Dear Paulus and the Greater Home Assistant Community,
This is an open response (to your blog post) about our product COVI.
We apologize sincerely for the confusion that our product description, press releases and developer documentation have created and take full responsibility for that.
It never was our intention to create the impression that we are somehow affiliated with the Home Assistant project but simply want to give credit where credit is due by mentioning that we are in fact happy users of your project!
We fully understand that the Home Assistant community does not want to provide free customer support for our users — and this is not our intent. We have a proven track record of supporting our NUIMO users and have every intention of providing the same level of support for our COVI users, developers or otherwise.
We have removed all mentions of Home Assistant from our external communications, Kickstarter page and developer documentation. While we cannot insure that there will be no further mention of a linkage between Home Assistant and Senic, we have asked the journalist that mentioned in Home Assistant’s initial blog to change their quote — and they have agreed. We will continue to monitor communications and do our best to fulfill Home Assistants requests and address their concerns.
After our first successful Kickstarter campaign with NUIMO, we have shipped 10.000+ devices to our customers with the quality that we promised.
Shortly after the campaign, two of our software engineers built the first open source NUIMO component for Home Assistant. We not only continued delivering software to our NUIMO customers, we also care deeply about making sure that each and every request of our customers is handled directly by us. We have successfully handled 9.956 incoming tickets of our customers as of this morning. We promise our customers to deliver the same quality of service for our future products such as COVI. We explicitly state in all of our documentation and communications that Senic is the one and only point of customer service for all of our products.
At no point do we plan to link to the Home Assistant support forum.
Furthermore, we at Senic embrace the spirit of the open source community, too and that’s why we have open sourced all software components of COVI as well, from the start — warts and all.
We are open sourcing COVI’s operating system, our complete software stack, our original work in provisioning IoT devices with Wi-Fi over BLE and even our designing and manufacturing methodologies.
We also contribute to the development of Embedded Linux. We believe that the open source community will profit from our numerous contributions, publications including our learnings.
Lastly, we would just like to say we have immense respect for the Home Assistant community and want to apologize for confusion, miscommunication and misalignment on our side. Our hope is that we can coexist and support each other in bringing more open source software to the smart home space.
We are available to the Home Assistant community for questions, feedback and concerns at hi@senic.com.
Respectfully,
Team Senic
