Home Assistant Yellow - Problems over and over

Hello all,

after waiting over 8 months for my Home Assistant Yellow (the flagship version out of the box) I was very happy when it found its way to me at the beginning of January.
But actually the problems already started with the delivery: Fed-Ex wanted another 34 € for customs and fees. Interestingly, I had already paid these when ordering.
Well, that’s how it is.
When I wanted to move my “old” Home Assistant(1), I found that my database had grown to 33 GB (2) and could no longer be purged.
In the same breath, I decided to switch to MariaDB and to give the Yellow an SSD (1TB Samsung 980).
The move went well - I manually re-registered all zigbee components (48) but the rest went well.
At least for the first 4-5 days. After that, only problems that I would like to list now. Maybe someone has a tip, or I can save someone from burning their money like I did.

  1. Recorder crashes every 2 to 3 days, which means no more reasonable history.

  2. Crash of the network component - no more reaching the HA, no function of the sensors and actuators. However, the core seems to continue running.

  3. The integration of Coral-USB fails completely. ! I have tried three! USB hubs up to 3A and at least 10 USB3.0 A-C cables. All with the error “F driver/usb/usb_driver.cc:857] transfer on tag 2 failed. Abort. Deadline exceeded: USB transfer error 2 [LibUsbDataOutCallback] Fatal Python error: Aborted”.

So the experiment really backfired. I think I will have to sell the Yellow again.

(1) HA was previously running on my Synology DS 418play in a Docker container, then MQTT, Node-Red and Deconz in other containers.

(2) I have to admit, I have a big installation. About 20 Shellys for lamp control, 25 window/door sensors, Alexas, thermostats, climate sensors, weather station, consumption meters for electricity, gas and water, 4 cameras, etc.

I don’t know the answer to your issues. But, in case you want to move to a new hardware, go with mini PC. I use mini PC from Beelink, U59 Pro. Specs: CPU Intel Celeron 5105, 16 GB, 500GB SSD, all for 230 euro, bought directly from their website (from Amazon will be more expensive). I got it delivered from Italy perhaps, reading the text (Beelink is Chinese company). Delivery was about a week or so. No import duty fee.

What I like, it’s very low power consumption. On average, idle and low task, 5 to 6 watt. Peak was 12 to 15 watt. And it’s really nice performance for HA, installed in Proxmox.

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Yes, the reason i want to switch the HA from the synology-system is the 70Watt power consumption 24/7 means about 200 € yearly.

Thank you for the hint. I will take a look.

I don’t have the answers to your issues either, can only say that the Yellow PoE I received last week has been a huge performance upgrade for me (coming from a RPi 3b+).
The steps in the Getting Started Guide were accurate, and the system as up in minutes. I did have some problems with downloading the backup from my current system, the download kept failing about halfway (at around 180Mb, so really not that large). With the Samba Addon I was able to download the complete backup from by old system.
Even the migration to a new Zigbee radio worked really well, did not have to re-register any component.

I do have the same issue with additional taxes and fees demanded by FedEx, although I had already paid them to Crowdsupply; there is a topic about that: Home Assistant Yellow PoE - incorrect FedEx charge for import duties & VAT

@ HA_n00b

I have done just that.
I now have a beelink U59 - but “only” the 8GB version with 500 GB SSD.
The connected Coral ran immediately with rates of approx. 9 - 10 ms.
Conbee II for the Zigbee network was also recognised immediately and I now also have Bluetooth.
Fast - quiet and economical.

A great tip and a good choice.
Somehow I understand the hype about the Yellow less and less…

I have received a customs refund from Crowdsupply. Quick and uncomplicated.