Since I started using Home Assistant in October 2023, I’ve been running it on a Raspberry Pi 4, first in ‘Container’ mode and more recently in ‘Supervisor’ mode. I’ve now bought a Home Assistant Green, and I’m using this to run Home Assistant.
The Home Assistant Green is one of the two dedicated hardware platforms that come pre-installed with Home Assistant. The other, the Home Assistant Yellow, deserves its own section later on. By buying one of these devices, you’re also helping to financially support the Home Assistant project.
Why I bought a Home Assistant Green
As someone who has previously gone down the DIY route, it may seem surprising that I’ve decided to buy a Home Assistant Green. My decision came down to the following:
- Price – the Home Assistant Green costs around £90 in the UK, which isn’t much more expensive than a bare bones Raspberry Pi 5. Once you’ve added a case, power supply and SSD to a Raspberry Pi, the Home Assistant Green is actually cheaper.
- Cheap to run – I had considered some kind of mini PC, which would offer me more power, but with both a higher upfront cost and ongoing electricity cost. The Home Assistant Green runs on up to three watts; it comes with a 12 volt, one amp barrel plug power supply. As it’ll be on all the time, I don’t want a power-hungry device.
- The need for a dedicated Home Assistant device. In May, it was announced that the ‘Supervised’ install method would be deprecated along with ‘Core’; only a tiny fraction of people use these methods. This dovetailed with me wanting a dedicated device for Home Assistant, rather than trying to run it on the same little Raspberry Pi as Plex and some other services. In other words, I was in the market for an additional device to run Home Assistant, and the Home Assistant Green fitted the bill. Meanwhile, my Raspberry Pi 4 can be dedicated to Plex.
- No longer needing to worry about compatibility. According to Home Assistant Analytics, over a third of people install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and so I don’t expect it to become unsupported. However, as the Home Assistant Green is the closest thing to ‘official’ hardware, I know it’ll be well-supported in future releases. As I’m coming to rely on Home Assistant more, I need it to run on a reliable platform.
What the Home Assistant Green can’t do
Coming from a Raspberry Pi, it’s worth noting what features the Home Assistant Green lacks. These include:
- Wi-Fi – you need to be able to plug it in using an Ethernet cable.0p
- Bluetooth – if you have Bluetooth devices, you’ll need to plug in a USB Bluetooth dongle that is known to work with Home Assistant, or use a Bluetooth Proxy.
- Thread, Zigbee and Z-Wave – again, you’ll need to plug in dongles for these.
The Home Assistant Green does have two standard USB-A ports for you to plug in dongles and hubs, so I have my Thread and Zigbee dongles connected. Not having Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on board may reduce interference on the 2.4 GHz band, I suppose.
Home Assistant Green hardware
The Home Assistant Green is actually bigger and heavier than I expected it to be – certainly, it’s larger than a Raspberry Pi. It has a very sturdy base, which is designed to act as a heat sink – it’s passively cooled so there’s no fan noise. Inside, there’s a quad-core 1.8 GHz ARM processor, placing it between the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 in terms of computing power. There’s 4 GB of RAM, and storage comes courtesy of a 32 GB eMMC (embedded multimedia card).
You’ll also get an AC adaptor with a variety of plugs (including a UK 3 pin plug) and an Ethernet cable.
Optionally, you can install a CR2032 battery inside. It doesn’t come with one, but if you add a CR2032 battery then the system clock will remember the time between reboots. It’s mostly only needed if you’re using it somewhere with poor or no internet access, as otherwise the clock synchronises with the internet on startup.
There’s also an HDMI port and a slot for a micro-SD card, but these are only for system recovery purposes and not for general use.
I would tell you more about how it is to use, but to be honest, it’s just like using Home Assistant on any other platform. All I had to do was restore a backup from my Raspberry Pi 4, and I was up and running.
Home Assistant Yellow
If the Home Assistant Green doesn’t meet your requirements, consider the Home Assistant Yellow. It’s more advanced and upgradeable, but also requires some assembly as it ships without a logic board. That’s provided by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the idea being that you can upgrade this incrementally over time without needed to buy a whole new device. It’s a nice idea, but it also adds to the cost – the base Home Assistant Yellow costs around £120 with the Compute Module adding £30-40 on top, and it arrives in kit form rather than pre-assembled. However, long term, it could be cheaper due to it being upgradeable.
There are other differences: The Home Assistant Yellow is available with Power over Ethernet (PoE), meaning that it doesn’t need a separate power supply. However, you’ll need a router or a switch which supports this. If you don’t, then you can buy a Home Assistant Yellow with an AC adaptor.
The Home Assistant Yellow also has an 802.16 radio, meaning that it can support Zigbee devices without an extra dongle. This can also be re-programmed to support Thread, but not both Thread and Zigbee at the same time. Additionally, there’s a 3.5mm audio port, and inside, there’s an expansion port for installing an SSD if you need one.
Whilst I have the technical knowledge to get a Home Assistant Yellow up and running, once you’ve factored in everything, it costs about double the price of a Home Assistant Green.
