The ESPHome Starter Kit Is Here!
It is here.
The Official ESPHome Starter Kit is available now, for $40. After a long stretch of design revisions, pre-production units, and blunt community feedback, you can finally put one in your cart.
If you want to celebrate with us, the ESPHome team is running a launch livestream covering the technical details, the design decisions, and the software work behind it, with some familiar faces along for the ride.
How we got here
Apollo started in September 2023. Two people, a modest goal, and Saturday assembly sessions in a basement in Kentucky. We built the whole company on top of ESPHome and Home Assistant, because those projects are the reason a company like ours can exist at all. Without them we would have been tinkering with no path to turn any of it into something real.
Then we pitched the Open Home Foundation on building the first official ESPHome-branded hardware. This was not a handshake. We made our case, and the foundation's board voted on it. Waiting on that decision was one of the more nerve-racking stretches we have had as a company. They approved it, and we became only their second commercial partner alongside Nabu Casa. We have spent every day since trying to be worth that vote.
We first showed the kit on stage at State of the Open Home 2026 in Utrecht. Standing in a room full of the people whose software we had built our business on, holding hardware with the ESPHome logo on it, was one of those moments that does not entirely land until later. Today it goes out into the world.
What the ESPHome Starter Kit is
It is the first official kit for learning to build your own smart home devices with ESPHome.
Anyone who has tried to get into this hobby knows the usual wall. You have to work out which development board to buy. Then a breadboard, jumper wires, resistors, and the patience to decode which pin does what. Somewhere in hour two a wire pops loose, nothing works, and the whole thing goes back in the box.
The Starter Kit takes that wall down. Snap a module off the panel, connect it to the main board with one ribbon cable, open the visual builder, and you have a working smart home device. No soldering. No breadboards. No parts sourcing. No code required.
And when the lessons are finished, nothing goes in a drawer. Every module is a real product you'll keep using in your home.
Build. Learn. Automate.
Three words that shaped every decision in this project.
Build.
Solder-free assembly gets you straight to the interesting part. Each module snaps off a single panel and connects through one FPC ribbon cable. Every connection is identical, so there is no wrong way to plug it in, no pins to decode, and no wire to work loose halfway through. The hardware stops being the obstacle.
Learn.
We did not want a kit that hands you a result without any understanding. The Learning Wiki explains the why behind each step, connecting what you physically plugged in to the configuration running underneath it. You finish knowing how it works, not only that it worked. Those skills carry directly into anything you build with ESPHome next.
Automate.
Add your device to your existing smart home in minutes, then trigger lights, notifications, heating, or music. Or run it standalone with no hub at all. Either way, it keeps working long after the lessons end.
What is in the box
The kit uses the same quality of components found in professional smart home devices.
ESPHome C6 board
The brain. Built on the Espressif ESP32-C6-MINI-1, handling connectivity, device logic, and communication with your smart home.
- 2 x 14-pin FPC module ports, so two modules can run at the same time
- Onboard RGB status LED, so you know it is alive from the moment you plug in
- USB-C for power and programming, the same cable as most modern devices
- Optional rechargeable LiPo battery support, for placing devices away from an outlet
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and Thread on the same chip. Zigbee is also possible at the chip level for advanced users.
PIR motion module
An MH-SR602 passive infrared sensor detecting movement from 0 to 3.5 meters. It picks up the heat given off by people and animals in motion, which makes it one of the most practical sensors in home automation.
Temperature and humidity module
An AHT20F sensor accurate to ±0.3 °C and ±2% relative humidity. Precise enough to drive automations you actually trust, rather than a number that only looks good on a dashboard.
Button module
A physical, clickable button built for everyday use. Sometimes the best interface in the house is one you can feel without looking.
ESPHome "Casita" notification module
Ten programmable RGB LEDs and a piezo buzzer, shaped like the ESPHome logo. Status colors, patterns, animations, chimes, and alerts. It is genuinely nice enough to leave out on a shelf, which is exactly what we were going for.
Also included
The button, temperature and humidity, and Casita modules all live on a single snap-apart module board, with the PIR as its own module. You also get three FPC ribbon cables and the ESPHome Casita stand to keep the notification module upright and visible.
How it works
- Plug in a module with one of the included FPC ribbon cables. It only goes in one way.
- Open the ESPHome Device Builder, the visual desktop app, and configure your device by picking components in an editor. No YAML knowledge required.
- Install the firmware and watch the device appear, ready to use.
- Connect it to Home Assistant for deeper automations whenever you want, or keep running it standalone.
By the end of the included learning path you will have built four working devices: a motion sensor, a notification light, an environment monitor, and an automation trigger. Run any two modules at once and the kit becomes a multi-purpose room sensor.
No code required, and no server to set up first
This is the part that quietly changes everything for newcomers.
For years, getting into ESPHome meant standing up Home Assistant first, or running a server, or configuring a Raspberry Pi before you could touch a single sensor. That is a real barrier for someone who mostly wants to learn how this works.
The ESPHome Device Builder removes it. Pick your components in a visual editor, set your behavior, install. Start building on day one, then connect to Home Assistant when you are ready for more.
And the YAML is always there underneath. The visual builder is a starting point, not a ceiling. When you want to open the configuration and change it directly, nothing is hidden from you. That is the whole philosophy here: lower the floor without lowering the ceiling.
The wiki walks you through every step
If there is one part of this project we would point you to first, it is the Apollo Wiki.
We spent a long time on it, because documentation is usually where beginner kits quietly give up. Ours is written to be followed start to finish with nothing assumed. First steps takes you from an unopened box to a working device. From there, guided walkthroughs like button controlled LEDs show you how to make the modules work together, one clear step at a time.
What we care about most is that it explains the reasoning. Not only "plug this in here," but why that pin does what it does and how the thing you clicked in the editor turns into the behavior you see. That is the difference between following instructions and actually learning something you can reuse.
If anything in there is unclear, tell us. The wiki is a living document and community feedback is how it got this good.
What you can build
Four modules, and each one becomes something real in your home:
- Walk into a room, lights come on. The PIR module as a presence trigger, so you stop reaching for switches in the dark.
- Track your bedroom climate. Temperature and humidity readings that trigger automations when a room gets too warm or too dry, and give you real data on how you actually sleep.
- A do-not-disturb light. Program the Casita LEDs to glow red and the buzzer to chime when you are on a call, so the household knows without you saying a word.
- One-press routines. Tap the button to fire any Home Assistant automation: a scene, your morning playlist, the coffee machine, or your whole evening shutdown.
- A multi-purpose room sensor. Run motion and climate together on one board and cover a whole room with a single device.
- Whatever you think of next. Once the basics click, the same skills apply across the entire ESPHome ecosystem and hundreds of supported components.
Who it is for
Complete beginners who have watched this hobby from a distance and wanted a way in that does not start with a soldering iron.
Home Assistant users who have always wanted to build a device instead of buying one, but never found a clean starting point.
Tinkerers and makers who want quality components, open firmware, and hardware with room to grow.
Educators and students. We keep hearing from teachers using our sensors to teach IoT and electronics, and this kit was designed with that classroom firmly in mind.
Anyone shopping for a gift for the person in their life who takes things apart to see how they work.
Built on Open Home principles
The Open Home Foundation exists to champion privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes, and for every person who lives in one. Those were not values we bolted on at the end. They were the design brief.
Privacy. Everything you build runs 100% locally. No cloud, no account, no subscription, no telemetry. Your data stays in your home, and what leaves it is only what you choose to share.
Choice. Open standards and open source throughout. The firmware and hardware designs are public on GitHub. Use it with Home Assistant, use it standalone, modify it, extend it, build something we never imagined. No vendor lock-in, ever.
Sustainability. Most learning kits end their life in a drawer. Every module here is built to last and designed to keep working as a genuine device in your home, or to sit on a shelf showing off the ESPHome logo. Open hardware you can repurpose, modify, and keep using.
Every kit funds the open home
Here is the part that matters most to us.
The majority of the profit from every ESPHome Starter Kit goes directly to the Open Home Foundation, supporting the team behind ESPHome, Home Assistant, Music Assistant, and over 250 other open source projects that put people first.
So when you buy a kit to learn on, you are also helping pay for the continued development of the software that made all of it possible in the first place. That loop is the entire reason we wanted to build this.
Working with this team
Building this alongside the ESPHome and Open Home Foundation team has been the best part of the project, and the most humbling.
They care deeply, they argue about the right things, and they hold a high standard for anything that carries their name. The kit went through more revisions than we planned because of that, and it is a better product for every single one. They caught things we missed and pushed back when we needed pushing back on.
We learned a great deal from them, and we are still a little amazed they trusted a six-person company in Versailles, Kentucky with something this important. We have tried hard to be worth it.
What early builders are saying
One of the first reviewers, Didgeridrew, called it <cite index="22-1">"A great way to get started with ESPHome."</cite> He noted that the components, the design, the documentation, and the new Device Builder together make those crucial early wins much easier to reach, and that the modularity let him move between device layouts without fussing with jumper cables.
That is exactly what we hoped people would find.
Where to buy
- Direct from us: apolloautomation.com, $40
Just the beginning
This kit is the starting point, not the destination.
The design is modular on purpose. Two FPC ports and a snap-apart module panel mean the platform can grow, and we are already thinking hard about what comes next: more modules, more boards, and more ways to extend what you already own. The Device Builder keeps improving, Thread and Matter support keeps maturing, and the ceiling on what a low-cost chip can do keeps rising.
This starter kit is just the beginning.
Thank you
We need to be clear about something: this kit did not come from six people. It came from a lot more than that, and most of them do not work here.
To our friends and family. You showed up at the workshop on evenings and weekends, stayed for long days and later nights, and did the unglamorous work: assembling, testing, folding, packing, labeling. When we ran out of hours in the building, you took boxes of components home and kept working at your own kitchen tables. Nobody asked you to do that. You did it because you wanted us to succeed, and we would not have made this deadline without you. Thank you. Genuinely, thank you.
To the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome teams, for trusting us with this, and for holding the standard high the entire way through.
To the reviewers and community members who tested pre-production units and told us plainly what was wrong. The rough edges you found are the reason the version in the box is as good as it is.
To everyone in our Discord who has been patiently asking about this for months and cheering it on without ever getting impatient with us.
And to our team in Versailles, who kept refining this until it was right rather than until it was finished.
We are a small company in a small town in Kentucky. Getting to make the first official ESPHome hardware is not something we take lightly, and we know exactly how many people it took to get here.
Now it is yours. Go build something.
Build. Learn. Automate.
Frequently asked questions
What is the ESPHome Starter Kit? It is the first official kit for learning to build your own smart home devices with ESPHome. It pairs an ESP32-C6 main board with snap-together modules that connect using a single ribbon cable, with no soldering, breadboards, parts sourcing, or code required.
How much does the ESPHome Starter Kit cost? $40 USD. Prices may differ between regions due to local market conditions and individual retailers.
Where can I buy it? Directly from apolloautomation.com, or through our distributors including Ameridroid in the USA, The Pi Hut in the UK, Domadoo in France, Domo-Supply in Switzerland, and Slim Huisje in the Netherlands.
Do I need to know how to code? No. The kit is configured through the ESPHome Device Builder, a visual editor that handles every step. If you want to work with YAML directly, you can at any time.
Do I need to solder anything? No. Every connection is made with an FPC ribbon cable. No breadboards, no jumper wires, no solder joints.
Do I need Home Assistant to use it? No. You can build and run devices without installing Home Assistant first. Connect it to Home Assistant whenever you want deeper automations.
What is included in the kit? The ESPHome C6 board, the ESPHome Starter Kit module board holding the button, temperature and humidity, and ESPHome Casita modules, a PIR motion module, three FPC ribbon cables, and the ESPHome Casita stand.
What can I build with it? By the end of the learning path you will have built a motion sensor, a notification light, an environment monitor, and an automation trigger. Two modules can run at the same time, turning the kit into a multi-purpose room sensor.
Does it need the cloud or a subscription? No. Everything runs 100% locally with no cloud, no account, no subscription, and no telemetry.
Does the kit support Zigbee? The kit supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and Thread. The ESP32-C6 has Zigbee at the hardware level, so it is possible at the chip level for advanced users experimenting, but it is not part of the supported out-of-the-box experience.
Can it run on battery power? The main board is powered by USB-C and supports an optional rechargeable LiPo battery, so you can place devices away from an outlet.
How does buying a kit support the Open Home Foundation? The majority of the profit from every ESPHome Starter Kit goes directly to the Open Home Foundation, funding work on ESPHome, Home Assistant, Music Assistant, and over 250 other open source projects.
Is it good for beginners with no electronics experience? Yes. That is exactly who it was designed for. The solder-free ribbon cable system and the visual Device Builder remove the two hardest parts of getting started, and the Learning Wiki explains the reasoning behind each step.
Apollo Automation designs, engineers, and manufactures privacy-first, locally-controlled smart home sensors in Versailles, Kentucky. Every product features 100% local control with no cloud dependencies or subscriptions required. Apollo is a Works With Home Assistant partner, Made For ESPHome certified, Works With Homey certified, a BBB Accredited Business, and the second official commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation. Learn more at apolloautomation.com.
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