UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 First Look: Exploring Local, Private Smart Home AI
Our Long-Held Vision for the Smart Home
When we first started tinkering with smart home gadgets, we both worked at Intel. Intel makes chips that power computers, so I thought it would be natural for them to build a platform for our smart home, one that would stream our content, store our photos and videos, and connect up all our gadgets inside our house, without us having to connect to the Internet. I spent a lot of time working in the enterprise space, so I imagined it like a mini server inside our home that only we could access.
Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains links that may earn us a commission from the Kickbooster Affiliate Program. UGREEN provided the HomeAgent 100 for our review. Opinions and conclusions are our own.
Intel did try to make an entertainment-focused PC back in 2006. It was called Viiv and like a lot of special projects, it was over-hyped, under-invested and slightly ahead of market demand. Early on in our own journey we made our own version of an entertainment PC, using Windows Media Server to store some of our music files and connect to our receiver and television. But it didn’t give us what we needed to stream content and certainly didn’t control any of our devices.
More than a decade later I was excited to see a company finally realizing my vision. I didn’t expect it to be a storage and charging company, UGREEN.
Introducing the UGREEN HomeAgent Ecosystem
Last week at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, UGREEN announced their new AIoT product ecosystem, powered by a sleek new box, the HomeAgent HA100.
The HomeAgent is designed to have everything inside one system: storage, computing power, and agentic artificial intelligence to help you control your home and manage all your household data securely, locally and privately, without having to rely on the cloud.
We weren’t able to make it to the launch event but they did send us a HomeAgent HA100 review unit that we have been able to play with. They also sent two new UGREEN security cameras, the indoor Wi-Fi SynCare ID500 Pro and the Outdoor Dual-Cam SynCare OD600 Pro that connects via Power over Ethernet.
Open the lid on the HA100 and it even looks like a server – with different slots to provide all the functions you need. One slot is for “Surveillance” – to store the security camera footage locally, another two hard drive slots provide file storage, and a slot for the UGREEN AI Accelerator card. The accelerator card has a Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip with 26 TOPS to do all the AI processing you need inside your house on your own data, so you can find files or make adjustments to your home in natural language.
So far Mark has been able to connect up the UGREEN cameras, plus another camera brand via RTSP, and use the AI to get text based descriptive notifications and even identify and locate him inside the house.
We fully expected HomeAgent to store and search our local data, but the in-depth smart home integration was definitely a surprise. With their included HomeAgent software running on a Docker instance in the box, we could connect a few Matter-devices and do some simple routines. In this first iteration it is only supporting Matter over Wi-Fi, but Thread and Zigbee are on the roadmap for the future.
Of course that wasn’t enough for Mark. He was also able to pair up devices from our Homey Pro hub using Homey’s Matter Bridge app which let him connect most of our Z-Wave and Zigbee devices into HomeAgent plus some Nanoleaf and Govee devices.
The Rise of Local AI
With the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence, nearly every smart home company has announced an AI product. At first it felt like hype, with some re-branding of machine learning to AI. But with the rise of chatbots, it’s become a lot more useful.
This January at CES, I was chatting with another creator in our space, Vince, from DIY with Vinny and I told him I thought Home Assistant was too complicated. He said he didn’t need to learn how to use Home Assistant because he could just ask Chat GPT to make a routine to do whatever he wanted.
While I see the appeal, I would be pretty hesitant to connect our home to Open AI, Anthropic or Gemini through the cloud with all the privacy and security issues. But I would feel comfortable if I could have a local large language model running in our closet that we can interact with.
The HomeAgent ecosystem offers agentic AI that you can communicate with via a built-in microphone and speaker on the box as well as through a smart speaker that you can use for voice search, control and running smart home routines. You activate it by saying, “Hi Uliya,” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but the intention is there to make it easier for users to do things like turn on the lights, close the shades and find out where the cat is hiding.
An AIoT Ecosystem for Homes of all Sizes
UGREEN also announced their Gallery LCD Smart Frames, which can display in color some of your favorite family photos stored inside the box as well as automatically show highlight videos from the attached cameras.
Our review unit is the HomeAgent HA100, the entry-level model, but UGREEN also plans two more models – the HA100 Pro with 205 TOPS of performance and more on-board memory, storage and built-in 10 Gb networking to handle more cameras and more sophisticated AI integration, and the MasterAgent MA100, the first local AI agent hub powered by the NVIDIA® Jetson ThorTM T5000, delivering up to 2,070 TFLOPS of AI performance. The list price for the MA100 comes in at nearly $20K, so we can’t wait to see what that machine will do.
So far, we are impressed with the design and functionality of the box but it is still early. You can pre-order the HomeAgent HA100, HA100 Pro and the UGreen MasterAgent MA100 now from the UGreen AIOT Official Store for a deposit starting at $50 and early-bird pricing. The official Kickstarter campaign will kick off October 27, 2026.
Anker MindBase: Another Local Hub Contender
Of course this wasn’t the only local AI home hub announced last week. Anker, maker of eufy home security cameras, announced their Anker MindBase at IFA 2026 in Berlin.
We have been using our eufy cameras for years, and their AI recognition features enabled by local storage like the eufy HomeBase S380 have really changed the way we look at our security cameras. We are accustomed to our human, pet, vehicle, and package detection notifications, and our eufy FamiLock E40 opens the door when it recognizes our faces.
The Anker MindBase promises to take that one step further by adding the Anker TrueSmart AI agent to understand the images in real-time, as well as the Anker EasyOmni Link to connect up Matter-compatible as well as the Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant ecosystems.
Anker didn’t announce availability for the MindBase yet but we hope to see more from them in the future, hopefully by early next year.
The Future of Local, Private Smart Home Control
We’re really excited to see both of these companies creating whole-house systems that can store, manage and control our smart home without relying on public AI infrastructure. We look forward to these smart agents making our Frankenhouse much easier to control and manage.