Bad design Home Assistant Amber?

Hardware
21

Whilst I have not been in the industry in a long time, I was employed by a production house that did embedded designs. I can not offer much, as not much is released and the development is probably not done when you look at the shipping date of Nov 30, 2022 which is probably optimistic when you have world wide shortages going on. A Pi5 could be out before this ships.

Only measuring the CPU and enclosure temperatures is not enough, you also have localized heating of certain parts on the board. Switch mode IC, capacitors, even a resistor or PCB traces can fail. Industrial testing by a production house would include a few months of running non stop inside an oven to test and find which components get stressed and what needs to be upgraded to ensure a long life for the user. The idea is to accelerate wear and tear far above normal to find out what parts fail first. Certain countries demand 2+ year warranty by consumer laws and when you have to do rapid development to get products to the market before they are outdated and also beat competition, tests like this and more are very important to be done.

That is only 1 of many tests done. Another may be drop tests to test how the heatsink and other parts fare during shipping and also with rough handling after the end user unboxes the unit.

The released graphs show a starting temp of around 27 degrees C which is a little low if someone has it inside a badly ventilated closet or networking rack with other heat sources around. Odroid for example do 35 degree C ambient tests.

Usually the process is.

Market research to ensure people want what you are going to make. Then:

  1. Get a working single unit to test with.
  2. Small run to do stress testing on after prototype works.
  3. Small run to send out for beta testers and get any certifications needed, done after fixing the stress test results. If you find issues and the design needs to change, then in some cases certification needs to be redone on the updated design causing delays and big $ costs.
  4. Production of at least 5,000 units to get a decent price break.
  5. Cross your fingers there are no design flaws as you now own 5,000 units. You can do a smaller first production run to test the water and make low/no profit on the first run.

This is where crowd funding can be helpful. Market research and also gauging how many people will purchase it to plan your first production run VS the risks of getting stuck with x amount of product.

This is only the tip of the iceberg and there are many challenges. Personally I think there should be a fan header for COTS fans and the case should have slots and/or a cut away that can be punched out to mount a fan. The mold has to be made for the case anyway, its really a low cost to add as a fan header, is only a few cents, then if the user does not order with a fan, it is on them… To make up some figures out of thin air… 90% of users wont be stressing the system to the point that heat will be an issue. However when you have to offer warranty and 10% of users may need the cooling to prevent premature failures, I think the question about a fan is valid or a different way to handle it.

Who knows what the products that ships will look like exactly, so let not be rude when we really do not have all the details, don’t know what tests have been run or perhaps are being run right now. Perhaps HA will be monitoring the temp and flag a warning message to the user they need a fan, there are many ways to handle this. I wish the team best of luck and try to have fun bringing a baby to life :slight_smile:

22

I’m genuinely confused about what you have in mind.

Real-world fact: I never needed USB3 for any thing else than hooking a fast external drive to extend internal ones.
Rather than that clunky setup (like I have now,) Amber proposes to basically embed the external drive onboard via a NVME drive. It also proposes to replace my zigbee dongle by an onboard one, POE, and 32 choices regarding the SoC configuration, including BT that I need.

It just fits my needs perfectly.

Now, I’m not a fanboy.
Is it good for all purposes? Likely not.
Are there cheaper alternatives? Likely yes.
Did it make sense for NC to create an Odroid N2 clone? Definitely not.

But supporting Amber is also supporting HA, so I’m in.

23

What stands out to me as a point of let down is that the M.2 slot is the only option to have more storage than the otherwise tiny 32Gb, but also the best place to put a hardware accelerator card such as the Coral. With other HA server hardware devices you can have both.

This and the internal Zigbee radio. No good if you want to have the device in a server rack or similar (which I have mentioned previously).

24

This is not targeted at the segment of users who might have a server rack, or who are comfortable building their own Pi based server. This is a starter device to get people into the HA ecosystem for very little money, and yes it can be used for other purposes, but I would say this is the target market:

Wants to get into HA, or currently runs on a Pi, or some extra hardware they had
Wants something like a pi but with better performance and reliability
Has Zigbee devices already, or will equip their home with them or Thread/Matter devices in the future
Probably wont use an AI accelerator, the M2 slot is gonna be for fast storage
Minimal amount of hardware and software tinkering required to get it operational

Another segment of users, like me, sees this as follows:
A POE device with a Thread radio, and run Openthread and Matter stacks on the device in Docker
Can get a CM4 with no storage or wireless for it at low cost
or a wireless CM4 for BT presense detection or some other fun use
Extra USB if I want to add an RTLSDR or Z-Wave stick at some point

1 Like
25

…although not in that first segment I’m in the latter which is a valid user base, perhaps alongside having another HA install

26

Yep, I’m exactly in the latter segment as well.