Ending manufacturing of Residence Assistant Yellow

At present, we’re asserting that we are going to now not be producing Residence Assistant Yellow. Relaxation assured, it’ll proceed to obtain software program help 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 Residence Basis. I couldn’t be extra pleased 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).

Residence Assistant Yellow was equally groundbreaking at launch and helped fund Residence Assistant’s growth. Nevertheless, for causes I’ll clarify under, the time has come to finish manufacturing. Which means that in the event you have been contemplating shopping for a Residence Assistant Yellow, you’ll have to act quick, as inventory won’t be replenished (test the Order Now button on the Residence Assistant Yellow web page to see in case your native retailer nonetheless has inventory).

Nabu Casa is now exploring what {hardware} may exchange Residence Assistant Yellow, so when you’ve got any options 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 Residence Assistant. For instance, in the event you’re in search of {hardware} that’s each simple to begin with and helps the Open Residence Basis, we’d advocate the Residence Assistant Inexperienced.

A golden period

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

It wasn’t all clean crusing with Residence Assistant Yellow. We primarily launched the gadget in the midst of the good Pi scarcity. It undoubtedly difficult issues for a time, nevertheless it all finally stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Residence Assistant Inexperienced, which grew to become the best strategy to get began with Residence Assistant. This new product led us to finish the sale of Residence Assistant Yellow units that shipped with a CM4 already put in (known 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.

Know-how modifications, 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 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 this time.

Software program help continues

Say ‘ellow to the longer term