One year ago, in August 2025, we did something that, in hindsight, took a bit of nerve. We walked into the Home Assistant community with a half-baked idea and an early piece of hardware, and asked: would anyone actually want a dedicated touchscreen remote for their smart home?
At that moment, we thought we were introducing a product.
We were wrong. We were starting a conversation.
We had built the hardware. We had made a bunch of assumptions about how people might use it. But we didn't actually know if it would find a place in the real world, or if it would just end up as another prototype gathering dust on a shelf.
A year later, we have our answer. And it's not the answer we expected when we started.
Astrion didn't get better because we followed a roadmap. It got better because people used it, broke it, complained about it, and told us exactly where we'd messed up. It grew through bug reports, feature debates, design arguments, and the occasional message of encouragement that arrived just when we were about to give up for the day.
Astrion was not built for the Home Assistant community. It was built with it.
Before we get into the timeline and the updates, we just want to say that plainly: thank you.
It Started with an Idea and a Lot of Trust
We are — and still are — a small team of engineers. We didn't come from the traditional consumer electronics world. We didn't have a marketing department. We didn't have a sales playbook. We had a prototype, a long list of unanswered questions, and a belief that Home Assistant deserved something better than a phone app or a tablet mounted to a wall.
In August 2025, we posted that idea online. People actually responded. They asked questions, poked holes in our assumptions, and — unexpectedly — told us they wanted one.
We started building for real.
By November 2025, the first Astrion units began shipping during Maker Faire Shenzhen. It was chaotic. We were still figuring out fulfillment while talking to people who had already paid for a product that was barely out of prototype stage. Around that same time, Adam — Chief Technical Editor at XDA — showed up at our booth and spent real time with what we'd built. Having someone from a publication we'd followed for years stop by and take a close look was a moment that stuck with us.
That was also the month reality hit.
We opened our online store and the database immediately crashed. Then PayPal froze our account, and payments were stuck for nearly two months. We were engineers. We were suddenly doing customer support, shipping logistics, payment processing, and international fulfillment, learning every job on the fly. We made mistakes. Some of them were embarrassing. We fixed what we could and kept going.
During those months, we genuinely wondered if anyone would trust us with their money.
And then something happened that we still talk about.
One customer paid for their Astrion pre-order by direct bank transfer. They simply trusted us enough to send the money directly, with a note that said, "take your time, get it right."
When shipments were delayed, other customers didn't demand refunds. They sent messages asking if there was anything they could do to help.
That gave us something we desperately needed: time. Time to fix problems properly instead of rushing half-finished work out the door.
From a Product to a Community
As more Astrion units made their way into people's homes, the feedback started changing.
It got more specific. Sharper.
People weren't just asking what the remote could do. They were showing us what they wanted to do with it. They were using it in setups we'd never imagined and finding workflows that never occurred to us because our own homes were configured differently.
That feedback didn't just influence what we built next. It became how we built Astrion.
In March 2026, we attended a Home Assistant community gathering in Shenzhen. We met Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant. We met Marcel Veldt, the creator of Music Assistant. We met builders, contributors, and community members whose projects we had followed for years. They asked tough questions. They shared ideas. They signed our Astrion packaging like it was a yearbook.
That day mattered to us more than any sales milestone. It made the project feel less like a product launch and more like a place we were earning our way into.
We don't think a device becomes part of an ecosystem simply because it has an integration. It becomes part of an ecosystem when people start using it, modifying it, questioning it, and eventually making it do things its creators never imagined.
That's what started happening.
❤️Thank You, Home Assistant Community
Over the past year, members of this community helped us find problems we would never have found on our own.
Some of you reported edge cases in automations, device-pairing issues, and small interface inconsistencies that only appeared after weeks of daily use. Others challenged design decisions and pointed out assumptions we hadn't even realized we were making. Many of you showed us workflows that simply didn't exist in our own homes.
You also kept encouraging us during the months when shipping delays and firmware issues piled up, one after another.
One firmware discussion on the community forums grew to more than 157 replies. It included bug reports, technical experiments, feature debates, and fixes that eventually made their way into Astrion. Whether the feedback was one sentence or several pages of detail, it gave us something concrete to work on.
The clearest sign of progress was seeing people build launchers, dashboards, editors, and tools around Astrion. That changed how we thought about the device.
It was no longer just a remote for controlling Home Assistant. It was becoming a platform where people could try new ideas.
And that was something we hadn't anticipated at all when we started.
What Actually Changed This Year?
When Astrion first appeared, its job was simple: provide a physical interface for Home Assistant.
That's still true. But it's no longer the whole story.
As people used it, they asked for ways to reach more of the devices already in their homes — not just Home Assistant entities, but local IR devices, Harmony setups, and legacy AV equipment. So we built that.
Here's the rough timeline of how it actually happened, as best as we can reconstruct it:
August 2025 – We shared the first Astrion concept with the Home Assistant community. A question, not a product.
November 2025 – The first Astrion units began shipping during Maker Faire Shenzhen. XDA's Adam visited the booth. Reality hit hard and fast.
Late 2025 – Community feedback started shaping hardware and software revisions. RosCard got better. OTA updates arrived. Onboarding slowly became less painful.
Early 2026 – Sanytron Hub launched as a central resource for documentation, support, and community. We finally started building the infrastructure to actually support a product.
March 2026 – We met Paulus, Marcel, and the broader Home Assistant ecosystem in Shenzhen. A reminder that we were part of something larger than just hardware.
June 2026 – Astrion grew beyond Home Assistant. Local IR, Harmony integration, and legacy AV support opened the door to setups we hadn't imagined.
Mid-2026 – V1.4.x introduced Activities and Macros. Home Assistant integration deepened. Physical controls got more flexible.
August 2026 – One year in. Astrion has moved from a dedicated remote to something people can actually build around.
The boundaries are still moving.
Hard Lessons and Things We Still Mess Up
Not everything worked well from day one.
Our onboarding process was too complicated. Some people opened the box and hit confusion before configuring their first button. Some didn't realize the remote could charge over USB-C and assumed it had to live in the dock. RosCard offered too many choices upfront without enough guidance. Our early documentation left too much to trial and error. And some of our terminology made perfect sense to experienced Home Assistant users but alienated everyone else.
None of these problems showed up on a feature list. We only found them by watching people actually try to use what we built.
We've been fixing them one by one — simplifying setup, clarifying documentation, improving defaults, and paying closer attention when users say something is hard to understand.
There's still work to do. But Astrion is easier to set up and use than it was a year ago.
That might not be the most exciting milestone to put in a press release. For us, it's one of the most important.
What's Next?
We don't want to pretend we have the next year all mapped out.
Some of the most useful ideas so far have come from people using Astrion in ways we never expected. The next chapter will depend on the same conversations that brought us here.
If you reported a bug, suggested a feature, shared a setup, built something with Astrion, wrote about it, or just encouraged us when the project was having a rough week — thank you. You helped shape this product.
And if you're discovering Astrion for the first time, you're welcome to join in.
What should we build next?
One Year of Astrion: Built Together with the Home Assistant Community