorite voice assistants, drop another $60 a year for nabu casa. Want your data and everything to stay local? Forget it. Home assistant is not a Matter bridge so you still need cloud access for Google and Amazon. Then you end up with a porcupine device with fobs and dongles hanging off it.