Home Assistant Green | Smart Home hub with Advanced Automation | Official Home Assistant Hardware

I like to consider home assistant the god of smart home hubs, and so far it is. There’s tons of things you can do, and any compatible devices (which includes a lot) can work together seamlessly. As far as connectivity goes, it connects to your home network with Ethernet, requiring no wireless setup, and from there can run everything locally. This results in almost instant response times from automations, not to mention the amount of flexibility you get when setting those automations up to begin with. Yes, this may be a pricy way of setting up a smart home, but so far it’s been worth it.

Home Assistant is amazing! It breaks down all the walled gardens between Smart Home vendors like Lutron, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc. Ex. I can now use the Lutron motion sensor to control all other smart home devices that could not talk to Lutron directly. It also fixes stupid bugs like the Arlo Video Doorbell no longer announcing motion on Amazon Echo devices via Alexa; I can now use Home Assistant to announce motion on the Arlo Doorbell on Echos and Sonos and other speakers around the house. It also enables truly hands-free automations like setting the correct Philips Hue lighting scenes whenever I start or stop video playback on a Zidoo video player. These examples are just scratching the surface. Home Assistant, using local control, responds much faster and more reliability than cloud-based automation platforms like Alexa and Google Home. It's also compatible with so many more devices than the cloud-based platforms. Don't let the Home Assistant's geeky reputation scare you away. The Home Assistant Green device is completely plug-and-play. Make sure you install the HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) to get the most out of HA. Amazon wants me to say something about size: the Home Assistant Green is tiny and unobtrusive, you can tug it away anywhere.

I ended up buying this device about 2 months ago when the Alexa devices could no longer access the Sengled cloud servers. This change rendered most of my smart bulbs useless via Alexa voice control, so that’s how I landed on Home Assistant Green. I admittedly did not do enough research to truly understand what I was buying and I’ve spent the last 2 months experimenting and this ultimately was a great purchase for me. In addition to the cost of the Home Assistant Green (Which isn’t peanuts necessarily) I had to buy 4 additional antennas so HA could communicate with the various devices I have. Another cost was a powered USB hub so I could connect all 4 USB antennas at once; due to HA only having 2 USB ports. These are all relatively cheap antennas (around $20-25/a piece) but costs are slowly adding up. To be fair though, HA did discover a lot of my devices just out of the box and hardwired to my router, so if you just need the basics, then you might not need to purchase anything additional depending on your device setup. BUT, if you do want more control and flexibility with your current mixed brand smart devices, then HA with a couple of small add-ons is the way to go. The reason I would say this isn’t exactly for beginners is because it’s not necessarily a plug n’ play setup like it is setting up devices in Amazon Alexa. Depending on your devices and how easily they integrate with Home Assistant Green would determine the level of experience needed to fully leverage the automation capabilities of the Home Assistant. I’ve been able to move all of my smart home devices under one roof now through Home Assistant and utilize local control all while maintaining voice control with Alexa via the Home Assistant Cloud subscription. All in all this has been a great little investment and with some effort to learn on my part, I’ve really been able to dial in control over my home smart devices and setup some automations that are only possible through Home Assistant Green (and possibly other “like devices”).

If you are getting into home assistant, this works out of the box. No need to fool around with some old PC or Raspberry Pi. Spend your time learning HA, not getting it installed. highly recommend.

If you want to use Home Assistant. Fully integrated and ready to go. Save time and get one of these rather than sloggiing away building your own. Good value for the money.

Great product easy to configure for I ital set up. Very robust configuration set. Not really for a pure novice but with ai support even a novice could probably configure scenes quickly as documentation is readily available to ai to walk you through even more advanced scenes.

For years I have been using smart bulbs, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and some smart switches. Home Assistant has transformed my house into an incredibly advanced system of devices all working together. This controls my garage doors, lighting, thermostat, music, TVs and more. You can talk to this just like Google and Alexa, this can send you customized notifications to your phone for events around your home. This can do things like automatically close your garage door if it's been left open too long, it can turn the lights on and off when you enter and leave a room. This is an absolutely incredible piece of hardware. I cannot say enough good things about it.

I have an incredibly robust smart home which is mostly Matter/Thread devices and this seemed like a good next step in my adventures to automate and create cool dashboards, while still allowing the family to use Apple Home as their frontend but after two days of fighting with getting a small sample size of my hundreds of devices onboarded, I ultimately gave up. Anyone who says this is rock solid clearly isn't leveraging Matter or Thread in their smart home setup. I have encountered very few issues with my Thread network composed of Apple TVs, Homepod Minis, and a few Aqara cameras and hubs with hundreds of endpoints and FTDs over the years but the second I set this up, it wrecked the entire Thread. TBRs started creating new networks and hopping around, tearing down communications and never healing. I removed it from the equation and everything cleared up near-instantly. Other than a few Matter bridges, I was never able to get a single Matter over WiFi device to join this using multi-admin. It's a cool concept and it works really well integrating with a few APIs and Cloud accounts, but it is very limited in what you can onboard that way, even with community support. This is absolutely not designed for the modern smart home and shouldn't even be advertising Matter support with the way it is haphazardly put together. To be fair, if my house had all Zigbee instead of Thread, this review might be written completely different. This is also far from the easiest way to set things up, so if you're not tech literate and just getting started out, steer well clear. Very disappointed tech addict over here.