Silicon Labs has entered an official partnership with Nabu Casa, the company behind the popular Home Assistant home automation software, to support the development of Home Assistant open-source software and Silicon Labs-based hardware platforms.
Most open-source embedded software projects start as a one-person (or a small team) effort as the vendor-provided firmware and related software may not have the features set needed by this user or group of users. So they hack existing hardware to build something that better fits their requirements often without input/help from the silicon vendor or product manufacturer. But sometimes the project becomes popular enough that large companies start to help it with support and funding. That’s apparently the case for Home Assistant project with Silicon Lans and Nabu Case entering an official partnership.
The announcement does not provide details about the partnership but explains this should lead to better support and improvements for both Home Assistant software and the firmware in Silabs-powered products, as well as better support for devices such as Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect, as well as third party devices based on Silicon Labs wireless microcontrollers with Z-Wave, Zigbee, or Thread support including Philips Hue, Ring, IKEA TRÅDFRI, and others. The main benefit here is that the developers at Nabu Cassa will be able to report bugs directly to Silicon Labs engineers and get a fix as soon as possible.
Two open-source projects currently funded by Nabu Casa – thanks to the revenue received from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers – are the Z-Wave JS and Zigpy projects both of which have a dedicated engineer working full-time to integrate Z-Wave and Zigbee into Home Assistant. As I understand it, the partnership with Silicon Labs should enable more resources for Home Assistant-related open-source software and hardware projects based on the company’s chips. As a side note, Nabu Casas also manages the ESPHome open-source firmware project – which they acquired in 2021 – but this partnership may not directly impact this specific project since Silicon Labs microcontrollers are not supported.
Thanks to Hedda for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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