The Easiest Home Assistant Install I've Ever Done

raspberry pies have become pretty much the de facto standard whenever someone asks for a recommendation for a PC that they can do some lightweight task on like run a smart home or a home automation system maybe run their own web server start to code teach their kids about computers the Raspberry Pi is so versatile and it gets recommended all the time for a good reason but the problem is that for the last like three years or so it's been completely out of stock everywhere and when you do actually manage to find one the price is jacked up through the roof and they are so expensive and that's led to people asking for recommendations for other Hardware or things that they can actually get their hands on and that is where this product comes in I'm hoping is going to be another good recommendation this is the Zima board by Ice whale Tech the Zima board is a single board computer similar to the Raspberry Pi but does or should pack a lot more punch than a Raspberry Pi whilst also sipping power so I've intentionally not had a look at any of the material for this because I'm actually really excited to check this out I want to see how it looks I've seen what it looks like and I actually really like the design of it I think it looks really good and it's worth mentioning that this isn't a new product so it's actually been out for a little while I don't really see it recommended by many people inside of the smart home space I've never really seen anyone else talking about it the world's first hackable single board server hashtag singleboard server okay okay oh okay that's a fancy box I always get excited now when I look at uh packaging because I know how difficult packaging is having just the smallest taste of it so I always uh have a look at other people's packaging now oh it's actually quite like feels like quite dense actually oh couple of stickers and then also inside the box is a little Sata cable so that'll become clear what that is for in just a second when we have a look at the board so this is the Zima board first thing I notice is actually feels like dense it's not heavy it's certainly a lot more dense in the hand than I thought this is certainly feels like metal on the top hear that I really love this gunmetal with the orange accent super cool reminds me of like a graphics card especially because it has this slot at the bottom so this board actually comes in a few different or three different configurations you get the the 216 you get a two cores two gigabytes of RAM and 16 gigabytes of emmc and that comes in at a hundred and nineteen dollars which is about 98 97 98 pounds and then you get the middle one which is the four three two which is a four core two gigabytes of RAM variant 32 gigabytes of emmc for a 159 dollars which is about 130 pounds and then finally you get the one I have here which is the 832 and again you get four cores same CPU as is in the middle one but this time you get eight gigabytes of RAM and again 32 gigabytes of emmc and 199 US Dollars which is about 106 60 pounds so that's the one I would probably recommend I pay the extra forty dollars Thirty pounds for the eight gigabytes I think that will be a lot more versatile because this has or can do so many different applications right at the back we have our i o so we have two gigabit Ethernet ports that is particularly uh cool to see because the minimum amount of ethernet ports you're going to want for a firewall type application like PF Sands or open sense or open wrt any of those projects you're going to want at least two interfaces to use with a firewall so really cool that this has two of them which you don't often see under those you then have two USB 3.0 ports Mini DisplayPort 1.2 which is capable of 4K 60 hertz and then on the other side we have our power supply so that is the barrel Jack connector and that is supplied by the 12 volt 3 amp power supply like so run to the front we then have two ceter ports which allows you to expand the storage with either an two hard drives or two ssds so really could expand and add quite a lot of storage through those SATA ports and that is where this cable at the front comes in the supply one cable and if you want to expand the storage so that just plugs in like that and then into your hard drive and then on the other side we actually have a PCI Express 2.0 by 4 slot typically the things you would use for this is like to add expandable storage so you can add even more storage through the pcie express slot and they sell a card on their website which I think can take up to four m.2 ssds so you could add even more storage I think this add up to like 32 terabytes or something like that through the ssds they also sell things like a four port two and a half gig ethernet card so four two and a half gig ethernets really compact uh really cool to see and uh yeah feels super dense with that heat that heatsink on top if you can have that heatsink the processor inside of here is a 6 watt TDP part really power efficient obviously that's just for the processor there will be a little bit extra for the entire board but I would expect this to be under 10 watts certainly the heatsink on top means that this runs completely passively completely silent as silent as a Raspberry Pi and yeah I really love this footprint it's super dense feels really good in the hand if we compare it next to a Raspberry Pi with the case on you can see it's not that much bigger yeah I really love this this is cool wait there's a peel on the back we have to peel it we have to do the peels if we take a look inside it I feel like I feel like I want to open it up and and uh just take a look at the take a look at the PCB goodness I'm excited to check this out because I'm always on the lookout for recommendations for people for a home assistant server or a Home lab a home lab server that doesn't use a lot of power and especially I love nerd night over firewall stuff firewalls is like my jam so yeah this one is really cool because of that that that two gigabyte ethernet ports I was on the lookout for new firewalls I don't know why I just got to think with firewalls yeah so you can see that um transparent sort of back cover you can just see through it there it's pretty cool so on the back we have a battery for our RTC oh this is a oh so they've actually added a fan header if you did want to add a fan you could do it through that fan header yeah it just comes apart like that Intel processor in the middle so that is our four core CPU right here and then up at the top it looks like we have our memory chips and then down here we have our emmc storage it looks like yeah that's our 32 gigabytes of emmc storage you could see that the memory modules are actually got thermal paste on them as well as some of the other chips uh just keep everything nice and cool so I haven't even really talked about the OS that comes with the Zima board so unlike most single board computers that just expect you to just flash your own OS onto it like Debian or raspbian or or that type of thing the Zima board actually comes pre-installed with a OS called Casa OS which I believe is based on Debian but it's kind of their own twist on it and the idea is that it's kind of an easy way for anyone to really install apps that they want from Docker containers so it's kind of like a giant store for Docker containers from what I've seen so it allows you to basically one click install a bunch of different apps like Plex or jellyfin or unify or next Cloud basically provides an app so that you can one click install all of those apps and just be kind of up and running without having to know need to know Docker and no commands and that type of thing another really cool thing is that it's open source so it's all available on GitHub and you don't even need to run it on the zema board you can just run that Casa OS on any hardware you want to really if you want to use it on a different machine I'm just going to guess that you plug this into power and then Network and then you should get some sort of web UI okay so we're showing a IP address already in our firewall that was actually really quick to boot up so let's see if it is ready it takes us right into the setup screen so that was actually a really fast server to boot it gives me kind of like a Mac OS type Vibe with that that mountain image in the background this is the main dashboard I guess where you manage all of the or everything about the Zima forward release so we can see we have our CPU and RAM usage we have our storage and then we have our networks uh status and our app store interestingly up here it says it found new drives a Hitachi one and a Western Digital one of 500 gigs each but I don't have either of those unless that's just like some some demo data but uh settings update oh okay wow that was really fast it was like 60 seconds it's kind of cool that they've made the dashboard really simple to navigate and easy to use and not overwhelming with loads of different options but you can kind of dig into the menus and into the the back end if you want to get a bit more advanced or you are a bit more advanced and you know what you're doing at least for beginners and people who just want the apps to work and they don't care about typing in commands and downloading Docker and all of that sort of stuff pretty cool but what I really want to check out is the App Store because that's what we're all here for if you click on that yeah it literally just looks like an app store it's got all of the popular most commonly used apps that we're all familiar with Plex unify next Cloud jellyfen ad guard pie hole a bunch of apps so many apps and home assistance there which we love to see let's try and install it so hit on install let's just go in that's super fast isn't the worst when progress bars like go right up to the end and then it sits at the very end for like 20 30 seconds and you're like what just just give me the just give me the actual progress hey and it's completed that took like 30 seconds nice and then home assistant's there we didn't even have to do anything we didn't have to answer any questions but I said no any commands just click install and it's and it's done hey and we're into the to the setup screen on home assistant the only thing I would be concerned about is who manages that App Store and um will always have the latest version because it looked like it was pulling from a different Source other than like home assistant GitHub repo and so is does someone else have to manage that and keep it up to date or does it just happen automatically I'm not sure nice and we're in that was like the fastest home assistant setup I've probably ever done that was probably like what less than two minutes total to get the whole thing running and Beyond the home assistant dashboard including the onboarding what other apps is there yeah we've got like unify controller here oh I see up in the top you can do like a custom install ah so this looks like if you are an R from more familiar with Docker images and Docker commands you can install pretty much any Docker app you want to by using the custom install and you can just fill in that information and that's really cool for people who are more advanced and they don't want to be restricted or limited and this allows you to do it so nice and you can see actually how much power it's using down here so 6.2 Watts I guess that's for the CPU and not the system as a whole but I imagine it's like seven eight nine less than 10 watts for the whole package and certainly a lot more powerful than say a Raspberry Pi would be okay so a unify controller is installed and we're into the the UniFi setup basically let's check out files oh so just because it just gives you like access to the entire OS file system so you get straight into the into the root file system so again not being you're not being restricted if you don't want to be you can you can see all the files you can do whatever you want to it's not locked down you you're not told what you can and can't do with your with your files and your data you just get access to everything this is going kind of addictive now just like going through the app store and just picking apps at random I don't even I don't I don't even want them I just it's just so easy to do I just want to install them it's just going she's going so yeah it's installing both apps at the same time no problem our CPUs at 80 usage and it's like hovering at 38 40 degrees so cool you can just feel the very slightest of heat through it but other than that it's yeah it's it's completely silent and completely cool oh nice you can just manage them all from here you can open you can update them from here just one click Updates this is a super cool device especially for the money like two hundred dollars for this kind of power uh this sort of form factor completely silent completely passively cooled is a really uh good value proposition I think and the CPU is a little bit on the old side now I would like to see them update that with a new version but yeah other than that this is this will run rings around your Raspberry Pi in terms of performance obviously it is a little bit more expensive but yeah really really compelling package so versatile so many different things you can do with it now yeah I can't wait to I can't wait to try it out especially in a firewall application if you want to check out the zema board for yourself I will of course have it linked down in the description so you can check it out for yourself man this is a really cool little device I can think of so many different applications for this maybe like a proxmox cluster that would be really cool just see how far we can push it doing that ah so many different ideas uh yeah check out if you want to check it out bear in mind this wasn't a full review this was just a more casual unboxing and overview and do let me know down in the comments if you liked this type of video it's a bit more relaxed uh unboxing and overview and first impressions I had fun doing this it was a bit more chill a bit more get to hang out with you guys and just kind of kind of geek out over this type of thing so let me know down in the comments if you did enjoy it make sure to hit that like button and get subscribed uh and have a nice day you know see you in the next one

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 94,414

Keywords: raspberry pi, zimaboard, home assistant, home assistant server, home lab server, home server, zimaboard 832, zimaboard 216, zimaboard 432, raspberry pi 4, plex server, home media server, home lab, home mini server, mini server, single board computer

Id: jr7vo9NAWfo

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023