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A Moment That Still Does Not Feel Real
This week, How-To Geek published an article titled "Stop avoiding ESP32 projects, this kit removes the biggest barriers to entry," and the kit they were writing about is the Apollo ESPHome Starter Kit. Read the full article here: How-To Geek coverage of the ESPHome Starter Kit.
For a six-person team in Versailles, Kentucky, that headline is not something we ever expected to read. And we want to be very clear about something before we say anything else.
This is not our win. This is the community's win.
What the ESPHome Starter Kit Actually Is
For anyone finding us through the How-To Geek piece, here is a quick summary of what the kit does.
The Apollo ESPHome Starter Kit is designed to let beginners build their own smart home devices without soldering, without breadboards, and without writing a single line of YAML. It includes an ESP32-C6 main controller and four modules that connect via FPC ribbon cables: a smart button module, a motion sensor module, a temperature and humidity module, and an LED and buzzer module. The kit supports any two modules at the same time, so your first build can be a motion-activated light, a smart doorbell, a temperature alert, or any combination you can dream up.
You configure everything using a visual YAML editor, flash the firmware, and connect the device to Home Assistant or use it standalone. Everything runs locally. No cloud. No subscriptions. No account to sign up for. The kit is expected to ship around June 2026.
But the kit itself is only half the story. The other half is why it exists at all, and who it is really for.
We Did Not Build This Alone.
Apollo Automation started in 2023 with two co-founders assembling sensors on weekends in a basement. Every product we have ever shipped, from the MSR-1 to the AIR-1 to the ESPHome Starter Kit, exists because of feedback from the ESPHome and Home Assistant communities.
The Starter Kit is the most direct example of this that we have ever built. For years, we have watched new users show up in the Home Assistant forums, on Reddit, and in our Discord asking the same question in slightly different forms. How do I get started with ESPHome without buying a soldering iron? What ESP32 do I pick? Where do I even begin?
The ESPHome Starter Kit is our answer to that question. It is not a flagship product. It is not the most technically impressive thing we have ever made. It is something simpler and, honestly, more important to us. It is an on-ramp. It is the thing we wish had existed when we were first tinkering in that basement.
Every design decision was shaped by community input. The choice of modules. The solderless connectors. The visual YAML editor. The decision to support two modules at once instead of locking people into a single configuration. None of that came from a whiteboard session. It came from listening.
The Open Home Foundation and Why Open Source Matters
Something we want to say clearly and without qualification: Apollo Automation exists because of open source. We are not a company that adopted open source as a marketing angle. We were built on it.
ESPHome gave us a firmware framework we could contribute to instead of rebuilding from scratch. Home Assistant gave us a platform our customers already trusted. The Open Home Foundation gives those projects a home where no investor, no acquirer, and no corporate strategy shift can take them away from the community that depends on them.
The Open Home Foundation fights for three principles that we believe in deeply:
- Privacy. Your smart home data belongs to you, not to a manufacturer or a cloud provider.
- Choice. You should be able to mix and match hardware from different vendors without being locked into a single ecosystem.
- Sustainability. The devices you buy today should not stop working tomorrow because a company decided to turn off a server.
Apollo Automation is the second official commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation, and the ESPHome Starter Kit is the first official ESPHome-branded hardware. A portion of every kit sold helps fund the foundation and the projects it protects, including ESPHome and Home Assistant themselves.
When you buy this kit, you are not just getting hardware. You are helping fund the open-source ecosystem that makes all of this possible.
Thank You to the People Who Made This Happen
We want to name some names, because credit matters.
Thank you to Adam Davidson and the team at How-To Geek for giving the Starter Kit a closer look and for taking the time to understand what we were trying to do. Coverage like that is not something we can engineer or buy. It happens when a writer genuinely believes a product is worth their readers' time, and that trust is not something we take lightly.
Thank you to the Open Home Foundation, and specifically to the leadership and engineering teams who welcomed Apollo into the commercial partner program and trusted us to help carry the ESPHome brand forward.
Thank you to the ESPHome maintainers. Every single thing we build rests on work you did for free, on your own time, because you cared. We see you. We know none of this works without you.
Thank you to the Home Assistant community. The forums, the subreddits, the Discord, the monthly blog comments, the bug reports, and yes, even the occasional spicy feedback. You made us better. You made the kit better.
Thank you to our customers. Every order, every review, every "hey this thing is actually incredible" message keeps a six-person team in Central Kentucky employed and building. We do not take a single sensor sold for granted.
And thank you to our team in Versailles. Trevor, Justin, Kyle, Brandon, Holly, and everyone who has assembled, tested, packed, and shipped products out of our little workshop. The Starter Kit shipped, a How-To Geek writer noticed, and it was because of the quality you put into every board.
What This Moment Actually Means to Us
There is a version of this blog post we could have written that leaned hard into marketing. We chose not to write that one.
The truth is this. We are a small hardware company from a town of 8,500 people, in a state that is not on anyone's list of tech hubs. We got here by doing things the slow way, the honest way, and the way the community asked us to. A feature in How-To Geek is not validation that we have arrived. It is a reminder that the community is watching, that we have a responsibility to keep earning this attention, and that the bar only goes up from here.
The ESPHome Starter Kit is shipping in May 2026. If you have been curious about building your own smart home devices and did not know where to start, this kit was built for you. If you have been in the ESPHome community for years and want to introduce a friend, a partner, or a kid to the hobby, this kit was built for them too.
And if you do pick one up, we genuinely want to hear how your first build goes. The Discord is open. The GitHub is open. The email inbox is open. We built this kit because you asked for it, and we are not about to stop listening now.
Learn More and Stay Connected
- Read the How-To Geek article: Stop avoiding ESP32 projects, this kit removes the biggest barriers to entry
- Learn about the Open Home Foundation: openhomefoundation.org
- Explore our products: apolloautomation.com
- Join the conversation on our Discord, YouTube, and GitHub
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.
