I liked the fact that the yellow had all the radios but did not ever buy one because I had to put it together myself and being blind makes that incredibly difficult.
I thought about getting the green and just getting the cards to do Z-Wave, etc. But haven’t done so yet since I’m currently using a Raspberry Pi 4 that somebody got me for Christmas a few years back
I don’t own a yellow but I’m also blind. I’m not sure it would be that difficult to set up physically from what I know. IIRC you just have to slot the compute module in place.
I would’ve bought a yellow but every time I looked they were out of stock.
Bought a bunch for a client project. Pretty decent form-factor, but they really need to have hardware that can do on-device AI inference. There are lots of reasonably priced choices out there.
Their whole “private” voice assistant story falls apart when they have to send everything to the cloud, including third-party services.
I think that the pipeline they made for managing voice chat is a great framework - specifically how you can point it to either local systems, their cloud, or third party systems is awesome.
I also think that while they are the champions of home automaton, they are playing catch-up on the voice assistant side.
On the whole I believe they still want to achieve on-prem voice, but the tech to do that is still being baked, and they’re not a Google or an Amazon, so they don’t have the money to be first in line.
I did set up a local LLM on a pretty beefy machine and Whisper to do local voice assistance, but it kept falling apart. The only one that worked reasonably was tying it to a commercial API. This was more than a year ago, so things might have improved.
But if they want to sell these things as an Alexa/Google Home alternative, they’ll have a hell of a story if they built a one-stop hub that ran an on-device model and did everything locally. There are a lot of smaller models now and companies like MediaTek make decent edge-processors with beefy NPUs.
I’m still a big fan of their approach. Sad to see them drop the yellow, but I hope it means they’ll come out with something better.
I agree that the private assistant thing falls apart if only using a green/yellow, but O don’t think that compute should be bolted on to these devices.
I have had an home assistant green for soon a year and it is great for what I need.
If I want the whole AI-thing I wpuld lile that to be run on a separate device that can be reached by the HA-green.
I was surprised to see this. I encouraged friends to get the Yellow because of the PoE support that the Green didn’t have IIRC.
Nabu Casa is still encouraging people to buy what’s left of Yellow stock.
I don’t really understand the appeal of Green. Yellow makes sense. More expand ability and
built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, optional PoE
Is it that zigbee and thread are less popular than wifi devices?
I’d have bought a Yellow but when I looked they’re out of stock. A n100 NUC probably is better for my usage anyways.
built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, optional PoE
Wait what, Green has no radio?? I always assumed it’s got Zigbee.
No ZigBee, zwave or threads. Only has WiFi/bluetooth built in.
They sell 2 separate antennas that each handle ZigBee/threads and Zwave, respectively for about $100 total.
Honestly I don’t know, but I think it’s bring your own USB.
It is typical, cheap SBC based on Rockchip RK3566 SoC. The only reason to buy this is to support Nabu Casa or to have product with Home Assistant preinstalled.
Yellow is based on the Pi 4 compute module.
I wonder if that’s going out of production soon.Not until January 2034.
Oh. Well then.
The Pi 5 compute module works just fine in it.
@lka1988
According to Nabu Casa sales of Yellow went too low to justify the launch of a new production batch.That makes more sense.
I don’t see functional reason to buy green other than supporting nabu casa. I like yellow for integrated ZigBee and ability to replace cm4. I was about to buy 3rd yellow but maybe I should move to some minisforum NUC.
I bought the green because I have too much to do right now and limited bandwidth.
So having something that I can just plug in rather than having to research what kind minipc to buy, such one would work best for home assistant, install it, debug it …
A good option are also mini pcs like the Lenovo M720q or the Futro S740
Thanks for other suggestions. I should get into figuring out all the available mini PCs, minisforum is just being in my feed a lot lately.
This comparison has some good info: https://github.com/a-little-wifi/TinySecrets
The MinisForum B550 is what I use for my own setup and it works pretty well.
