Comment by ahaucnx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahaucnx | Hacker News Reader

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It's true that the trend in the industry definitely goes towards subscriptions and closed eco systems.

We at AirGradient see that very well that more and more companies force their users into the cloud and some monitors even refuse to show current air quality when not registered to the cloud. Imagine you would need to register your fever thermometer with an app in the cloud before you could measure your temperature...

Part of the problem is not only the investors in Matter but also VC funded smart home equipment manufacturers that are pressured to go down the recurring revenue business model.

At AirGradient [1] we want to demonstrate a counter example. Our fully certified air quality monitors are open source hardware and thus we provide the firmware code and they can be easily re-flashed with whatever software you like to use. With this openness a great community has emerged that maintains integrations to various systems like Home Assistant via ESPHome.

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/

Thanks for trying a more customer-friendly approach!

I don't have an immediate need for one of these, but do you have any plans to expand to Europe or work with a local distributor? Inflated shipping cost & time, VAT & customs duties (+additional processing time) and a cumbersome return process if anything goes wrong, makes for a less than ideal shopping experience.

+1, I just bought an Aranet4, and I’d return it in a heartbeat if I could buy an Airgradient (or three) in Europe without the added cost & hassle.

This is definitely on our radar.

At the moment we still have a lot of dynamics in the product, eg frequent firmware updates on the shipped units and this is why we currently prefer to ship directly.

Once things are more settled down we will look for fulfillment centers in Europe and the US.

Hey, I run a small fulfillment company in Germany and would love to help shipping your products. In fact, I just wanted to order your indoor kit yesterday but, as others have said, it's not that straight-forward ordering from the US. Drop me a note at can@getravioli.de and let's see if we can make it work, including the complexity with the firmware updates and so on.

To provide a counter point here, I jumped through all these hoops and happily run an AirGradient sensor here in Germany. While delivery took a while, everything went well in the end.

Thanks to Achim for all your awesome work, by the way.

I literally just purchased your fully assembled kit a few days ago specifically because all the parts are open source and easy to hack. Right now I’m running Amazon air quality monitors with a homebridge plugin I had to patch myself because Amazon changed their API which broke everything.

Massive respect to that HA support. I’ve started running HA and it amazes me what is available on some cloud products once you remove the proprietary cloud from them. I used to be a Google home or bust, slowly I’ve been going the cloud agnostic route. Any Android device should work with Google home (for the wife) and both HomeKit + Home Assistant. I say HomeKit and Home Assistant because I really like Apple ease of use and the ability for home assistant to pipe other compatible sensors directly into HomeKit for example, ecobees sensors provide more sensor data via home assistant than they do in their regular app and in HomeKit. Via Home Assistant I can add this extra sensor data directly into HomeKit.

Can you elaborate on the Home Assistant integration? Do you just need to plug in the devices and ESPHome detects them or is there more to it?

At the moment you need to flash ESPHome onto it (can be done easily via the browser) and then there is a well maintained ESPHome configuration script available.

https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome

I’ve got one of your pre-soldered kits running ESPHome in my office. It’s a great product, thanks for making it!

#metoo. I love it. I wish it did carbon monoxide among other things i havemt thought of yet.

You would not happen to have an email subscription list/webform for people from Europe who’d like an alert when you’re available here?

This way you’d get a list of potential customers and we’d get a notification when we’d get an easier option to buy your products.

This is exactly the kind of product worth supporting. It's Christmas Day, so won't be buying today, but I've added this to the list of items for my Home Assistant.

There isn't an HN promo code is there?

I think I'd seen your product before on HN. It looks nice but like the others say, I'm in Europe so it's a no go for now. Will keep an eye on it though for when you decide to expand!

Looks perfect for me with one show stopper: no Home Kit support. I love the idea of Home Assistant but do not have the free time to pick up another service to support in our house.

One of our community members actually added Home Kit support.

See: https://forum.airgradient.com/t/airgradient-integrations/703...

Aww I wish I had known about AirGradient a few weeks ago. I ended up buying an an Air Things wave plus where I can at least export data to csv.

I have had an Air Things Wave+ for a few years now. It’s great. So at least you will have a solid product.

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