Home Assistant Amber

This youtuber does quite a bit of home automation stuff, and is now advertising an “Amber Pro”. Digital Home Server (Amber Pro) - All in ONE Router & NAS - YouTube

You smart guys at Nabu Casa did trademark the name right?

I have a feeling that Nabu Casa may have been second place in the naming race…

Home Assistant Freesia doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.

Home Assistant Tangerine could have had a much nicer looking case though.

Missed that tasty boat by about 40 years :rofl:

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Do you think that Home Assistant OS running on the Home Assistant Amber hardware can be made to auto-detect the Zigbee module for ZHA integration discovery by listing available serial ports and using the Zigbee modules serial number, probes, or something else unique?

Check out the related post about USB discovery in regards to adapter discovery in ZHA:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/community-help-wanted-to-whitelist-all-compatible-zigbee-and-z-wave-usb-adapters-for-automatic-discovery-in-home-assistant-os/344412

I understand that USB Discovery can not be used for Serial/UART devices but maybe you could hardcode it if the Amber hardware platform can be detected or perhaps if Home Assistant OS developers could create a new ‘Serial Discovery’ integration?

It’s not clear if I would be able to fit an Aeotec Z-Pi 7 or a Z-Way.Me RaZberry inside or if the necessary GPIO pins are already wasted by the soldered Zigbee module.
Why didn’t they opt for a replaceable hat? Or if they truly wanted to make it soldered at least add Z-Wave as well (the frequencies issue is bullshit, because you can make them user selectable).

Blue was a limited edition which will most likely not be continued.

I’m having zero issues with Zigbee since I use a long (two meters) high quality USB-3 extension cord to my Zigbee stick from my RasPi 4B.

That’s my cable: Jsaux USB Extension Cable USB 3.0 Cable

That’s my stick:

https://slae.sh/projects/cc2652/

Sorry for being late to the party but I tend to agree…
The choice of not exposing the gpio internally is a bad one if you’re going for an all in one device like this.

Sure, you can add an USB module for Zwave or whatever your poison is, but if you’re stuck adding external devices for your integration needs, then what value-add does Amber give you over a basic Pi4? As a Zwave user my answer would be “none”, well, except for the m2 slot… but then again, I’m running a ZWave.me card with external antenna so in that situation I’d have to pick between exceptionally reliable zwave v.s. chances of a corrupt SD card…

Personally I opted for a dedicated server for HA and ZwaveJS on a pi… best of both worlds, a lot more complicated and I’d definitely gone for HA Amber had it…
A) Been available at the time
B) Had an option for GPIO Z-Wave

Well, the GPIO are just in use. M.2 and builtin zigbee are not free in terms of pin usage.
If you have a zwave RPI daughter board that you want to keep using, you are basically locked-in, and I’m not sure what you would expect of Amber over your current setup…

“you can have any color you want as long as it’s black” :wink:

I’m not saying I don’t understand why it isn’t there, I’m just saying it would have been a better option to give the customer a choice between the two (Zigbee / Z-Wave) via a GPIO headers.

It won’t suit everyone. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t buy it. There are literally thousands of devices to buy and use.

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Z-Wave GPIO news and “Home Assistant Amber” now being renamed to “Home Assistant Yellow”(?)!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow/updates/z-wave-and-rename

Really great news to hear Aeotec Z-Pi 7 Z-Wave module is compatible with GPIO pins and the case!

But what was wrong with the “Home Assistant Amber” name?

Hope you keep in mind that “yellow” is American slang for a ‘coward’ before permanently change name.

https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+coward

My first thought was: “Ah, a clash with an existing registered name…”

WOW - thats fantastic, see, we’re all happy now :grinning:

One of the difficulties with ‘Blue’ was that you couldn’t search the community for related posts and there was no sub forum created…surprisingly. Amber was more unusual but I see a similar issue arising with ‘Yellow’

Quick question: since it is far more expensive, was is the advantage of the Yellow over a Raspberry Pi? The Pi with 8 GB of RAM costs a third.

I think the appeal for a lot of people is just the form factor, but you do get a bit more than just a Pi for that price—notably, built-in Zigbee, which alone could be over $40 USD (or as cheap as $11 for the new Sonoff one, but in any case you get one built-in, which I guess feeds into the form factor concern some people have). Depending on your Compute Module, you’ll also get either eMMC storage and/or the ability to use NVMe storage (16 GB eMMC if you get the preassembled Amber/Yellow option). Either is likely to behave better, particularly long-term, than the SD card the regular Pi accepts. It also includes an RTC.

Don’t forget the things you’d have to add to a Pi, like a case (technically optional, I guess), power supply (they used 12V here, probably to avoid issues with questionable 5V USB supplies some people use on the Pi), and storage (already included if your board has eMMC).

Part of it, however, probably also goes to support the Home Assistant project itself. If you don’t care for the form factor or features, then yeah, you can roll your own hardware, probably for less with similar or better specs. This includes various CM4 IO boards that are already available, which you could use if you like the idea of a CM4 over a “plain” Pi 4 (ease of non-SD-card usage, maybe?), though of course there are tons of options. But it doesn’t seem too bad for what it is to me. :smiley:

I am completely for supporting the project and HA having its own device to make some money off of.
I was really just curious, because Pi 4 with 8 GB including power supply, case and better specs costs a total of around 100 €. Add zigbee or any other usb devices (e.g. adapter for SSD) for another 15€ each.
I personally prefer my proprietory protocols to be external devices so I can replace them when new protocols arrive (not an issue for WiFi, Bluetooth or LAN).

I think it would be far more appealing to me if it wasn’t just a 2 GB version.

But it is nice to see that people are loving it and I wish everybody involved good success :slight_smile:

Home Assistant is an awesome platform/software AND community! <3