October 2025 Round Up

Home Assistant Yellow Is Done

Nabu Casa, the hardware partner of the Open Home Foundation, has announced that the popular Home Assistant Yellow device will be exiting production.

The Yellow is a more powerful and flexible Raspberry Pi based smart home hub that provides an ideal platform for running Hom Assistant and was particularly popular with certain power users, like me, due the option to use Power over Ethernet.

It seems that market has become saturated with Nabu Casa indicating that demand for the Yellow has fallen to the point where future production runs are not viable. Instead, they will be looking toward the next hardware platform, possibly based on more powerful Mini PC hardware in order to support higher demand functions such as locally run voice assistants.

The Yellow will continue to receive software support, and the simpler Home Assistant Green remains available as a good entry point for newcomers to Home Assistant. You can learn more about jumping into this flexible, open-source smart home with my Getting Started Guide, and see how the companion Node Red code-free automation platform can elevate your automations once you are settled in.

Ring Goes 4K

After spending most of its existence stubbornly sticking with 1080p on most of its camera offerings, smart home security brand Ring has recently been stepping up to reach parity with the almost ubiquitous 2K of the competition.

Last year saw the review of several doorbell models to move from a 16:9, 1080p resolution to a 1:1 1536x1536 head-to-toe view, and the apparent software upgrade of more recent cameras, like the Spotlight Cam Pro, to 2K streaming.

This month, Ring has announced a whole new lineup of products featuring ‘Retinal’ 4K video quality, along with ‘AI Tuning’. Without specifcs on this, I think it’s safe to assume that this feature will be effectively what smart phones have done for a while. Use on board image processing to dynamically adjust and enhance the image on the fly to improve things like low light performance and digital zoom quality.

You can check out the new range in the Amazon Ring store.

TMEZON Bell 24T Doorbell Tested

Ah, TMEZON. One of those random-bunch-o-letters Chinese brands that pepper Amazon listings. I’ve long been loathe to even touch such brands, but people are gonna be enticed by those low prices and compelling marketing blurbs, so I figured I’d better put one through the test drills to make sure potential buyers know what they’re getting.

The verdict is that it works as advertised, just not particularly well. The camera image quality is actually very good, ranking pretty competitively with the highest scoring models I’ve tested, but beyond that it falls short on virtually every other test.

Audio quality is particularly abysmal, motion detection is useless for any security-related purpose, and even the app is poorly laid out and loaded with incessant nagging for you to sign up to their cloud storage subscription (Really, it’s literally on every screen in some form).

You can get all the details in my full review. The bottom line is that, even at this price point, there are much better options.

Eufy C30 Doorbell Tested

An example of a MUCH better option for budget priced doorbells is the C30 from Eufy. This is also a pure battery powered doorbell that delivers even better video quality along with excellent motion detection performance.

I couldn’t trip it up during a variety of weather conditions in day or night scenarios, and it was able to reliably detect people at long distances with minimal false positives in windy conditions.

People detection, custom motion zones, and robust privacy features make for effective control over what you record and get alerts about, and you can record it all for free using the included 32GB MicroSD card.

There are no package detection features on this one, but the TMEZON implementation is largely useless anyway so it’s not really a comparison point. Overall, it’s a good performer for the price if you can’t wire your doorbell for power.

See all the test results for yourself in my comprehensive test report, and compare with other tested models with my comparison charts.