The UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 is a local AI hub that puts network storage, a security camera recorder and a smart home controller in one white box, with Home Assistant running underneath UGREEN's own app. UGREEN has moved the launch to the first quarter of 2027, after the holidays, at $799 early bird against a $1,599 MSRP. UGREEN sent me a pre-production unit along with one of its cameras, so this is a preview of where things stand today.
The UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 is in its reservation stage: a $50 deposit on UGREEN's site holds the $799 Super Early Bird price for the crowdfunding campaign, against an MSRP of $1,599. Drives, cameras, the Smart Speaker for Uliya and Gallery photo frames are sold separately. Moving the brains of your home into your living room changes more than where data sits and while this comes at a cost, I think it makes sense for a lot of us to consider re-asserting our control over information - especially things like video, photos, behavior patterns, and conversations that we should never want to have accessible to someone else to build marketing profiles (or worse) around us with. I already run Home Assistant on a UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus. The simple reality is that the box doing that job is a big ugly black machine that deserves to be in a server closet, not sitting in the entertainment center next to the PlayStation where the guys gather for game night. Google Assistant has been the brains of most of my home network for the past decade. Despite the recent Gemini "improvements," it seems to be getting dumber even as it gets more expensive. I have had it start talking when nobody asked it anything, and give answers to questions I never asked. Google seems to be aware of the frustration that long-time users are expressing and just this week they released an update that they say will fix some of the problems. Unfortunately, though, big corporations like Alphabet and Amazon work slowly and have challenges justifying products like this where there's not massive revenue-generating potential - but there are huge costs to take it from here to there ... with "there" being a point where it serves your needs as a true personal assistant. Then there is the thing we have always known: the data it gleans from listening to our conversations seeps into all sorts of corners of the Alphabet organization. I am not as comfortable with that now as I was willing to accept before. To me, hardware like this represents a new phase of home automation, where things previously available only in the cloud can be done at home. How the final production software gets implemented is still speculation, but the potential is clear. Inside UGREEN's environment, cameras and other sensors would work seamlessly with the HA100 while keeping your data secure, reducing the monthly burden of subscriptions and pulling everything into one interface. You keep records for weeks and months at home, not in a cloud where they could disappear tomorrow or be exposed to hackers who compromise the services behind those devices. And because it lives in your house, you get more control over how it works. What HA100 can NOT do alone is some of the features that Gemini does with Google Home like being able to answer complex questions from web searches, voice conversations etc. This will come and the joy is that the potential exists for Home Assistant (or UGREEN's own skin on it) to use whatever models you want, upgrade the hardware as needed, and be something "different" than just a simple drop-in replacement for Nest speakers and Google Home devices as they are today. Visually, the HA100 is a compact white cube with a top display strip, and includes four microphones and two speakers, so the hub itself answers to "Hi Uliya" as the wake word instead of being always on. The back panel carries HDMI, two USB-A ports, a 2.5GbE port and four PoE ports, which send power and data down one cable so a wired camera needs no outlet. Along with the "surveillance" drive, it also has two "storage" slots so you can run a basic RAID system to store media, backup documents, etc the way you can right now with their other 2-drive systems like the DXP2800, for instance. Lift the lid and four sleds load from the top: two gray for storage, a blue one for surveillance footage, and a green one labeled Accelerator. Inside the box is a Rockchip RK3588 and 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, rated by UGREEN at 26 TOPS of AI processing, with up to 96TB of storage. The green sled holds the AI accelerator card and slides out like a drive, suggesting you could upgrade the AI hardware later without replacing the hub. UGREEN's own product line suggests this is one of the main differentiators between the HA100 and HA100 pro whiuch has essentially the same chassis but features 32 ZGig of ram and a 128 gig system drive, along with an upgraded CPU / GPU producing 205 TOPS vs 26 TOPS (but at a price tag nearly $2,000 higher!) and then they also have the MA100 that goes even further with more than 2,000 TOPS. Home Assistant is a separate open-source project, and it is more of a home lab tool than something designed to "just work" like Alexa or Google Home. My team and I dug into the pre-production HA100 and found stock Home Assistant Core, packaged in a container with direct access to the network and radio hardware, plus one custom component of UGREEN's own. UGREEN has chosen a short list of integrations; the app offers no way to add more yet, and there is no Z-Wave radio. That is encouraging: this is real Home Assistant on capable hardware, so opening it up further is a product decision for UGREEN, not a rebuild, and that means if UGREEN chooses to give us a "power user" "developer" switch we could potentially be looking at something really cool for folks like me that like to tinker but don't really want to have a NAS or PC with a bunch of USB dongles and accessories, making it relegated to a data center or server closet rather than something useful sitting in my living room. Connecting the camera UGREEN sent is what made the idea click for me: hardware, software, and AI designed around keeping information inside the home. The hub watches the feed locally, writes plain-language descriptions of events, and lets you search footage by keyword. Cameras, speakers, and photo frames all report to the HA100, the same local AI push behind UGREEN's AI NAS lineup. That is the promise UGREEN is offering, but I am hoping UGREEN gives power users the opportunity to get full root access to the machine. That would let us extend and build on great hardware running great software, and do creative things that push the concept of a truly personal home assistant device. I should preface my enthusiasm by tempering the statements by saying that right now with hardware that is widely affordable for consumers, this is still aspirational. It's a glimmer into what the future can be and as hardware prices drop (which they will in 2-3 years) and as models become more and more efficient (which they do every day) ... a system like this should be in every home able to be customized and adapt to my needs and my environment serving me with the comfort, data safety, etc. that is tailored to my family's needs. It could also bring the Home Assistant project new power users, merging great hardware with corporate investment in the things that are tough for home lab folks to do, like security, polish, wide compatibility and extensive QA. People who just want it to work would get that, and folks like me would get the keys to creative projects that are currently hacks built from dongles and hardware pushed together in the hope that it works. It is a reality I have dreamed about since I first started experimenting with Alexa and Google Home about a decade ago. UGREEN was set to launch this in November but they rightfully punted the launch until next year. They suggested that I hold off on promotion until it was fully ready but agreed that I could share my candid feedback now ... as long as I continued to support them next year as well (which I obviously will!). This is pre-production hardware and software, and a lot can change before launch, so I am holding off on judging features still being built. I am hoping to have more information in January. If you have any questions or comments or ideas on how they can make this better - let me know! I'm always interested in hearing from fellow nerds that want to work together with the global community of open source enthusiasts who along with AI tools that are now so widely available ... are reshaping the world into something pretty awesome! The $50 deposit is refundable any time before the campaign ends, so reserving now carries no risk while the software takes shape. Between now and launch, my team and I will be working to provide feedback to UGREEN to help make this a product that is as amazing as I think it can be, and I will be building integrations on it along the way, so stay tuned. For pricing and reservations, see the UGREEN HomeAgent page.
Why I Am Ready To Pull My Smart Home Off Google Assistant
A New Phase Of Home Automation That Moves The Cloud Into Your House
A Home Server Designed To Sit In The Living Room
Color-Coded Sleds Make It Easy To Swap Drives And The AI Card
What We Found Under The Hood Points To Real Home Assistant
The Camera Demo That Shows How The Ecosystem Fits Together
The Power User Access I Am Hoping For
Where Things Stand Before The 2027 Launch