Home Assistant Green is the best purchase of smart housing I have made

When I started building an intelligent house, my Samsung Frame TV served as the center that connected everything together. Now the brain of the home is a small box that controls everything locally instead of trusting the cloud. His name is Home Assistant Green, and it is the best investment I have made in my intelligent home.

I did not want to install the house wizard myself

Home Assistant is an alternative to platforms such as Samsung Smartthings and Google Home. Unlike them, the origin assistant is not linked to a corporation. It is a free and open source project provided by a community of developers who work together to offer a private way of controlling our smart homes, one that will not suddenly break because a company loses interest.

A Home Assistant benefit is that you can download the software for free and execute it on a PC you already have.

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Personally, that is not a project that I have the time or interest in assuming at this time. My two young children have assumed all the time I once had for the test and the error that often comes with DIY projects and playing with technology. In addition, I don’t have a mini PC or a single plate computer out there.

Home Assistant Green does the job for you

Home Assistant Green is a pre -constructed center that comes directly from the assistant team of origin. It is marketed as the easiest way to put in your hands the home wizard if you do not want to configure things yourself. I made a request for AmeridroidAnd in a week, the package was at my door.

The configuration process was so simple that, although I did it at night, when I was already tired, it only took a few minutes and did not make any mistake.

This is a box that can recommend anyone with an active interest in creating their own smart home. This is also a case in which the open source solution is more powerful and capable than commercial alternatives. On the negative side, the project feels a bit like VLC: it will play anything, but it is neither the most beautiful nor more intuitive.

This saves energy compared to old technology

The start assistant can flee from any old computer that has there, assuming that it meets the requirements of the system quite low. Disadvantage is energy consumption. A desktop PC draws a lot of power for something you need to run 24/7. This is not ideal for an old laptop.

Home Assistant Green comes with a four -core ARM processor of 1.8 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, 32 GB of EMMC storage, two USB 2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet. It only consumes 1.7 watts while inactive and 3 watts while it is under load. Even a mini PC of energy efficiency with an Intel N200 CPU without fan can still draw around 6W. This is more similar to installing the house assistant yourself on a single -table computer like a Raspberry Pi, since that is basically everything that is the green assistant. Use a single rockchip RK3566 computer, which you can buy yourself if you want to bricorate. But for when you take into account an enclosure, you are not saving as much money as you might think.

With around $ 120, I think the project is asking for a fair price for the hardware that I am obtaining. I also like to support free and open hardware when I can, instead of giving that same money to a corporation whose software I intend to replace with code that I finally do not have to pay. I am happy to think about any premium as a donation to the continuous existence of the project.

Faster and more private than a television or cloud

My smart home used to be based on Samsung Smartthings, and each device that is not a Samsung device is connected using matter. The good thing about the matter is that the connections take place locally and do not depend on a web server to function. The disadvantage of smartthings is that yes. I was effectively using a web application to control devices that do not need to be connected to the web.

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The origin wizard is fully run in my local network, and is faster as a result. I did not think of smartthings as slow, but the assistant of origin is milliseconds faster. Alternating virtual buttons, lights and roof fans feel instantaneous. The response time actually feels faster than some applications that run completely on my phone.

All the time, the assistant of origin is generating and presenting more information than commercial alternatives. The amount of information you can provide is amazing if you really want to enter the weeds of how much energy are using certain devices at a given time.

Before saying that my smart trip at home, I heard that I

I like to show that people are wrong, but in this case, they were right. While the start assistant could benefit from some improvements in the interface and usability improvements to make it more accessible, it is a great comfort to know that each switching sensor and intelligent movement that I install is not sending more information to someone’s servers.