Ending production of Home Assistant Yellow

Right this moment, we’re asserting that we’ll now not be producing Home Assistant Yellow. Relaxation assured, it would proceed to obtain software program assist far into the long run.

I’m Carl, Vice President of Industrial at Nabu Casa, the group that builds and sells official {hardware} for the Open Residence Basis. I couldn’t be extra happy with our {hardware} achievements over the previous 12 months, together with Voice Preview Edition and Connect ZWA-2 (together with its cool new Wi-Fi and PoE experimental firmware).

Residence Assistant Yellow was equally groundbreaking at launch and helped fund Residence Assistant’s improvement. Nonetheless, for causes I’ll clarify under, the time has come to finish manufacturing. Because of this should you have been contemplating shopping for a Residence Assistant Yellow, you’ll have to act quick, as inventory is not going to be replenished (verify the Order Now button on the Home Assistant Yellow page to see in case your native retailer nonetheless has inventory).

Nabu Casa is now exploring what {hardware} might substitute Residence Assistant Yellow, so in case you have any options on what we should always do subsequent, please inform us within the feedback! Within the meantime, the excellent news is that there are already plenty of other great ways to run Home Assistant. For instance, should you’re in search of {hardware} that’s each straightforward to begin with and helps the Open Residence Basis, we’d suggest the Home Assistant Green.

A golden period

There is a long yellow brick road that brought us to today. All the way back in 2021, we introduced Residence Assistant Yellow (initially referred to as Amber). It included some fairly distinctive options, together with its built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, non-compulsory PoE, and total expandable method. Because it used the Raspberry Pi Compute Module platform, included GPIO, and had an NVMe slot, there have been quite a lot of other ways you could possibly improve it over time (together with individuals being able to upgrade from CM4 to CM5, which was fairly the speed bump 🏎️).

It wasn’t all clean crusing with Residence Assistant Yellow. We basically launched the machine in the course of the nice Pi scarcity. It undoubtedly difficult issues for a time, however it all finally stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Home Assistant Green, which turned the best technique to get began with Residence Assistant. This new product led us to end the sale of Residence Assistant Yellow units that shipped with a CM4 already put in (referred to as the Residence Assistant Yellow Customary), which allowed us to focus the product line on the equipment variations.

Small, however a lot room for actions

Residence Assistant Inexperienced continues to have robust gross sales, however Residence Assistant Yellow gross sales have been naturally slowing down, as occurs a few years into any product’s life. This month, it lastly reached the purpose the place it now not made sense to have one other manufacturing run, which in the end pushed us to discontinue Residence Assistant Yellow.

Expertise adjustments, and small-form-factor computing has at all times moved quick. As an illustration, within the early days of Residence Assistant, the group’s de facto advice was at all times the latest Raspberry Pi machine, however we’re seeing extra individuals gravitate in direction of Mini PCs. We’re now exploring what we might construct subsequent for our energy customers, however we’re nonetheless a way off, so don’t wait should you want one thing at present.

Software program assist continues

Say ‘ellow to the long run