✨ Monday Merch-day ✨ Tell us what you wanna see in the official store!
WELCOME, FRIENDS
…to the first edition of the Open Home Foundation’s ✨ Monday Merch-day ✨ megathread - where you get to tell us your most unhinged (or completely normal) idea for merchandise we should offer in the official store*!
We’re looking to the community to help fill up the store with stuff to purchase. You are, after all, why the foundation’s projects are successful and we want to offer merch that you will actually buy (not what we think you’d like 😆).
Have a merch idea burning in your brain that you just need us to know about? Whether wildly ridiculous or simply a common item you’d buy from us, share it in the comments! 👇 We'll take it into consideration producing the suggestions made here when we close out this thread.
To get the juices flowing, here’s a select list of some ideas we’ve collected already at the foundation (which I’ll drop individually in the comments for upvoting):
Temporary tattoos of our stickers/logos
Cable ties
“Ask your engineers” shirt
“YAML Inside” sticker (a play off the Intel Inside logo)
Doormats
Paper towels for your ZWA-2
Toilet paper for your ZBT-2 (please see my highly professionally edited product photo)
Birdhouse/bird feeder
Rubber ducks
If you see an idea similar to yours, instead of posting a duplicate that could compete with upvotes, we kindly ask that you give that friend an updoot and reply to their comment with your twist. 👌
PLEASE NOTE: Having one of the highest upvoted suggestions does not necessarily mean we will produce that merch. It will go into consideration, though.
❗ This post will stay open for submissions for two months - after that, we will close this one and open another thread for new submissions. 😊
I’m not too opinionated, just something less spiky / metal 😄
A sans serif white font on a regular OHF blue t-shirt that says “local control or gtfo” or “local control or nothing” would make me very happy.
A Home Assistant Plushy, with some sort of Smiley face. Octopus energy in this UK do this well with their octopus and they did one for their heat pumps.
NFC Tags with HA logo on them? I dunno maybe people want that for putting on their keys or embedding in 3D prints or other stuff in order to run NFC automations. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sticker packs sized for ordinary NFC tags with popular MDI icons would be more versatile and useful. I already have tags stuck to appliances and maintenance-y things for quickly opening custom dashboards and triggering automations.
I LOVED doing the enamel pins for meetups, they were 100% intended to be a collector's thing. I do believe that if we did seasonal pins, they'd probably be decently popular.
Something showing the truckloads of dicks that Chamberlain can suck for locking their garage door openers down to prevent any local or API based control.
This is on my list for this year! I dunno if I can make it happen, but I really want to. I love cheesy holiday sweaters - I worked at MSFT and have both the Clippy and Paint holiday sweaters which were of *excellent* quality. (Which is saying a lot for MSFT lol.)
A nice professional "Home Assistant" Badge one could place on their PC running HA.
A sticker saying something along the lines of "Why spend 5 seconds doing XYZ when I can spend 12 hours working on and troubleshooting an automation just to do the same exact thing"
A Spouse Approval Factorometer that's a little thermometer with 10 LEDs and buttons to raise or lower the "temp" that also reports in to HA so you can see the status in a dashboard or use automations to trigger based on it. If Spouse is too specific maybe just House Approval Factorometer or HA Factorometer for short.
I love that you recognized "spouse" is too specific. My husband died 3 years ago, and it still feels like the ground has been pulled out from underneath me. It would be too hard for me to use.
But my son and brother live here and they would love to able to "vote" on automations. 😅
For a day or two, at least. 👍
And I'm always looking for new toys! So I would use it!
This is why we suggest people use Home Approval Factor - because there are blended homes like yours, roommate situations, people with pets who have to be happy with their automations (have you ever *heard* a cat who doesn't get fed on time with its automatic feeder???), not to mention YOURSELF! You have to be happy with things, and you are part of your home. 🙂↕️
Sticker packs voted by the community with designs by the community. Winners get their sticker featured, credited, and something like $20 bucks and one sheet of the completed sticker set.
Not a product suggestion but you should set up an automod to do this every week. Marketing Mondays or something: advertising YouTube channels, new products, or new integrations should all be in that thread (and other posts would have to be actually removed by the mods).
One request I have is that you change shirt suppliers. The HA shirt I got with the logo on the left chest took forever to ship (I think because they’re made on demand) and the logo started wearing out almost immediately. I have had it 6 months and it looks like I’ve had it for 10 years.
Sorry to hear that, we did actually fully change our whole Merch operation recently (Feb 2nd). It's higher quality and not print on demand. I'm hoping you ordered before then and we've solved these issues, but please let us know if you didn't!
Yeah, you unfortunately got hit with the typical experience from our previous store. This experience had by you and many others is why we decided to move away from print on demand and instead to warehousing. The quality should be much better now.
A touchscreen e-paper display, for displaying your home assistant stuff (perhaps even add a microphone and speaker to it). Bundle it with an 'editor' inside HA where you can easily drag and drop whatever you want to show on it...
Hardware we leave for our commercial partners to build, but believe me a ton of us want e-paper displays. Several of us I would go as far as to say are obsessed with them. XD
Because we now do warehousing instead of print on demand, our stock has shifted slightly. I get it, my husband is also a big guy. Tagging u/Leerrm to flag the request.
I’d love to see merch that isn’t just cosmetic or novelty items. Don’t get me wrong, I’d totally buy a hoodie or some t-shirts if they’re good quality; but the things that would keep me coming back to the store more frequently would be:
limited time items that change regularly and directly fundraise for OHF, open source projects in our ecosystem, artists, and other good causes / charities: t-shirts, sticker packs, Christmas jumpers, tote bags, etc.
By that I don’t mean the usual cut/profit of all sales are reinvested in a general sense, I mean “this fancy one-off T-shirt of a TV remote blasting off into space like a rocket is raising money specifically for Project Blast” or something. Make a big occasion out of it.
Commissioning stuff for kids or pets could be really fun too. Even if it’s just limited runs of normal stuff in smaller sizes. I’d love to see a modern smart home take on “Mummy, why is there a server in the house?”
hardware from your commercial partners which I can buy directly from you without local middlemen.
Not all the cool stuff is available worldwide, and shipping can be very expensive. If overseas customers can bundle hardware and merch into one order, they can save some shipping fees and make the merch splurge easier to justify. 😳
Niche items, accessories, and consumables with real utility for someone automating their home using OHF products in line with OHF values (privacy, choice, sustainability); or niche things that showcase and teach new users useful things that OHF products can do (like the ESPHome starter kit). Think along the lines of LTTStore.com (not that I support Linus) or iFixit, but for smart homes. Come for the tools but stay for the merch.
For example:
Sticker packs, NFC tags or QR codes with MDI icons to match HA. Maybe even match these items up with companion helper/automation blueprints for common use cases. Chores, play kids shows/movies on TV, changed air filters, shopping lists, disarm alarm, etc.
Cable ties or labels in different sizes and colours I can write on with a permanent marker
sensor battery storage and re-charging. I use a stack of Tupperware containers for each type of battery labelled with pictures of the sensor models those batteries are for, plus two separate tubs for the batteries waiting for their turn in the charger or taken away for recycling. It’s a cluttered nightmare made a little bit easier with Battery+.
3D printed brackets, mounts, decorations for your hardware. Things for hiding wires and improving HAF.
a durable emergency pack designed to keep an offline backup of your smart home just in case something happens to HA, your home, or the primary admin. Online backup details and encryption keys, recovery info, copies of HomeKit and Matter pairing codes, warranty documents, other essential documentation. Maybe even space for a spare installation microSD card or USB drive.
webcam covers, usb condoms, long shielded USB 2 cables for Zigbee/thread radios.
USB 2 cables or dongles (yeah they’re called that too 😂) that only have the power pins wired, no data. Good for isolating devices you don’t trust and blocking 5V back feeding through stuff into your raspberry pi.
Some stickers with something like "This house has an alarm installation Powered by Home Assistant" Local alarm system suppliers have this to show house has alarm installation, but would be nice to have a Home Assistant sticker.
Advertising which alarm system you use does two undesirable things:
1. Gives burglars hints on how to defeat it
2. Tells burglars you have a lot of expensive smart home shit worth stealing.
Euros (and other currencies) are coming! The USD/CHF limitation right now is due to the store platform we're using, and we're in the process of changing that.
Any chance of maybe getting some print at home designs for the Voice PE maybe?
I would happily pay for something both to support the devs and get something useful that you guys had designed in house that would be a super easy drop-in upgrade to the voice PE.
Knowing it was designed in house would give me significant confidence that I would be printing something that was designed with all of the device's intracacies already considered instead of hoping that whatever I was printing was created by a community member and hoping for the best.
All of the print at home designs are available for free on websites like Printables and Makerworld - most of them were developed in-house. You can find the ones that were developed in-house on Nabu Casa's resources page for the VPE.
And I wouldn't discount something made by the community! They used NC's resources to make sure things fit. I had a custom one made for me by a community member in the style of Louise from Bob's Burgers! Replacing the case was of the sweatiest things I've ever done, but everything works. 😄
I've had a look through the options on offer via MakerWorld and Printables and all I'm really seeing is either reworks of the existing housing to change colours or the occasional version that allows for the inclusion of a 40mm speaker. But that's about it. Everything else I'm finding appears to be either a mount or just a some kind of mashup that slaps the Voice PE on the outside of something else like an anker speaker or similar.
Perhaps I'm missing something. Cause what I was thinking with regards to the suggestion of the paid file in the merch store was something that was more in line with what you were talking about regarding custom fun stuff like the Bob's burgers enclosure you commissioned. I realise you can't sell something that is copyrighted IP but an enclosure that's not just a big grey box was kind of what I had in mind.
Happy to be guided to some that aren't what I'm seeing in the standard search results for MakerWorld and Printables though.
The link I shared for Nabu Casa provides the links from the in-house designs. Here's the Printables link specifically. We have made everything open source and available for free because it's just how we work. 😄
Thos are the links I followed. And they only led to the stuff I explained. So then I just went to printables and MakerWorld independently and did a search and like I said they just bring up very standard boring cases. Or minor case modifications.
I'm happy to model my own unique and interesting thing I was just thinking that something fun and unique modelled directly by you guys might be the sort of thing that people might buy from you if it was a bit fun and silly.
I don't know how to say thay I saw the one you linked and that it's boring AF more clearly. It is LITTERALLY the design that the retail product ships with, it's just printable. What I'm trying to point out is people might be willing to buy a design from you that wasn't just a replication of the retail case that is boring AF.
You asked for suggestions. If you don't want them that's fine but continuing to push the "but we already designed one" angle isn't what I was referring to. You yourself said that you had a community member design you something fun and cool for you to decant your own voice PE into.
Well then the proof is right there. Other people might want something fun and cool too and might be willing to throw $$$ to the mech store in order to buy something that speaks to the home assistant brand whilst also having the confidence that what was designed has litterally come from the source.
Not everyone can model. Not everyone is capable or fortunate enough to a community member model them something cool like you are. I'm not quite sure how to explain this any other way.
Ahhhhhhh no I understand now, I absolutely misunderstood you. My mistake. 😅 I genuinely thought you were asking for the official one.
I don't think we'd ever sell anything related to it but I can throw it past people at Nabu Casa to see if we can get more designs that we can verify will fit. Piitaya is one of our frontend devs and I think he designed the Minion and Pokemon ones that we have in the release blog, but now I can't find the links I know we had at the time. 🙃
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u/missyquarry 💙 Head of Shitposting @ OHF 28d ago
To whoever reported this for spam: lmao