In January, our original backers received their Home Assistant Yellow Kit PoE! With this, all our backers have received their units (with just a few exceptions, see below), and many of the pre-orders have been fulfilled as well. The crowdfunding campaign made Home Assistant Yellow possible and we are now entering the next stage in its journey: Home Assistant Yellow will enter ongoing production and become more widely available through various distributors in the future. It will help new Smart Home enthusiasts to start their journey with Home Assistant! A big shout-out to all of you for your support, patience, and feedback! Without you, Home Assistant Yellow would not be where it is today!

Shipping update

Backers are at the front of the queue. At this point, we’ve delivered enough units to fulfill all backer orders and >95% of the crowdfunding units have shipped to backers. If you are an original crowdfunding backer (ordered before October 27, 2021) and have not received your unit, then your order got stuck for some reason (payment issue, delivery address issue, or similar). In that case, please contact Crowd Supply support if they haven’t already been in touch with you.

We also fulfilled many of the pre-orders placed since October 27, 2021. At this point, there are 1,941 units on the way to Mouser’s warehouse. They are already in the U.S. and are expected to arrive at the warehouse before the end of February. Another 130 units will leave Hong Kong very soon. We are aware that some shipping estimates have been wrong. We’re in contact with Crowd Supply to ensure that shipping estimates become something you can better rely on!

Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi CM4s are still in short supply. At this point we can’t build enough Home Assistant Yellow (with CM4) to fulfill demand. Unfortunately, we can’t make accurate estimates on when Home Assistant Yellow (with CM4) variants will ship, as we have not gotten delivery dates from Raspberry Pi. So far, we have received a steady stream of a couple of hundred CM4s every quarter. As Raspberry Pi stated in their latest supply chain update, there should be significantly more units available from Q3 2023 onwards. So if you ordered a Home Assistant Yellow recently, you’ll likely have to be patient a bit longer. For now, we’ve set tentative shipping estimates of August 31, 2023 for all units that include the integrated CM4, though those estimates will very likely change as we get more news from Raspberry Pi.

Incremental improvements

As we learn from issues we see out in the field, we make small adjustments and improvements to Home Assistant Yellow. For instance, we’ll make a single variant for all countries moving forward to simplify inventory management.

We also continue to extend our documentation at yellow.home-assistant.io. If we are missing specific information, feel free to open an issue on the yellow.home-assistant.io GitHub repository.

Home Assistant Yellow is open hardware

We designed Home Assistant Yellow as an open platform, with KiCad, a piece of open source electronics design software. Not only is the Home Assistant software open source, but we now also made the PCB design files available online. You can view the KiCad design files on the GitHub repository.

More Thread/Matter updates

We are still hard at work to support Thread (and Zigbee & Thread Multiprotocol) as well as Matter for Yellow and Home Assistant in general. You can find more information about the current state in our recent blog post Matter & Thread: where we’re at.

With our crowdfunding coming to an end, if you are interested in getting updates, please head over to home-assistant.io. Thank you very much for being part of this journey! 👋