Home Assistant Amber

Blog
21

This is also what I’d like to know.
Unfortunately I don’t see any GPIO pins on the board (also no mention of them in the description). I’d pledge right away if it had full 40 pin GPIO header, but I think I’ll stick with official CM4IO board and m.2 to PCIe adapter.

1 Like
22

Nice board. Congrats guys !

23

At the end of the video (59:20) Jesse Hills asked about the J11 connector in bottom left corner of the board, and Stefan replied that it’s a mini-GPIO (what is left over after the GPIO pins used by the onboard features) including access to UART.

Would like to know more about what is extended to J11

24

Would it be possible to use the amber, with the wireless compute module as an access point to allow WiFi smart products to connect directly to HA without the need for a router?

I know it wouldn’t work if that WiFi device needed to connect to the cloud but what if the device is just connecting to an MQTT server (on HA)?

25

Home Assistant Amber

This flagship version of Home Assistant Amber is ready to go out of the box. It comes pre-assembled in a custom enclosure with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) and a custom heat sink for fanless, silent operation. The CM4 is a version without wireless and has 2 GB RAM and 16 GB eMMC storage, pre-installed with and Home Assistant. All you need to get started is to plug in the power supply and the Ethernet cable, both of which are included.

26

I realy like this board.
Anyone knows if its possible to connect Amber to an UPS like LiFePO4wered/Pi+ | Crowd Supply ?

1 Like
27

+1 for offering an internal Z-Wave controller module and/or a ZWave and Zigbee combination module.

Should base it on EFR32ZG14 or ZGM130S for Z-Wave 700 series (Z-Wave Gen7) like Aeotec Z-Pi 7.

Preferably offer all radio modules with U.FL connector(s) for the option to connect external antenna(s).

Zigbee internal module radios is especially is known for being sensitive to electromagnetic interference.

28

Silicon Labs chips are on test now, not yet fully compatible with Z2M.

1 Like
29

Specially for people who will love to stick to existing setup.
We are developing now a RPI4 Hat with RTC,I2C,Zigbee CC2652P,POE.
What of course will be opensource and easy to assemble by yourself.

30

Hmm, I wonder if alternative CM4 pin-compatible modules (like the upcoming SOQuartz) could be an upgrade over the CM4.

1 Like
31

I wonder why there’re only 8 pins left. The board doesn’t seem to have so many features on it to take the rest of the pins away.
How is the HB-RF-MOD communicating with the RPi? Is it just UART?
Anyway, I’ve just received my CM4 (WiFi with 8 GB of RAM and 32 GB eMMC) and CM4IO board. I have the original CCU3 (running on RaspberryMatic), which is going to be a donor for the HB-RF-MOD.
As the CM4IO board has a full 40 pin GPIO header, compatible with standard RPi, there’s no need to make some adapter.

32

Pretty sure that MGM210P/EFR32MG21 can not support Zigbee and Thread/Matter at the same time?

I think that you have to choose to flash/run either a Zigbee stack or a Thread stack firmware?

I believe however it can run “Zigbee and Bluetooth” or “Thread and Bluetooth” for BLE provisioning?

33

Please consider changing from soldered Zigbee module and offer a pin header + a shield/HAT instead?

That way you could lower the lead-time and users can choose to plug in any other radio modules like:

There are of course also Bluetooth, RFLink and others and future radio shields for Raspberry Pi header.

So soldering a Zigbee module to board instead of offering it as shield/HAT option may hinder flexibility.

34

To the people suggesting that the board should have ZWave instead of Zigbee. Aside from the certification and licensing issues that they touched on in the video -
Zigbee uses 2.4GHz everywhere in the world, ZWave uses a different frequency in different places, so then they would have to look at shipping different pre-assembled versions of the board. Unless of course you are suggesting that the only ZWave version should be the US frequency and sod the rest of the world.

1 Like
35

Correct, I believe you have to flash specific firmware to the board, which will be either Thread OR Zigbee, not both

36

At least one current hub manufacturer, Hubitat, is using a 700-series Z-Wave chip that apparently has user-selectable frequency, so I’m not sure this is actually the case with the latest chips. But yes, licensing and whatnot would probably be a concern. One less dongle, at least, if you care about the way it looks. :slight_smile:

1 Like
37

Congratulations! It looks great! I assume the answer is yes, but anyway, does the team think 2GB of RAM will be enough for running HA in the medium term? Just in the middle range of RPi4 and below Blue seems a strange decision… Maybe component shortage influenced the choice? Thanks!

38

Well that would certainly solve one problem, the only other problem they would have - other than the cost of certification, would be the $10,000 they have to pay every year to be part of the ZWave Alliance…

(that’s why Zigbee devices are so much cheaper than ZWave ones these days)

1 Like
39

Canada is not that far from the US… 40$ of shipment is too high :confused:

40

On the crowd Supply page it states that its shipping from the US, so you have to add taxes and probably handling fees if it is shipped to the EU.

Please correct me if I am wrong. I hope it is EU friendly.

1 Like