The Home Assistant Green is here | Hacker News Reader

The Home Assistant Green is here

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81 pointsTomte23 comments

For those that are curious about the difference between Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant Green:

Yellow is for power users. It supports any Raspberry Pi CM4-pin style board (for the "brain" including CPU/RAM/networking), is ZigBee/Thread enabled, has a M.2 slot for a SSD or Google Coral and optionally supports PoE. Green has none of these things, you have to add on a ZigBee/Thread stick via USB. Green is made for new users to Home Assistant who probably already have a Phillips Hue or IKEA TRÅDFRI hub for their devices. Green was also created because since Yellow was made Raspberry Pi CM4 prices went sky high and there was other competition in the same, newer, price range. Yellow will still continue to be supported long term.

Honestly I do not understand why HA devs choose such absurd deploys, ok, they need to get some money, but HA is a monster due to it's design, a hell of YAML, a hell of dependencies and so on. Pretend that one need a pre-built OS to put more monsters in the game is frankly ridiculous. Curate a simpler pip install and offer small homeservers eventually, but reasonably specced to be a home server, not just the bare minimum to run slowly would be much more reasonable.

If people really want useful IoT at home reliability is needed, playing with devices stacked one on another, usb toys and so on is a good recipe to made an unmaintainable pile of modern crap, unupgrade-able, unreliable crap. And HA is the less crappy in the game.

We’re super stoked to launch the Home Assistant Green[1]. It will be $99! The first 1000 are available today at Seeed, and 14000 more will be available end of October. More to come afterwards.

With Home Assistant Green we hope to make it very easy for people to join the Home Assistant community and experience a smart home focused on privacy and local control.

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/green

RK3566? Any chance we could get Soquartz support for the Yellow?

I recently discovered the home-assistant supervisor [1] repository. It's awesome to see such a well-designed, mature, and actively maintained open-source python application. I've found that there's no shortage of high quality python libraries and frameworks to learn from, but open-source applications aren't as common. I love coming across repos like this so I can study their design.

[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor

The supervisor method of installation is difficult to get right. The easiest way forward is Home Assistant OS, which includes supervisor, or just running the Core docker container directly.

This is pretty underwhelming without Zigbee or any "exotic" smart-home-specific hardware which would've been the main selling point of a HA-specific device.

As it stands, this seems no better (nor cheaper!) than selling Raspberry Pis with preloaded SD cards (or any Wi-Fi/Bluetooth-enabled general purpose computer for that matter), and is actually worse because RPis have much better ecosystem support (outside of Hass) and are easier to source if a replacement is needed.

I'm looking forwards to a turnkey Home Assistant hub that magically works with most consumer-grade smart home protocols (Zigbee, and upcoming Thread/Matter), but this is not it. "Buy this extra dongle to actually control your Hue/Ikea lights" is not going to compete with proprietary hubs that manage to do everything all-in-one and that most people already have in their house.

Big fan of Home Assistant in general, but this is a disappointment for me.

The green seems to be targeted at people who could probably get a Pi and install an OS and install basic HA and schedule/manually do OS/HA upgrades and whatnot, but would rather just buy a box that does all that work for them. I know lots of people who can sweat their way through everything up to but not including upgrades, so for them, it's a good product.

Sounds like you are looking for the Home Assistant Yellow: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow

It has Zigbee 3.0, OpenThread, and Matter; a DAC; and an M.2 socket.

Love how they want to keep the focus to the personal usage instead of selling themselves into building features for business.

Does anyone knows what is the current state of the voice commands? I always wanted a self hosted version of Google Assistant. I bet it's possible to use a fine tuned version of llama and open source models like whisper to have a local assistant smarter than any of these smart speakers available in the market.

Look into Willow by Tovera. It's exactly that.

We’re working on making a voice assistant with Home Assistant[1]. We have all parts done except for wake word, which Hopefully we’ll be able to ship soon.

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/04/27/year-of-the-vo...

It's great that this option is affordable, but at least for me, 90% of the value of HA is ESPHome, and I would want a little more horsepower for compiling and viewing logs. I run HAOS in a Proxmox VM and I had to bump the vCPUs from 1->3 to get reasonable compile times. I wonder how this RK3566 would perform when recompiling ESPHome devices, which happens every time you make a config change or a version bumps.

Looks cool, but until YoLink has local network support, I'm going through the cloud no matter what, might as well just use the cloud.

I’ve ran Home Assistant on a used Mac mini for the past three years and loved every second of it. Could not recommend more, especially because it’s functionally indistinguishable from Apple HomeKit if you set up the right integrations, just compatible with more accessories.

And of course it also provides a HomeKit integration, which works quite well!

I love home assistant, but I wonder for whom this is. I presume this is for non-tech people, but how are they going to discover it? Without brick and mortar distribution, this is not going to fly imo.

I think the best way to discover you want to do something with smart home is seeing someone else do it. Then you can advice this to them and have less fear of becoming "the tech support".

> I love home assistant, but I wonder for whom this is. I presume this is for non-tech people…

Not in my experience. For non-tech people, stick with Alexa or HomeKit, and maybe set up Homebridge for them.

Running it on a Raspberry Pi kit for 3 years solid. In additional to automations, also serving AdGuard and Tailscale for the network via easy to install plugins.

Which tailscale plug-in are you using? The official one seems to only support automation and getting some tailnet metrics and does not connect your Home Assistant machine to your tailnet.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tailscale/

https://github.com/tsujamin/hass-addons/tree/main/tailscale

I'm using the linuxserver.io brand docker container, which now supports Docker Mod, which has a Tailscale plug in.

https://tailscale.dev/blog/docker-mod-tailscale

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