WTH is there no dedicated Home Assistant Yellow Support or Community Pages

As a lot of people are starting to receive their Yellows, it would be good to see dedicated support for the hardware (in particular the Zigbee coordinator) and a place for people to discuss what works, issues etc with migration to Yellow.

Thereā€™s a #yellow channel in Discord.

We can certainly create a section here for it, if thereā€™s enough activity. Until that happens you can use the yellow tag.

3 Likes

Iā€™d also ask for a docs page so we can offer pull requests for more advanced Yellow topics :slight_smile: :mage:t2: like:

8 Likes

Yellow has its own site with setup instructions, certain support information (like how to wipe and reinstall), and more at yellow.home-assistant.io. The site is available on GitHub at GitHub - home-assistant/yellow.home-assistant.io

I would imagine they are willing to accept pull requests that would help clarify things, although some of the sort of things you are mentioning donā€™t seem to have any place where they would fit in well with the current site.

3 Likes

A Discord channel is a pretty moving target and not really a good place to document things.

1 Like

You can also start a wiki post here, as well as suggest edits to the docs.

I already created a long post with Yellow installation tips, but a #yellow category might help more users find the help.

Is there a the difference between this and a ā€œWiki Postā€ please? (as the demand for Yellow information can only increase as hardware is shippedā€¦)

2 Likes

A wiki post can be edited by anybody, if you go to the post edit options you should see an option to make it a wiki, and you can move it to the Community Guides section.

1 Like

While I agree that it would be good to have a dedicated subforum for ā€œHome Assistant Yellowā€ specifically, preferably under the hardware forum, I still think that all Zigbee-specific questions/discussion should be handled in the existing Zigbee subforum and not separately for the Home Assistant Yellow hardware ā†’ https://community.home-assistant.io/c/configuration/zigbee/39

People are already getting these?

Mine has been pushed back to January and it isnā€™t even a POE device.

In general, the communication surrounding Crowd Supply is dreadful. In fact, Iā€™d give it a solid D-. Infrequent updates, no open question thread, etc.

They actually sent me an email that said they were going to cancel my order because I had ordered an NVme that was no longer available and I had 48 hours to reply to buy a different NVme to retain my order. I donā€™t know if that was Crowd Supply or Nabu Casa but in any case it was just terrible handling of the situation.

I donā€™t think I will ever back anything on this platform again.

1 Like

I donā€™t know when you ordered but mine was a year ago and due to ship end of Nov. Then I got messages to say it was shipping in October. Maybe not great communication from the fulfilment company but patience is the name of the game with development projects like this.

Order placed Oct 30 2021ā€¦I got the same Nov message.

I havenā€™t gotten anything about further delay, but the order shows Jan now.

My non-PoE Yellow was ordered July 2022 after the PoE version delay and was originally scheduled for August delivery. Well they missed that and a few more and my account was recently changed to January 2023 delivery (same as my PoE version) but then I got a shipping notice from Crowd Supply this week and it arrived today.

There could be hope for yours but only Crowd Supply really knows.

i received my yellow a few weeks ago (ordered over a year ago), it was originally scheduled for november and I was happy to get it early, but did not do anything with it until now.

Turning it on was easy - but now I want to use it. I was expecting most of the devices that were working on my smart things hub would work on yellow using the ui. turned out that was wrong. for example none of my lower cost smart lights are automatically found and when I tried to add them I was told I needed to configure a package.

I am completely overwhelmed with how to get this thing configured and operating with my existing devices, and have trouble determining what new devices I should buy. the forum is difficult for me as a newcomer to navigate and find stuff. having a section that specialized in the yellow variant seems like it would be very helpful.
so I am in favor of having a dedicated yellow support page.

Most of that however has nothing to do with the fact that youā€™re running it on a Yellow. Support for your lights is linked to Home Assistant, not how you install it, or the hardware you run on.

I accept that. In fact I am very happy with the yellow hardware and how easy it was to get it running. I suspect that people with yellow simply donā€™t have hardware issues with the yellow device, except that many will want to expand the wireless capability to include zwave and maybe bluetooth.

That said, the success of the yellow project is bringing a large number of people to home assistant that have never used it. So as a newbie to HA I need to be able to find how to get something done (whether it is a good idea or not) and advice on what I should do (for example is it a good idea to add zwave inside the yellow enclosure verses using a USB extension cable and adding a zwave device some distance away from the yellow enclosure.) I understand that HA is agnostic to hardware and having a yellow specific support section is not the role of HA, but I also suspect that a large percentage of the yellow newbies will be reaching out to this forum to help them. Having a yellow specific page would be a good place to have them start their search and would reduce the number of inappropriate questions posted by new yellow users all over the various other pages. (the page could be titled ā€˜post your inappropriate questions hereā€™)

2 Likes

Indeed good idea but ā€¦ I canā€™t find a CM4 module , the Yellow is again in his box collecting dust ā€¦

By the same token, a lot of what applies to setting up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi would apply to setting up a Home Assistant Yellow, since the Yellow is basically a Raspberry Pi with an integrated Zigbee Coordinator. No, if youā€™re using the version that includes the CM4 module you donā€™t get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so youā€™ll need a separate USB Bluetooth dongle, but pretty much everything else should work for both.