so if you stumbled Upon This Home assistant thing and you're just wondering what exact Hardware should I run home assistant on should I just do the thing that everybody recommends and just run home assistant green call it a day maybe so but hang out you can get more bang for the buck with room to expand in this video you can skip some of the intro stuff you can skip the chapter stuff whatever cuz I do talk a lot and we're going to show you how to load hos on some of these different machines hos if you're not familiar that's the home assistant image that kind of does everything for you and probably what you should start out with so that leads us down to should I start with this it's a great little machine it's the home assistant green pulls one to 3 Watts or so comes ready with hos um you can reload your own thing but there's no expanding storage on it everything's going to be soldered on and you're going to be running at like a hundred bucks and performance you're hitting that pi4 so if you have the current pi4 I would say this is not an upgrade for you it's going to be the same it may even be kind of a downgrade for you don't buy that if you got the pi4 especially um even if you had the pi 3 now I guess talking pies Pi five I covered this one I would say by the time you get into this guy and do the micro SD card stuff yeah that's not great um then you start to do nbme by the time you spend all that money on the pi five you might as well go with like a belink type deal and no belink did not sponsor this video there's nothing to this any sponsors here at all so they probably don't even know who I am which that probably might be a good thing but the Binks are great little nooks they're an n95 Intel processor which also gives you a little bit of GPU stuff if you get into that later with doing like frig and Plex Etc and these prices do vary a good bit it's going to vary from like any I've seen them down as low as 115 which by the time you tack on shipping and stuff with the green you're right in the same range and this is like five to six times faster if not more for you considering like the pi4 green stuff and then the memory is not soldered on the storage isn't soldered on because you're going to see I'm going open this guy up we're going to load home assistant straight on it now if you're thinking well what if I go with something that's a refurb yeah we did Cover these These are the little Dell little refurbs this was a core i37100 I believe and yeah it's just a little mini computer they call call this an usff the ultra slim form factor you can find these on eBay Amazon or even locally if you have a referb computer and it's really stupid cheap go that route I'm not trying to make you buy some crap if you got something locally go you do that you keep it from going into a landfill you're not having to buy a new because even some older little computers are great for running home assistant on now then this cam Ru this is like a little plastic cas one it's an n95 as well I haven't opened this one up I suspect it doesn't have the best uh memory and stuff on it but I guess I will check it out now you can go with a beast you could go with a beast such as the geekam they this is like the a little bit older 12th generation i7 and yeah it's you're going to pay for it but it's too much it's overkill for just running hos if you plan to go down the road and you're going to do like Pro MOX or some other type of stuff you're just want to Debbie and do your own thing maybe you'll want to get into some bigger processing stuff such as those but that's not what this video is about we're trying to start out beginner that way you can spend most of your time focusing on you know making smart plugs work and motion sensors work that turn on the light in the bathroom without all the worry of all the stuff of like hey what container runs this or lxc runs this or VM or blah blah blah yet no you're just going to put the one image on the computer and then we're going to start up home assistant and get it done now what all do you need you can let's put all this crap out the way we're going to focus on the belink CU that's one of my favorite the little belink Nook and if you're curious the wattage of this I clocked I think at idol and home assistant was like 6 to 7 Watts so it's going to be a little bit more than you know say the home assistant green but do keep in mind that if you're that worried about five Watts you're probably not going to want to do a smart home cuz by the time you start with a smart home and you start adding smart bulbs and smart plugs and motion sensors and everything and the wattage is going to nothing crazy but by the time you add like 30 40 50 or like me over 10 and something devices um five watch doesn't matter so um that's why I would prefer to stick to the n95 style because that gives you a lot of room to grow so back to what do you need and I'm jumping all over here is this little guy here this is the little sabr they make a bunch of different ones of these and what is this exactly is this allows you to take the nvme drive out of the and put it in here and that way you can load hos very simply now you could do the live USB boot method but I will tell you it's just a pain in the ass I've tried it just to see if it's any easier I find it easier just to unscrew the four screws take the mvme out pop it in and ready to go and then if for some reason you have a catastrophic failure of some Port then now you understand the Dynamics of everything of hey how do I load hos on a new system because you've already done it once it's kind of like the whole thing of doing 3D printer repairs and you never built the 3D printer yourself so let's jump into and um take this guy apart to pull the mvme don't get crazy it's just four little screws if you use the Phillips screwdriver you're already well ahead of the game so this is the belink Nook and we're going to be taking the nvme drive out of this and you really just need to remove the four screws and then you can just pop the top off and that's it this has an expansion for you know throwing in a little like SATA hard drive in the actual top pretty awesome but the cool part is the crucial memory that comes with this guy and yeah the everything is soldered on except for your mvme and your memory so you can change change the memory if necessary and but the Wi-Fi and this one is going to be soldered on that's the Wi-Fi and the the Bluetooth now we really won't be using that much I guess if you really want to use Bluetooth with home assistant you could use that chipset but probably want to use Bluetooth proxies anyway so just take that little screw out and then we're going to pop this stick out this the little nvme stick and then this is what you're going to need here is the sabr now they make a bunch of different brands of this this was just one of my favorites that I found I've used the hell out of this and you'll find of course all the links down below to all this stuff and you to pop this in is it's toolless is just take and just pop it into an angle you'll feel it kind of you know wedge in there and then if you push it down and then there's a little clip you turn it with your fingernails it keeps it down and then you close the door and that's it and then you have USBC on the end that give you the cable for USBC to C and then USBC to a and so then let's jump on over to the computer and we'll pop in hos straight on this mvme now I'm curious what's inside of this this is going to be a little cheaper model this is like a little USB thing you can throw in your hard drive in there if you want for expansion but um is it as easy to throw hos on this as it is the belink yeah you can but you can see the one issue here where's the ram I'm assuming it's probably soldered on the bottom of this one I'm not going to fully take this apart because yeah I don't see any way that that is going to be a um room to like clip Ram in there so uh yeah they do have the the nvme you can pull that out fairly easy now once you do have your little NVM and your little nvme USB adapter and keep in mind this also applies to like all the other devices that you can pop out the mvme in whether it be like a refurb laptop or whatever just we're showing this on the be link because it's just a great value for what you get in that n95 so so course you'll find the link for all this stuff down below pop in the mvme and then we'll just plug it in USBC to our computer yeah software you're going to need I use Bailey and etcher it's fairly simple to do just download it I think they even have like a portable one of course they have it for Mac OS Linux Etc pick the one that you need I just grabbed the portable one I don't feel like installing junk then go to home assistant IO and jump to getting started now of course some of this may change cuz they do evolve the documentation over time but it's not going to change a whole lot just look for like installation and then look down of course easiest well we're going to do the best so come down to the one they don't want you to use and they say it's hard it's not hard that's what she said trust me and scroll down for you can see this is all the stuff for like the btu live stuff and I found there was even more steps than this when I was running into dependency errors and stuff and I was just like screw it I'm going to mvme spend the 20 30 bucks and call it a day and save your sanity so um yeah where is the B here we are bileen etcher so we want to look for we need this now I have found that sometimes when you paste this into Bailey and etcher it throws a fit you're supposed to be able to just paste it in there but just go ahead and download it I find that's just the solid way to do things just paste it into another tab let it download it's going to download on your machine and then we'll jump over to ban etcher once you have bile and etcher installed or just running whatever it may be I was tempted like I say to use the URL but it doesn't always work for me so I just download the file hit Flash from file pick the hos generic file that you just downloaded and then you're going to need to select Target be careful on this one but they do have it where it won't let you flash like your OS drive so this is that sabrin you can see it says 256 gig and that's going to be in the from the definitely a lot more storage than you'll find in other devices like the same cost so then we got sabr USB and I don't want to show the and those are the ones that's keeping me protecting me from you know being dumb so then we're going to hit select and then we'll hit Flash and it does give you a warning it's a large drive but that's what comes in the belink is a 256 gig and then even if you get like some of the N1 100s they're like 500 gig so say yes I'm sure and then you'll see it kind of goes through the process of writing everything and while you're at it if you do get stuck on any of this process or part or whatever definitely come join us down in Discord down below you'll find the link down there in the description really simple just click it and rock and roll hang out with some friendly people and do all the smart home things so we're going to fast forward all the way through to 100% and that way you don't have to hang out listen to me ramble all day so once it's finished we'll just go ahead and close Bailey and etcher and you can go and hit eject on it or just wait a while and then you can pop it from it it's definitely going to empty the C cash from the computer and then we'll put this back in the beelink and reverse that process so there are a couple things I like to go over in the actual bio setup if you're not familiar with that you're going to need to hook up a keyboard and a screen to the beelink and again this all applies to a lot of different like referb computers and everything it's just the screen's going to look different behind me here and most of the keys are like Le keys or sometimes it's like F10 F12 F4 you just got to kind of look up your box but for the most part just keep mashing and spamming the hell out of like F10 11 F12 and deletes and you'll finally get some sort of Bio setup screen because it'll complain about you mashing the keys too much so this is that you can see we do have the 8 gig of RAM and definitely a lot more than other machines and what I'm looking for I didn't change really anything in here but was the power at basically if it loses power and one setting I found that was in that little Dell computer and probably applies to many others is do make sure it's going to be different so you're going to have to dig but go dig around you're going to be looking for this SATA if you're using the SATA port on it same thing for mvme we found that you had to be in ahci mode mode otherwise it gave some error about let me read here otherwise it gave some TSC clock Source error at boot and you had to reflash things everything so just make sure ahci is set in the SATA mode operation if it isn't already now the one for the power state is kind of weird it says state after G3 and you definitely need to make sure that's s State they call that working State some other computers will actually say in layman's terms it'll say like power on or power off or previous state and of course your home assistant you always want it to be on so we're going to try this out save changes and exit now if you still can't get your box to boot and because you got some sort of you know security boot errors if you did notice in home assistant in the documentation I probably skipped over is you do need to make sure in your bios that you have uy boot enabled and secure boot disabled I think that's stock pretty much in and that way you can boot up and do your home assistant right there if you get stuck with some of this stuff of course jump down you'll find the link the Dig blur DIY Discord and will'll help you go through some of the different things on your specific box or computer and get you going and running now once you do have this installed you know back together and you have hos on it you haven't powered it up yet do keep in mind you don't need to use the HDMI ports on the back you really can put this up in like your closet or whatever by your router CU you're just going to be using the power port and then you're going to use the ethernet port on the back I don't recommend using Wi-Fi for a home assistant it's just you know that's the whole brain of everything and you should just keep it wired and just plug it in like in a battery backup or whatever right next to your router and that way it's stays where and it's just solidly linked up to the you know your network now if you do want to hook up the HDMI port just to see the IP address that's one way to find out how to browse over to it you can also just check your router or whatever and see what new device has pulled an IP address it's going to be different for kind of everybody there's also if you can do home assistant. local in your browser it might pull up that way as well so let's give it a shot and we'll see what pulls up so once you go ahead and browse over to home assistant. looc or just go to that IP address you will need to put colon 8123 at the end and it will bring you to the wonderful onboarding page from home assistant and you'll just hit create my smart home and then this is going to be your user and password like your main Guru rug guy so don't forget the password or anything like that you can always add additional users later if you really forget the password there is a way where you can go and reset that password if you have access to the Box itself so nope we're not in Amsterdam we will set our location sure that works great um it's really going to be for like your time zone and then like the Dust to Dawn stuff it's really good for like you know I use it to close the shades so I would suggest to go set that as a location if not your exact location cuz it's going to be used for a few things down the road you can always change it later and if you want to turn on analytics usage D for them I'm not going to for this box I'm not going to just you know cuz I've thrown it up there for a split second no need to do that it's already you can see Finding devices in my home that I have now I already have home assistant and everything but you can see even with the Bluetooth chipset it's already finding a bunch of Bluetooth devices so really it's going to find stuff automatically hit finish and just starts popping things up how freaking awesome is that you could go in here and start to say hey I want to turn on the studio speaker you can hear it and we could play stuff on it if we want to can do text to speech things with it it's all like right there um I already have some you know some devices some Bluetooth devices deves it's picking up on from like all the way across the house um seeing the weather Etc you can jump in and see the notifications it's going to say hey we showed all these new devices it'll walk you through configuring all this now this is all going to be different based on what you have in the home and you can just hey I want to pull in the switchbot stuff that's through Bluetooth it's finding my Shelly devices other Bluetooth devices then you've got everything it shows as configured right here plus if I get my fat head out the way you can hit add integration you can add all these crazy Integrations for all the different things that you want but that's a whole different video just trying to help you get involved and get your home assistant rocking and rolling and that's what we've done here so if you've done that congratulations you done a great job you got home assistant running in the home and definitely stay tuned for future videos we going to show you how to and what devices and everything and the automations Etc on your home assistant box itself and while you're waiting on me to procrastinate and take a long time you can start to go dig off into the settings and go look at all the different add-ons you can put in here and you can go to the add-on store and find all the different apps and everything that you want like ESP home and different things node r red great for automations Plex the whole nine yard you can load on your home assistant box and there's a lot of stuff that you can do you don't have to but there's a lot of stuff that you can do that's always the things I find that with home assistant was is hey can it I never ask hey can it do this no it's always like oh damn it can do that you'll see now if you want to see some future stuff to go over zigg and all the different things to control some smart home devices and everything we're kind of going to do this restart on our series of all the beginner from ground up of different things of what I would have done differently in my smart home if I was knew that much then back then what five six years ago probably or more so definitely shoot the Subscribe button Bell icon shoot us a comment down below if you'd like to see something you know that we have coming up in a future video cool wa you want to drive that yeah what you going to do with it um if I have my metal detector I I i' get that out dig it up and get Tri find treasure you think you'd find some treasure [Music] maybe take boy you got it you got it bro boy your potatoes that was all those are pears oh pears he likes okay well if you're good