If you buy enough technology, there’s no escaping the sirens of a smart home. Amazon is effectively throwing Echo Dots at you. Google includes a Nest Mini with almost everything you buy in its store. You’re in luck buying new kitchen appliances that you don’t want to be connected to the internet. All of these have locked-down, cloud-dependent platforms that require you to follow the company’s wishes to use them.
But for the past decade, Home Assistant has been the go-to software for privacy-minded geeks who want all the benefits Apple, Google, and Amazon products have to offer, with more flexibility and fewer security risks. And now, to celebrate his 10th anniversary of the software, the people behind Home Assistant have announced a new product, Home Assistant His Green, in hopes of extending Home Assistant beyond the geek realm. I am.
“Our ideal future is that in the long term, we want people to have smart homes that value privacy, not something that only the rich and geeks have access to.” Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant and CEO of Nabu Casa, said in an interview. .
“We want people to have privacy-focused smart homes, not just the rich and geeky.”
Like many people, I first discovered Home Assistant because my Hue lights, smart speakers, NAS, air conditioner, not to mention random switches on things, didn’t work well with each other or at all. This was because there were too many devices that didn’t work together. , motion presence sensor, and other non-conforming dongles purchased on AliExpress. And while large enterprises are adopting Threads to make everything work together, even interoperability is confusing. General dissatisfaction with the way things are and a painful desire for specificity seem to be common routes to home assistantship.
However, there were many obstacles. The process of setting up Home Assistant isn’t too difficult for someone who plays around with her Raspberry Pi on a regular basis, but it’s still a challenge for the faint of heart. At this point, this is still hobbyist software, and setup is still a very intentional process by design. But there are so many people who want to participate without having to mess with hardware. Home Assistant Green is a handy little package and an attempt to make the onboarding part easier for everyone.
box for everyone
The price is $99, home assistant yellowThe RK3566 quad-core CPU is fast enough to run software without any issues, but what’s new about Home Assistant Green isn’t that it’s packed with powerful high-end hardware. What makes this device unique is the 32GB eMMC storage that comes preloaded with the Home Assistant platform. This is a more affordable and much easier entry point for those who want to dip their toe in the water without flashing a memory card from another his PC. The unit also comes with 4 GB of his LDDR4x RAM, several USB 2.0 slots, an HDMI output, and a microSD slot for expansion.
The device is clearly made solely to run a home assistant operating system and is not intended to be a multipurpose computer like the Raspberry Pi. Also, this isn’t a piece of hardware you can just gift to your technophobic relative, but rather for people who know about Home Assistant but don’t want to go through the hassle of running it all. .
To get started, simply connect to the included power adapter and connect to your router via Ethernet (Green doesn’t have Wi-Fi, because “you need to use Ethernet as the backbone of your smart home,” Shosen says. will be explained). Run the setup process using your phone or another computer. The system automatically detects operational devices on the network. If you don’t have an existing way to connect to your Hue hub or Zigbee device (and experimentally thread), you can add a Skyconnect dongle later. There are countless devices on which Home Assistant already works, but with Home Assistant He Green, simplicity is the key.
I received an early sample of the device for testing. This came in a nice brushed plastic case with a metal base and easy to follow instructions. This is a much nicer looking setup than what I currently have. This is a naked Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with cables sticking out at various angles that looks like it would be at home on a bookshelf.
Once you plug everything in and point your computer’s browser to Green’s address (http://homeassistant.local:8123/) or the Home Assistant mobile app, you’ll see a quick install screen asking if you want to start a new installation. You can restore your smart home or restore your old one. Since I was already running Home Assistant, I made sure to create a full backup of my instance and downloaded it to my PC before unplugging it from the router. From there, I uploaded the backup and waited about 20 minutes for everything to fall into place. Currently, it doesn’t tell you when it’s done, so you have to refresh your browser window, but sure enough, everything is right where you left it, and all of his painstaking UI tweaks and integrations are there too. did. Skyconnect worked. Everything went well.
If simplicity was the goal, the team achieved it.
“Right now, we’re targeting an audience we call ‘growthers,'” Shoutsen explained via Discord. “That’s the person who uses Amazon/Apple etc. and reaches their limits and wants more. They search the web and find a home assistant. At that point, the user already knows they need a smart home. and are generally looking for solutions to problems that home assistants can solve. (We don’t know if it’ll ever be resolved), so we think we’ve been missing out on a significant number of growers, so together with Green, we’re trying to provide a way for anyone to get started using Home Assistant. .”
Home assistant experience 10 years
Home Assistant, which turns 10 today, has grown a lot over the past decade. Like me, Schoutsen got into the game after getting his expensive set of Philips Hue light bulbs and hitting a wall with what they would let him do.
“I didn’t start Home Assistant because I wanted to write a smart home platform,” he explained. “I bought Hue when it came out. At that point I was finishing up his MSC thesis as a visiting scholar at UCSD, and I was doing a lot of work with Python, so I was writing some code to communicate with Hue. I wrote it.”
Since then, the project and team The number has increased to 28 people. Home His Assistant’s development is funded by subscriptions to the company’s Cloud His service. home assistant cloudAs well as selling hardware such as yellowlimited edition blue, the SkyConnect dongle, and now the Green Hub, allowing the company to grow without holding its breath for outside investors. Outside of the core team itself, there are countless people who add to Blueprints and contribute code in their spare time. According to Schoutsen, Home Assistant is his second most active open source project on GitHub.
When I asked about the possibility of expanding the project beyond the country, Schousen said he wasn’t interested. “Whenever you expand your focus, you have to add features that fit well in one use case, but poorly in the other,” he explains. did. “I don’t want to pursue hotels or offices. When talking to companies, people always assumed we would go there, because that’s where the money is but it’s not fun 🙂. And we don’t have investors to move us away from focusing on the home.” Building into the office would also require very strict access controls, which would slow the process of adding functionality, Schoussen said. It’s a more sober vision for the product than what we typically see from the founder, and that vision becomes even more complex when asked how he sees the Home Assistant compared to products from Google and Apple. became.
“I don’t think we’ll be directly competing with Google/Amazon/Apple anytime soon in terms of the demographics of users we need to teach about smart homes, because anyone with a smartphone has access to Google Home or Apple Home. However, we do not claim that these users have a smart home. Having multiple connected devices does not make it a smart home. A house can only be said to be “smart” if we start to take an interest in making things more interesting. ”
“Homes can only be said to be ‘smart’ if people become interested in integrated control and coordination of connected devices.”
Having used both HomeKit and Home Assistant, I tend to agree. Home Assistant’s main market has always been people who want an intentionally smart home, one that works exactly as they want it to, rather than an overly curated closed garden. And while there’s still plenty of work to do to make it more appealing to beginners (Shosen admits it should be easier to find user-generated blueprints), make it work. The core hasn’t changed. Thousands of users are getting devices for their homes and saying: “This doesn’t work the way I want” and find a workaround and share your progress.
“It takes a lot of effort to keep the machine running,” he said.
I’m a tinkerer by nature, but I also live with the understanding that most people don’t. Raspberry Pi can spark curiosity, but many people already want to do most of the things to get there. Too much IoT hardware is sold as seductively easy and attractive at the expense of being closed, insecure, and intrusive. Home His assistant green translucent plastic He looks at the case and hopes Mr. Shussen is right. My hope is that more people will be interested in running Home Assistant and open source software, and eventually have full control over a truly “smart” home.