Nabu Casa has acquired ESPHome

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Today I’m happy to announce that ESPHome is from now on under the Nabu Casa umbrella. ESPHome is the easiest way to program ESP8266 and ESP32 devices and integrate them into Home Assistant. It has become an important piece of the Home Assistant ecosystem, so much so that we want to ensure that the project can continue to flourish as a free and open source project. This week Nabu Casa came to an agreement to acquire the ESPHome project from Otto Winter, the founder of ESPHome.

Otto started ESPHome three years ago to make programming ESP devices as easy as possible. With ESPHome, users write simple YAML files in which you describe what components are attached to what pins of the ESP device. ESPHome will then make this available in Home Assistant. No extra work necessary. Super simple.

Example ESPHome configuration

The following ESPHome YAML example will program your ESP device. When you plug it in, it will make the light on pin 16 available in Home Assistant.

esphome:
  name: esp32_light
  platform: ESP32
  board: esp32dev
wifi:
  ssid: "MySSID"
  password: "supersecret"
api:
light:
  - platform: binary
    name: "Desk Lamp"
    output: light_output
output:
  - id: light_output
    platform: gpio
    pin: GPIO16

Otto’s vision was right and ESPHome has become the easiest way for people to integrate ESP devices in Home Assistant. For example, the tag reader is based on ESPHome, and many other projects are too.

As the project grew, so did Otto’s obligations in his personal life until they could no longer be combined. With the acquisition of ESPHome, Nabu Casa now owns the copyright of Otto’s code and the ESPHome organizations on GitHub, Docker, etc. Otto has shut down his Patreon account. Otto will step back from being part of the project management side of things. The project will continue as an open source project with the current ESPHome development team, @jesserockz and @glmnet. Otto will still be around and help out on development as his time allows.

We are going to bring our experience gained from the Home Assistant project and apply it to ESPHome, like focus on community and ease of use. If you have any ideas, make sure to share them in the ESPHome discord.

About Nabu Casa Nabu Casa was founded by the founders of Home Assistant. It exists to make the privacy-centered smart home accessible to everyone. Nabu Casa has no investors and is solely funded by users via Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions. With Home Assistant, Nabu Casa already works on making sure the brains of your home are the best it can be. And with ESPHome they will help you make sure that other devices are too.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/03/18/nabu-casa-has-acquired-esphome/
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When can we expect the rebrand to Home Assistant Embedded ?

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Sounds great! Especially if this will also mean that future HA changes are reflected in ESPHome at the same time. For example the fan integration in HA now supports percentages, but ESPHome doesn’t.

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Awesome! open-source software and cheap DIY-friendly hardware is a win!

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Parts of that have been merged, coming soon™

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Wow this is big. I’ve never used ESPHome yet but still this is exciting.

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So HA Home? HAH has a good ring to it. :sunglasses:

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I’m not really enthusiastic…
Despite the fact that I love Home Assistant, I think ESPhome was meant to be independent.
ESPhome allows you to make firmware for a lot of sensors in a very short time.

There is no reason why this possibility should only interest the Home Assistant community…

The opening would have been more favorable to this project but well the project remains open source so criticism is difficult but even remaining open source it is not the direction I was imagining for this project.

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If you do it with high availability it becomes HAHHA :laughing:

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It was, but like many other projects, it skewed long ago to being almost a bolt-on project for HA and tailoring itself to support that as much as possible. AFAIK, HA is the top system integration for ESPHome and has been for a long time. I’ll put it this way, as of 2020, OpenHAB had to actually develop a “HomeAssistant MQTT Discovery” component to be able to really integrate ESPHome devices.

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I think this is awesome! This gives Home Assistant a great platform for tinkerers and developers to make deeply embedded gadgets for HA

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How does Nabu Casa own copyright to code that Otto Winter did not write? The individual authors own the copyright in their code.

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Nick, I’m not sure if the verbiage was changed after you made your comment but the blog post specifically says, " Nabu Casa now owns the copyright of Otto’s code". They also own the GitHub, Docker, and other accounts. They don’t mention other contributor’s copyright at all. I think it’s safe to assume that nothing has changed for those contributors.

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Awesome! Congrats to everyone involved in making this happen. Super excited to see ESPHome find a permanent home with Nabu Casa!

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Yes the word « aquire » is disturbing.
So they aquire my participation to esphome too ? :sweat_smile:
« HA now manage the esphome project. » seems more adapted to me.
But I’m pretty sure that the intentions of HA are very good… just not the right terminology for a community allergic to lucrative activity :smile:

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I hope you don’t have any plans for replacing yaml with GUI?

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if i don’t have a nabucasa account , be able to use esphome anymore??

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Yes. ESPHome isn’t being attached to NabuCasa. It’s just that the same team that manages NabuCasa will also be managing the ESPHome project as well. It’s not becoming a paid service.

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If it had to happen, I’m glad it was Nabu Casa that did it. It needs to be an organization that understands how to keep open source projects free and open and so far Nabu Casa has done a great job of that. I’m sure they will be good stewards of this very key part of a FOSS home automation ecosystem.

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Just because it’s part of Nabu Case does NOT mean ESPHome will be closed up to HA only. You will still be able to use it as you are using it now. There is the MQTT option already. It won’t go away, so if you don’t want HA that’s fine you have MQTT

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