Home Assistant

Update from the Field

Paulus Schoutsen Comments

TL;DR:

  • Nabu Casa has become a sponsor of Let’s Encrypt to support the infrastructure for a secure home.
  • Ubiquiti has decided to no longer sponsor Home Assistant. We left on good terms. Paulus has moved from Ubiquiti to be employed by Nabu Casa.
  • Current development goal is to get to Home Assistant 1.0.
  • We are working on building relationships with manufacturers: working on getting our integrations certified, make it easier for manufacturers to contribute/maintain integrations for their own products.

It’s been a while since we talked about our plans for world domination, so it’s time for a quick update from Home Assistant HQ.

Last year Ubiquiti Networks hired me, Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, to work full time on improving Home Assistant. This has really helped the project make big leaps towards getting to 1.0. During this time, Home Assistant added an authentication system, the concept of devices and areas, a UI for configuring integrations, and the new Lovelace UI, just to name a few things.

Last September, on our fifth birthday, we launched Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa is a company founded to help make Home Assistant better. It does this by providing the Home Assistant Cloud service, and using the revenue to support the Home Assistant project. With Home Assistant Cloud, users can enable secure remote access to their Home Assistant installation with a single click, and integrate with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

As part of the ongoing support for Home Assistant, Nabu Casa provides the infrastructure for Home Assistant to host the community and parts of the build system. At the beginning of this year we have hired Pascal Vizeli, the founder of Hass.io, to work full time on Home Assistant. And just this month, we have started to sponsor Let’s Encrypt – the service that provides free SSL security certificates for securely accessing Home Assistant remotely.

This month marked a year since Ubiquiti got involved, and also their last month, as they have decided to end their involvement as their plans have changed. We left on friendly terms and I want to thank Ubiquiti for this tremendous opportunity, it has given the Home Assistant project a significant boost. Moving forward, I will be paid by Nabu Casa, so that I can continue my work on Home Assistant.

The Focus

For the last year, the Home Assistant community has been working on building a user-friendly version of Home Assistant, also known as Home Assistant 1.0.

We’re aiming to release Home Assistant 1.0 this year. With Home Assistant 1.0, installation and basic functionality can be done via a user interface. Advanced options will require entering an advanced mode or set up via configuration.yaml. Check out last year’s state of the union for more details. We have started using this project board to keep track of our progress.

While we’re working hard on Home Assistant 1.0, we have also started working on the next goal for post 1.0 launch: a better story for manufacturers and integrations.

We have started certifying our integrations with partners and are working on making it easier for manufacturers to improve or maintain their own integrations. If you are a manufacturer and want to join early, reach out to us at [email protected]. We’re planning on launching more information about this soon.

Finally

These are exciting times and I am stoked for what is ahead of us. Home Assistant is growing, our community is growing, and our reach is growing. Just this week there was a testimony about how Home Assistant saves lives and we discovered that the Living Computers Museum in Seattle is using Home Assistant to teach people about the internet of things: