As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!
Home Assistant has physical hardware labeled "green" and "yellow".
Beyond that, I assume there's some confusion about what each can and can't do? I certainly can't remember which is which... But I don't actually own one.
Ah, yeah, it was confusing to me when I was trying to get started as well! fortunately, the folks in the hardware channel of their Discord are super helpful.
Here's what I learnt: Green is the new plug and play server. Easiest to setup and will cover the vast majority of what you'll want to do. Yellow is basically green with a couple extra things built in (namely zigbee and thread), plus expansion bays, if you anticipate building on to it, but it requires you to flash it so less user friendly setup but easy if you're a dev.
But most people start out by using an old laptop or PC sitting around. That's what I did, the got a yellow.
I'd love to de-amazon (neuter) my Alexa's, and somehow flash custom firmware on it. We have some devices around the house, and switching to the linked Home Assistant Voice would be a significant expense now.
Can you create a private network on your router for your spy devices that blocks any traffic to the mothership while allowing something like Spotify? Do they require access to the mothership to work at all?
As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!