Home Assistant Green is the easiest way into Home Assistant: a $199 box that runs the full Home Assistant OS out of the box, with no Raspberry Pi hunting, no SD cards and no Docker. This guide takes you from the sealed box to a working automation in about an hour. You will set up the hub, add whatever is already on your network, plug in the optional Connect ZBT-2 radio for Zigbee or Thread devices, commission a Matter device from your phone, build a motion-activated light that only fires after sunset, and turn on backups so you never have to do it twice.
The steps reflect Home Assistant 2026.8, released August 5, which changed the default address for new installs. If your Green shipped with an older image, one step differs slightly and we flag it.
What to have in hand before the first boot
You need:
- Home Assistant Green. The official page lists it at $199 or €179 MSRP. Inside is a quad-core Rockchip RK3566, 4 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports and an HDMI port that is only for diagnostics. It idles at about 1.7 W, so leaving it on costs almost nothing.
- A free Ethernet port on your router. Green has no Wi-Fi. A Gigabit Ethernet cable and a universal 12 V power supply with EU, US and UK plugs are in the box.
- A phone with the Home Assistant Companion app (iOS or Android). You need it for Matter commissioning, and it is the nicest way to use dashboards day to day.
- Optionally, a Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2. Green has no Zigbee or Thread radio built in. The ZBT-2 is a $49 (€45) USB stick that adds one or the other. Skip it if all your devices are Wi-Fi or Matter over Wi-Fi.
- Optionally, one cheap Zigbee motion sensor and one smart bulb so you can build the automation in step 6 with real hardware.
Step 1: Plug in and find your hub at homeassistant.local
- Connect the Ethernet cable from Green to your router, then plug in the power supply. The status LED comes on.
- Wait a few minutes. On first boot, Home Assistant OS unpacks itself and may download an update before the web interface appears.
- On a computer or phone on the same network, open
http://homeassistant.local/.
Since Home Assistant 2026.8, fresh Home Assistant OS installs listen on the standard web port 80, so the plain address works with no port number. If your Green shipped with an older image and nothing loads, use http://homeassistant.local:8123/ instead; existing installs keep port 8123 unless you change it. The onboarding docs also suggest trying the hub's IP address (find it in your router's client list) if the .local name will not resolve, which happens on some Android phones and on networks that block mDNS.
Once you are in, 2026.8 lets you change the web server settings from the UI with a safety net: if you set a port or address that breaks access and do not confirm within five minutes, it rolls back automatically.
Step 2: Create your owner account and set location
The first screen asks you to create a smart home or restore from backup. Choose Create my smart home.
- Enter your name, a username (lowercase, no spaces) and a strong password. Write these down somewhere safe. There is no recovery path for the owner account; if you lose the password you will be reinstalling.
- Set your home location on the map. This sets your time zone, unit system and currency, and creates a "Home" zone with a 100 m radius that presence detection uses later. You can change all of it afterwards under Settings > System > General.
- Choose whether to share anonymized analytics with the project. Either answer is fine.
You land on the default Overview dashboard, which will fill up as you add devices.
Step 3: Let auto-discovery find what's already on your network
Before you buy anything, see what Home Assistant already found. Go to Settings > Devices & services. The Discovered section lists things it spotted via mDNS, SSDP, DHCP and Bluetooth: printers, TVs, casting devices, Sonos speakers, Philips Hue bridges, Shelly relays, your router, and so on.
Click Add on each one you want. Some need a button press on the device (Hue) or a login (cloud-backed brands). Anything that does not show up can be added manually with the Add integration button and a search for the brand. Home Assistant 2026.8 alone added 16 new integrations, so the list is long.
One habit worth starting now: as you add each device, assign it to an area (Kitchen, Hallway). Areas drive the default dashboard, voice commands and, since 2026.3, even robot vacuum room targeting.
Step 4: Add Zigbee or Thread devices with Connect ZBT-2
Plug the ZBT-2 into one of Green's USB ports using the supplied 1.5 m cable, and stand the antenna away from the hub and the router. That cable is not optional decoration: Home Assistant's launch post explains that the stick's much larger antenna and ground-plane base are the whole point of the redesign, and USB 3 ports and metal cases are notorious for drowning 2.4 GHz radios. The ZBT-2 uses a Silicon Labs MG24 radio, which the project says has better sensitivity to weak signals than the MG21 in the older ZBT-1.
Home Assistant detects the stick and shows a discovered "Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2" card under Devices & services. Click Configure and the wizard asks the one decision that matters: Zigbee or Thread? The ZBT-2 can only run one protocol at a time; it flashes the matching firmware and updates it with one click later.
If you choose Zigbee: the wizard sets up the Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration. Open ZHA, click Add device, and put your sensor or bulb into pairing mode (usually holding a button for five seconds or power-cycling a bulb). It appears within a minute. Zigbee is the right pick for cheap sensors, buttons and bulbs from Aqara, IKEA, Sonoff and Third Reality.
If you choose Thread: the wizard installs the OpenThread Border Router add-on and Green becomes a Thread border router. Thread devices are almost always Matter devices, so you add them in the next step rather than here. Pick Thread if you are buying new Matter-over-Thread hardware and have no Apple TV, HomePod or Nest Hub already acting as a border router.
If you own the older Connect ZBT-1 (formerly SkyConnect), keep using it. Production has ended, but it still receives software updates and can be switched to Thread mode, so a common setup is ZBT-2 on Zigbee and the old ZBT-1 on Thread.
Step 5: Add Matter devices with the companion app
Matter devices are commissioned from your phone, not from the web interface. The Matter integration docs are explicit that Home Assistant uses the Companion app for this, because the phone's Bluetooth talks to the new device and hands it your network credentials. On Green, the Matter Server add-on is installed automatically, so there is nothing to set up server-side.
- Open the Companion app and go to Settings > Devices & services > Add integration > Matter, or simply scan the device's QR code with the app's Add Matter device button.
- Choose No, it's new for a fresh device. Scan the QR code on the device or its manual and follow the prompts.
- If the device uses Thread, you need a border router within range: the ZBT-2 in Thread mode from step 4, or an existing Apple TV 4K, HomePod mini or Nest Hub. Wi-Fi Matter devices need no extra hardware.
Already have the device in Apple Home or Google Home? Matter's multi-admin feature lets it live in both. Choose Yes, it's already in use, pick the platform it belongs to, and the app walks you through generating a pairing code from that platform. Nothing gets reset. Our Matter explainer covers why this works.
Matter doorbells got proper event support in 2026.8, so a Matter 1.5 doorbell press now shows up as an event you can automate on.
Step 6: Build a first automation (motion light with a sunset condition)
Every automation has three parts: a trigger (when), optional conditions (only if) and actions (do this). The classic first one is a hallway light that turns on when motion is detected, but only after sunset.
- Go to Settings > Automations & scenes and click Create automation > Create new automation.
- Under When, add a trigger of type Entity > State. Choose your motion sensor's occupancy entity, set From to "Clear" and To to "Detected".
- Under And if, add a condition of type Sun. Set it to After sunset. Add an offset of
-00:30:00if you want it to kick in half an hour before actual sunset. - Under Then do, add an action Light > Turn on, pick the hallway light, and set a brightness if you like.
- Save it with a clear name such as "Hallway light on motion after sunset".
Test it by waving at the sensor. If it is daytime, temporarily remove the condition or use the Run actions menu on the automation to fire the action part only.
To turn the light off again, create a second automation: trigger on the sensor going from "Detected" to "Clear" for 2 minutes, action turn the light off. Two small automations are easier to debug than one clever one.
If you want to check what a sensor is reporting while you fiddle, the panel formerly called Developer Tools is now just Tools in the sidebar; 2026.8 renamed it and removed around 43 "advanced" and "expert" labels across the app to make clear that these screens are for everyone.
Step 7: Set up backups and the companion app
Do this before you invest more time. Go to Settings > System > Backups and set a schedule for automatic backups. Set an encryption key and store it with your owner password; an encrypted backup without its key is useless. By default the backup lives on the Green's own storage, which does not help if the hub dies. Add a second location: a network share, a cloud drive through an add-on, or Home Assistant Cloud if you subscribe. 2026.8 redesigned the Cloud setup pages, so if you go that route the backup toggle is a guided step.
Then, on your phone, sign in to the Companion app with the same homeassistant.local address and enable only the phone sensors you actually want under Settings > Companion app. Remote access from outside your home needs either Home Assistant Cloud, a VPN or a reverse proxy; do not open port 80 or 8123 on your router directly.
Optional: add local voice with Voice Preview Edition
Green plus a Voice Preview Edition ($69 / €59 MSRP) gives you a wake-word speaker that never sends audio to a cloud unless you choose to. The puck runs an ESP32-S3 with an XMOS XU316 audio chip for echo cancellation and noise removal, and does wake-word detection on the device using the microWakeWord engine, with "Okay Nabu", "Hey Jarvis" and "Hey Mycroft" as the built-in options. Setup is a USB-C cable and a wizard; it connects over 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
You can also try local voice with nothing but your phone. Since Home Assistant 2026.3, the Android Companion app has experimental on-device wake-word detection using the same engine. It costs battery because the mic stays open, so the release notes suggest automating it to run only when the phone is on your home Wi-Fi.
Troubleshooting common first-day snags
homeassistant.localdoes not load. Tryhttp://homeassistant.local:8123/, then the IP address from your router. If the LED is on but nothing responds after ten minutes, unplug power for ten seconds and try again.- ZBT-2 devices pair but drop off. Move the antenna away from the hub, router and any USB 3 device. Add a mains-powered Zigbee device (a plug or bulb) near the far end of the house; it acts as a repeater.
- Matter pairing fails at "Checking network connectivity". Make sure your phone is on the same Wi-Fi as Green, not on cellular, and that Bluetooth is on. Thread devices additionally need a border router that Home Assistant knows about.
- An entity has a silly name like
light.hallway_light_2. Since 2026.8 you can rename entity IDs from the entity's settings dialog in the UI; no YAML required. - A cloud-based integration keeps asking to log in again. Check Settings > Repairs; most integrations report exactly what they need there.
- You changed the port and locked yourself out. Wait five minutes. The web-server settings roll back automatically if you do not confirm the change.
Home Assistant Green removes the fiddly parts of running Home Assistant, and 2026.8's port-80 default and friendlier UI remove a few more. Plan on the $49 ZBT-2 if you want Zigbee or Thread, use the phone app for Matter, and build your first automation as a plain trigger, condition and action. Turn on encrypted backups before you go any further; everything after that is a matter of adding devices.
Sources and further reading
- Home Assistant Green (official product page)home-assistant.io
- Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (official product page)home-assistant.io
- The best gets better: Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (Home Assistant blog)home-assistant.io
- 2026.8: Approachable by design (Home Assistant release notes)home-assistant.io
- 2026.3: A clean sweep (Home Assistant release notes)home-assistant.io
- Onboarding Home Assistant (official docs)home-assistant.io
- Matter integration (official docs)home-assistant.io
- Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (official)home-assistant.io
- Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (official)home-assistant.io