Review - The Home Assistant "Blue"

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv today i have yet another product review i'm going to be reviewing this right here the home assistant blue which was a lot of fun to check out now unlike the other reviews that i put out this week this was not sent to me by the vendor actually bought this myself with my own money but as always i'm going to give you guys my honest opinion and we're going to talk about the home assistant blue in this video i'll show you guys an unboxing and then after i do that i'll give you guys my thoughts now this particular device runs home assistant hence the name home assistant blue and if you didn't already know what home assistant is it's a really cool piece of software that makes it very easy to take full control over your internet of things devices and i really love it my friend tom and i actually covered home assistant in a recent episode of the home lab show so definitely check out that podcast if you haven't already it's really awesome if i do say so myself now i've been using home assistant for quite some time now i currently have it as a proxmox virtual machine and i'll be migrating it over to this box right here i'll even show you the process but i use home assistant to automate all kinds of cool things such as turning on and off the recording lights for the lighting here in the studio the outdoor light smart plugs all over the house you name it but i decided to convert over to the home assistant blue because recently i made my home lab power down completely when not in use overnight just to save power and of course be a little bit more green but you know with the home assistant server being part of the virtualization stack when that goes down if i need to turn on a light in the middle of the night well it's not going to work because home assistant is down at that point so i decided to buy this because what i want to do is migrate the virtual machine over to this so that way it stays on all the time so what i'm going to do is show you guys an unboxing and then i'll show you the process that i went through to migrate to this unit and then i'll give you guys my thoughts so let's get started but first of all before i show you an unboxing let's talk a little bit more about what the home assistant blue actually is the home assistant blue is a limited edition device with home assistant built right in now home assistant itself is a home automation software that gives you full control over your internet of things devices like i mentioned but you can install it on anything you'd like you don't really need to buy the blue in order to use home assistant for example you can install the software on a raspberry pi a pc or even run it in a virtual machine like i've been doing the blue gives you a really awesome out-of-box experience with home assistant thus closer to what it would be like if home assistant devices were actually sold in stores the blue itself is powered by an odroid n2 plus and it features a custom case with the home assistant logo as you can see when i mentioned that it's a limited edition device what that means is that only a certain number of these cases will be made however you can always purchase all the other components of the blue after stock runs dry so even though it has a custom case it's still an odroid at the end of the day and that's one of many platforms that home assistant supports and it's also one that they plan on continuing to support and the specs of this device are pretty decent too the odroid n2 plus has an amlogic s922x cpu which contains a quad core cortex a73 and a dual core cortex a53 for a total of six cores the clock speed is 2.2 gigahertz and 1.8 gigahertz respectively this unit features 4 gigabytes of ddr4 ram and 128 gigabytes of emmc flash storage so this should definitely have no problem running home assistant i mean home assistant itself doesn't need a huge amount of resources to run but as with most things the faster the hardware the better the experience anyway now that we know what the home assistant blue actually is let's take a look at the unboxing now right here i have this little insert and of course the main box right here and both of these things were actually inside a different box and all that was was just a bigger box with packing material so here we have a getting started guide just some simple documentation for home assistant as you can see and then right here we have the actual box that contains the home assistant blue so let's open it up so right here we have what i believe is the power supply and actually i was close this is part of the power supply this is actually the power supply so i'm going to just unravel this right here and here it is so i believe i just probably put this right here and let's see so i just twisted this on and now it's secure so we have the power supply that's pretty cool we have the barrel connector pretty standard stuff so far and then right here we have a box that is marked odroid n2 and my understanding is that the home assistant blue is using odroid so let's go ahead and get it out of the box and here we have another insert that's pretty cool i think that's neat it also gives us a qr code to download the home assistant app so if you don't already have the home assistant app installed on your mobile device then you can use one of these qr codes to get that installed and right here we have the home assistant blue check this thing out how cool is that that is just so cool so we have all kinds of ports here interesting that we have an hdmi port i suppose i could probably use that for something most home system servers are run headless anyway you access it through a browser we have usb ports a barrel connector for the ac adapter of course the ethernet port right there this actually looks really cool i can't wait to get this thing powered on and check it out so what i'm going to do at this point is spend some time with this device and then i'll continue the rest of the review and in the same video i'm going to come back and give you guys my opinion so like i mentioned before my use case for the home assistant blue was to replace my virtual machine that runs home assistant so after i took it out of the box i connected an ethernet cable i plugged it into power and that was it at first i wasn't even sure that the unit powered on at all because it's just so quiet it wasn't until i noticed the blinking led on the ethernet port in the back that i realized it was powered on after i gave it a few minutes to boot up i checked out the dhcp list inside pf sense which is my router firewall for my network and inside there i noticed that a device named homeassistant received an ip address from dhcp so it was obvious that that was the one i was looking for so i copied the ip address and then i pasted it into the address bar of my browser along with the port number and then i was immediately connected to the device now there was no installation process or anything home assistant was immediately ready to go as soon as it powered up so i created an account for myself and went ahead and updated it i made sure that my current home assistant virtual machine and the blue were both upgraded to the latest version of home assistant because i wanted them to be the same which is a best practice when you're doing a migration i upgraded the supervisor first and then the operating system and off camera i repeated that same process inside the home assistant virtual machine as well when both the current home assistant virtual machine and the blue were both fully updated i captured a backup from the virtual machine and then i uploaded it to the blue it took a fair amount of time to upload but after it was done my home assistant installation was exactly like i remembered it to finalize the swap i changed the mac address for the static lease for home assistant and pf sense and then gave it another restart it then came up with the correct name and ip and all of my devices were immediately talking to it so the process of switching over to the new home assistant blue was painless for the most part and other than the amount of time it took it was a trouble free experience overall so overall my experience with the blue has been a great one out of the box everything worked i had no problems whatsoever i feel like the experience of the home assistant blue would be exactly like the experience would probably be if home assistant devices were sold in stores because it was a very commercial or retail-like experience which was a lot of fun and the entire unit is very well made the home assistant blue has a really awesome metal case it's metallic looking and very pleasing to the eye it looks so cool in fact that i almost feel like it'd be a shame to put something like this in a server rack where nobody would probably be able to see it so i think i'm going to leave mine somewhere in the studio when it comes to ports we have a bunch i mean for home assistant you only really need a power cable and an ethernet cable but this unit is built from a node droid after all which has a number of ports for various purposes on the front we have a single 3.5 millimeter audio jack and on the back we have a gigabit ethernet jack four usb ports a barrel connector for power and also an hdmi port you probably won't need most of these ports for this use case but it is nice that we have a variety of ports in case you need them and i found the home assistant blue to be a very responsive device and you might even consider the hardware specs to be a bit on the overkill side the storage isn't overkill though even though home assistant itself doesn't require much in the way of storage space the log files and backup files within home assistant can become quite large if you don't keep your eye on them so having extra storage means you can have longer log and backup retention before you start having to clean files anyway due to the decent specs of the blue the menus respond very quickly and i haven't seen it slow down yet and home assistant itself is a ton of fun to work with i mean just when you thought you figured out everything you could possibly think of there's more functionality being added all the time and the add-on store allows you to take the functionality even further you can essentially turn home assistant into its own server to handle other things beyond iot and into the homelab territory all in all the home assistant blue is a great device and i'm very happy with it i mean sure you don't have to buy a dedicated box like this one in order to use home assistant you can run that on pretty much anything but if you can get your hands on this limited edition device i think it's totally worth it and even if you can't get one in time or you're more of a do-it-yourself kind of person you can still build your own with the same parts either way you'll have a very awesome home assistant experience so all in all i think the home assistant blue was a win i had a lot of fun checking this out and it's running very well in my home network so let me know what you guys think in the comments down below i look forward to seeing what you guys have to say and i'll see you in the next video thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 9,707

Keywords: Linux, Review, Distribution, Distro, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, home assistant, home assistant blue, odroid, smart home, home automation, home assistant setup, raspberry pi, home assistant blue review, home assistant blue first impressions, home assistant automation, home assistant hardware, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi projects, raspberry pi 4 projects, home assistant hardware info, home assistant hardware setup, home assistant hardware list, home assistant hardware blue

Id: XeVcxPDWXPo

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021