Today we are announcing the rename to Home Assistant Yellow. It will stay the same product we announced as Home Assistant Amber, it’s just a new name.

A couple of weeks back Lewis from Everything Smart Home asked me if Aeotec’s Z-Pi 7 would work with Home Assistant Yellow. We have a subset of the GPIO pins available on the J11 header, which offers plenty of 3.3 V power and a UART directly connected to the Compute Module 4. Electronically, this is all what is required to make the Z-Pi 7 work.

Home Assistant Yellow with Z-Pi 7 for Z-Wave support

We received two Z-Pi 7 from our friends at Aeotec and can confirm: Z-Pi 7 works with Home Assistant Yellow and the Z-Wave JS Add-on and Integration. It also fits into the case which provides an easy and clean way to extend Home Assistant Yellow with Z-Wave support.

Aeotec Z-Pi 7 inside the Home Assitant Yellow case

We haven’t measured or compared RF performance yet. The orientation of the antenna might not be quite ideal, but keep in mind that Z-Wave forms a mesh-network. Z-Wave also uses a different frequency spectrum than the onboard Zigbee radio, hence interference should be minimal.

The Aeotec Z-Pi 7 comes with the latest 700-series chipset from Silicon Labs. It has a higher transmit and receive sensitivity than the Z-Stick Gen5 or Gen5+.

We are currently still in the process of securing components. One of the critical parts is the Silicon Labs MGM210P wireless module. We had received a shipping date previously but it turned out not to be a guaranteed date. We have not received a confirmed delivery date since then. As we are part of the IoT Accelerator, we remain cautiously optimistic that we can start deliver Home Assistant Yellow in the second quarter 2022.