Home Assistant Yellow - USB WiFi

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1

Morning all,

Due to the location of my solar inverter my Home Assistant Yellow is located in an attic well away from any network infrastructure. As a result, it’s connected with a Powerline adapter. Unfortunately, this keeps failing. I’ve got perfectly good WiFi signal there.

Does Home Assistant Yellow allow for the connection of a USB WiFi adapter? I can’t see a way to connect it to WiFi if I do, but if there is a way it would solve some issues (and probably introduce new ones!)

Thanks,

Tom

2

I don’t know whether a USB Wifi adapter would work, but this should do the job.
You can connect it to the Yellow Box ethernet port.

3

Thanks. I’ve been trying to link in old Apple AirPort Extreme and Express routers into the mix and connect it via Ethernet. However, while they connect to my UniFi network the Ethernet Ports don’t seem to allow a connection. I’m not sure if this would have the same issue.

I should probably have explained that in the first post. It’s why I was wondering about a direct USB WiFi connection.

4

USB WiFi works on generic x86-64, so I suspect it should work on the yellow too .

5

Understood. My Yellow Box is connected to a Xfinity (Comcast) secondary pod ( * ) and it works fine. Previously I had the same set up with a secondary Nest Wifi pod.

( * ) Because the modem/router is not in the center of our home.

6

I suppose it does,
it supports the wifi on RPI CM4 (if there is any)

But the main question is, do you want to relocate your yellow based on your solar inverter?
Next you want a P1 meter for energy and your HA device needs to be in the electricity closet.
I would check if there is a way to connect the solar inverter without hard wiring to the HA device, so maybe ethernet/wifi/zigbee/RS485 to wifi, not sure what kind of inverter you
have.
When I started, I too thought all should be connected directly, but it’s mostly not doable.

7

Unfortunately, the only way to connect my inverter is directly. It’s been a proper pain, but it does at least work. I’d definitely prefer to have the Yellow elsewhere, it would probably improve the Zigbee network hugely.

I’ve found the UniFi Express can achieve what I’m looking to do, though can’t say I’m happy about the price. However, it’s able to slot into the mesh network and has an LAN port, so it will at least provide a reliable solution.

Thanks,

Tom