Not on the roadmap so wondering why Nabu Casa is not yet making/selling a larger model (mid-range variant) in Home Assistant Green series with more expansion slots/ports and better SoC for AI?
That is, since the “Home Assistant Green” is a huge success why not also make and sell a larger model with more on-board expansion options to target those that want the same simple plug-and-play appliance experience but know they want to add both AI accelerator M.2 card (like Hailo Accelerators) and an M.2 NVMe storage (so need SoC with more PCIe lanes or PCIe switch) + want to add more USB radio dongles but still wanting an easy to use all-in-one hardware solution that it simple to get started with and maintain?
Why should Nabu Casa not design a larger model of Home Assistant OS appliance in the same series called “Home Assistant Green Plus” or something similar that offer more expansion options out-of-the-box, and then continue to offer the standard “Home Assistant Green” as the end-level model.
I’m hoping to see a mid-range model with not only more expansion options but also better SoC for AI:
- Two long M.2 PCIe slots that can be used for combo of AI accelerator module and NVMe SSD disk.
- Four USB 2.0 ports for external USB dongles (Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread + Bluetooth radio adapters).
- One SD-card slot for optional local backups.
Maybe consider adding PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) as well if want to retire the Home Assistant Yellow(?).
If that works out then perhaps after a year or two consider also designing an even larger high-end model to be the new flagship variant in the same series called “Home Assistant Green Max” or similar with even more M.2 slots and USB-ports for further expansion.
- At least one but preferably two short M.2 PCIe slots for AI accelerators (like Hailo Accelerators).
- Two or more M.2 slots for NVMe SSD disks (with option to configure RAID-1/mirror for redundancy).
- More than four USB 2.0 ports for external USB dongles like radio adapters.
- One SD-card slot for optional local backups.
By the way, another argument for consolidating and combining an AI accelerator together with many NVMe SSD disks in a single Home Assistant appliance is use case for running an NVR (Network Video Recorder) like Frigate as an add-on in Home Assistant for both locally processed AI and video recording. For that reason alone it would be great to have more than two NVMe slots (at a lower speed) instead only two at higher speeds.
Anyway, one of the main point is that with AI acceleration becoming interesting for more people and new hardware acceleration options being made available as M.2 models so fast it would be nice if there were more options to slowly grow with AI acceleration, by booth first starting out with onboard AI acceleration capabilities embedded into the SoC/CPU and then having various options to add different M.2 PCIe adapter as optional modules to add more AI capabilities to your existing appliance.
While it is not nessesarly a must it would also be nice for higher-end models to use an “AI-ready” SoC/CPU/chipset so it also has one or more fast embedded NPUs (for AI acceleration onboard out-of-the-box), so if ever make even higher higher-end models in the future could worth it to look into basing such models on an x86-64 CPU/chipset from Intel or AMD instead of an ARM SoC, (such as example the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra 200V series which are designed to meet the NPU AI TOPS performance requirements of Microsoft Copilot+ / Copilot Plus laptops PCs).
Note! Yes I know there Nabu Casa still sells the Home Assistant Yellow model but it only has one M.2 slot and because it is currently only sold as a kit today it is not plug-and-play so do not work out-of-the-box.And yes, I also know that at the price we are talking here it would probably make more economical sense for end-users wanting those features to just buy a mini-PC instead, but that negates the idea of “Home Assistant Green” series as complete and finished appliance products that are all easy for new/beginner users to get started with and simple to maintain.
PS: Off-topic but as I do not really see the point in Nabu Casa offering the above suggested mid-range and high-end models as open-source hardware a related idea it might also be the concept of doing a free project for the community in parallell to cater to all the thinkers too by helping designing a brand new carrier-board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (as a spiritual successor of the Home Assistant Yellow but redesigned for the CM5 and with leasons learned) and release that new PCB design schematics as an updated reference design (+ an enclosure for 3D-printing) that can be shared under projects/marketplaces for DIY PCB manufacturers sites like PCBWay and JLCMC (which if the open-source hardware license allows should even allow third-parties to build such offerings?)? → GitHub - NabuCasa/yellow: Home Assistant Yellow - hardware for Home Assistant which grows with your needs. …I guess today much of such a design could also be learned from the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 IO board which they published Kicad design files for now: