You may have heard of Home Assistant on some occasion, but in case you don’t know it, it is a software prepared to facilitate home automation and the control of the connected home, a proposal that now also has its own hardware.
And the company behind this development has launched a type of Mini PC intended to operate Home Assistant and serve as the brain to control all the home automation of the smart home.
No installations or virtualizations
Image | Home Assistant
Home Assistant is one of the alternatives to OpenHAB or Mozilla’s WebThings and it is a free, open source development. Home Assistant is a toolkit designed to offer users a safe and autonomous way to develop a home automation system at home. A system that can be installed on a Mini PC or a Raspberry Pi to control the connected home. And to facilitate the task, it now has its own device that is also very compact, so that it can be easily hidden (it measures 11 x 11 x 3.3 cm.
Those responsible for Home Assistant have launched a Mini PC specifically developed to make this system work and control everything that revolves around the connected home and thus not have to mess with installations or virtualizations.
The Mini PC that they have launched has the following characteristics: ARM processor, Quad-Core at 1.8 GHz, a Rockchip RK3566. It rests on 4 GB of RAM and 32GB storage eMMC to save all the necessary or generated data (automations, configurations, scenes, routines…) Added to these 32 GB is the option of using an SD card as an emergency solution to recover the system.
Image | Home Assistant
Because it is a device designed for managing the connected home, connectivity is an important section. It has a port Gigabit Ethernet for the LAN to connect it to the local network, two USB 2.0 ports where you can connect the Home Assistant SkyConnect USB and thus have Zigbee 3.0 and Matter. This is completed with one HDMI port to connect the Mini PC to a monitor or TV so that we can visually control different aspects.
Being a device that will work with the brain of the connected home, it must take care of consumption so that it does not show too much on the electricity bill and in this sense, the brand announces that this Mini PC will have a consumption of only 12W.
Price and availability
This equipment can be purchased on the manufacturer’s website at a price of 99 dollars and it is an alternative to equipment that can be assembled and virtualized to control the connected home.
Via | Zone Networks
More information | Home Assistant
In Xataka SmartHome | Houston, we have a problem. The connected home is of no use when this device that we all have at home fails