AirGradient Is Now Works With Home Assistant!

Last Thursday, during our 13th Air Quality Forum, we made a big announcement that our team has been eagerly anticipating for months: AirGradient has officially achieved Works with Home Assistant certification!

This milestone represents something we’ve been working toward for much of the year, and our team was overjoyed when the news finally came through. We hope you’re as excited as we are about what this means for the future of open source air quality monitoring.

While this achievement is a technical milestone, it is also a validation of our shared commitment to open source technology, local control, and user privacy. It’s the culmination of collaborative efforts between our team, the incredible Home Assistant community, and dedicated contributors who believed in our vision of making air quality data accessible to everyone.

Today, we wanted to share this announcement with anyone who hasn’t yet heard the news. We also thought it would be a great time to reflect on how we got here and where we want to go next. If you prefer video format, please find the full recording of the forum here.

Our Journey to Home Assistant Integration

Many of you are probably already aware of our origin story, but in case you aren’t, here’s a quick recap.

The story of AirGradient began six years ago during the burning season in northern Thailand, when air quality became a critical health concern for our local community. My co-founder and I created the first devices to help at our children’s school during the wildfire season, when parents and teachers needed to understand whether it was safe for children to play outside during the heavy smoke.

Armed with a technical background and a determination to find answers, we began building our first air quality monitors using recycled plastic bottles as enclosures. From the very beginning, we shared the designs freely, believing that access to clean air information shouldn’t be limited by geography or resources.

As we refined the devices and saw their effectiveness, we began creating more units for other schools and community members. We started offering PCBs for free - users would only pay for postage, and we would send them a circuit board that they could attach sensors to, creating their own DIY air quality monitor. I still remember making trips to the post office, carefully packaging PCBs in envelopes to send around the world.

This grassroots approach caught the attention of Jeff Geerling, a prominent YouTuber, who created a video about our project. Suddenly, our small operation was overwhelmed with interest, our web server struggled to keep up with the traffic, and requests for PCBs exploded. The video now has over 360,000 views and hundreds of comments from people excited about open source air quality monitoring.

From there, we realised there was genuine global interest in accessible, open-source air quality monitors. We began looking into how we could improve our devices while maintaining our commitment to open source principles and community-driven development.

Community-Driven Development

Joshua, known in the community as MallocArray, was among the early adopters who saw potential in connecting AirGradient devices with Home Assistant. He independently developed an ESPHome integration that has become very popular, garnering over 290 GitHub stars and serving countless users who prefer the flexibility and customisation options that ESPHome provides. His integration remains strong today, offering features and configuration options that some users prefer over our official integration.

Later, as our community grew and more users requested a native Home Assistant integration, Joost stepped forward to develop what became our official AirGradient Home Assistant integration. Joost created an integration that meets Home Assistant’s rigorous quality standards and achieved platinum-level certification. His dedication to integration and attention to user experience have been instrumental in earning the Works with Home Assistant certification we’re celebrating today.

What makes this story so special is that it showcases the power of open source development. Because our hardware and firmware were completely open, talented developers like Joshua and Joost could build upon our work, creating solutions that serve different user needs and preferences. Rather than competing, these integrations complement each other, giving users choice and fostering innovation we never could have imagined when we first started mailing PCBs from Thailand.

What “Works with Home Assistant” Means

As Miranda from Home Assistant explained during our forum, this certification represents rigorous testing where every aspect of the integration is thoroughly tested to ensure seamless operation across different scenarios. The Home Assistant team puts integrations through comprehensive evaluation processes that go far beyond basic functionality testing.

The certification also validates our shared values, as both AirGradient and Home Assistant prioritise local control, privacy, and open source principles. This alignment represents a fundamental agreement about how smart home technology should work - users should have full control over their data, and devices should function locally without requiring cloud dependencies.

Our integration meets Home Assistant’s platinum-level quality scale, ensuring an excellent user experience with features like native discovery. AirGradient devices automatically announce themselves on your network, allowing Home Assistant to discover and set up devices without manual IP configuration.

Open Source, Open Future

Achieving Works with Home Assistant certification marks a significant milestone, but it’s just one step in our ongoing journey. We’re currently working on the next generation of AirGradient ONE, which will continue to build on our modular design philosophy while incorporating the feedback and insights we’ve gathered from our growing community.

Our commitment to open source development also remains stronger than ever. As we develop new hardware and expand our sensor capabilities, everything will continue to be fully open - from circuit designs to firmware code. This will continue to enable the kind of innovation we’ve seen with the Home Assistant integrations. When brilliant developers like Joshua and Joost can build upon our work, the entire ecosystem benefits.

The future we’re building is one where air quality data belongs to the people measuring it, where local control is the default rather than an afterthought, and where open source principles drive continuous improvement. Whether you’re monitoring your home’s air quality, contributing to global environmental awareness, or building the next innovative integration we haven’t thought of yet, AirGradient will continue to provide the open foundation that makes it all possible.

We’re excited to see what our community builds next, and we’re committed to supporting that innovation with hardware and software that remains completely open, forever.

Want to join the community? Visit our GitHub repository to explore the code, check out our community forum for discussions, and discover how open source air quality monitoring can enhance your home and contribute to a healthier world.