Would be very nice if HASS had an official HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) on the Home Assistant website.
Listing all compatible hardware peripheral that works with HASS out-of-the-box and configuration for hardware that could/should work with manual configurations.
The list could to start with containing WiFi, Z-Wave, ZigBee, and RF USB sticks and (Raspberry Pi HATs / GPIO HAT) that are supported by HASS and Home Assistant, as well as which minimum version of HASS it is supported from, and if needed also which hardware version and minimum firmware level required for each device to work with HASS.
HCL is generally wanted to make setup and installation even more like an appliance. It also discurage people for mistakenly purchasing incompatible hardware. This is for example similar to what almost all router manufacturers have to list compatible 3G/4G modems.
PS: Maybe extended HCL could possible also be needed if new addons add support for additional hardware; such as example for the Google Assistant addon which require microphones you might want list recommended compatible USB microphone arrays and HAT(s), like the PlayStation Eye (PS3 Camera) and ReSpeaker Mic Array.
This is most likely not going to happen as there are no resources to create/maintain such a list. The component/platform documentations is providing details about the hardware it works with but it heavily depends on the platform.
We encourage everyone to add details to the existing documentation to make it better.
P.S. There is already an indicator that shows in which the integration was added.
What is the HCL would be a Wiki on the Home-Assistant website or as part of the docs to let the community maintain it?
Then would really only have to create and setup an initial template and a disclaimer stating that the HCL list is maintained by the community and as such is not garanteed by HA/HASS developers nor should not be considered endorsement or recommendations for specific hardware.
+1 for list, at least for server side of HA.
What HA is working with is hard to manage, but what HA is working ON shouldn’t be.
After all, seems like 99% of people run it on either RPi or PC.
So, pretty much list “only” need to cover PC (non)compatible hardware in regard to various server side options.