Ending manufacturing of Dwelling Assistant Yellow

As we speak, we’re asserting that we’ll now not be producing Dwelling Assistant Yellow. Relaxation assured, it’s going to proceed to obtain software program assist far into the longer term.

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

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

Nabu Casa is now exploring what {hardware} may exchange Dwelling Assistant Yellow, so in case you have any ideas on what we must always do subsequent, please inform us within the feedback! Within the meantime, the excellent news is that there are already loads of different nice methods to run Dwelling Assistant. For instance, in the event you’re on the lookout for {hardware} that’s each straightforward to start out with and helps the Open Dwelling Basis, we’d suggest the Dwelling Assistant Inexperienced.

A golden period

There’s a lengthy yellow brick street that introduced us to at present. All the best way again in 2021, we introduced Dwelling Assistant Yellow (initially referred to as Amber). It included some fairly distinctive options, together with its built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, elective PoE, and general expandable strategy. Because it used the Raspberry Pi Compute Module platform, included GPIO, and had an NVMe slot, there have been a whole lot of other ways you may improve it over time (together with individuals having the ability to improve from CM4 to CM5, which was fairly the velocity bump 🏎️).

It wasn’t all clean crusing with Dwelling Assistant Yellow. We basically launched the gadget in the course of the good Pi scarcity. It undoubtedly difficult issues for a time, but it surely all ultimately stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Dwelling Assistant Inexperienced, which turned the best option to get began with Dwelling Assistant. This new product led us to finish the sale of Dwelling Assistant Yellow gadgets that shipped with a CM4 already put in (referred to as the Dwelling Assistant Yellow Normal), which allowed us to focus the product line on the package variations.

Small, however a lot room for actions

Dwelling Assistant Inexperienced continues to have robust gross sales, however Dwelling 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 finally pushed us to discontinue Dwelling Assistant Yellow.

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

Software program assist continues

Say ‘ellow to the longer term