Home Assistant

2021.1: Happy New Year!

Franck Nijhof Comments

We said goodbye to 2020, which was a weird and wild year. 2020 will be remembered because of the awful pandemic, that hopefully will get under control in 2021.

We wish you, your family, friends and everyone around you, safety, health, happiness and countless blessings for 2021!

Happy New Year!

Kicking off the year with Home Assistant Core 2021.1!

Now don’t get too excited. The 2020.12 release was jam-packed, and most of us enjoyed the holidays with our loved ones. Furthermore, we didn’t have a full release cycle, this one was shorter than usual. This is due to the delaying of the previous release cycle (for the conference) and the introduction of the new release cycle (monthly now).

As a result of that, this release starts 2021 slowly, with a light release. No big new features, no new integrations. Just fixes, tweaking and tuning.

Besides, I’m curious, what is your smart home new years resolution? Let me know in the comments!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

In memoriam of Villhellm

It is with sadness that we announce that one of the Jedis in our Discord Server, @Villhellm (William), who had been actively involved with the Home Assistant community for a number of years, had passed away right before Christmas of 2020 at the age of 27.

He had been an active member in forums, and other discord servers related to Home Automation (Dr. Zzs, DigiblurDIY, and many more.)

We want to take a moment to recognize his efforts and the support he had provided to the HA community, and may he rest in peace.

Some of his friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help his surviving wife and family members. We now have an opportunity to help his family get through these difficult times.

We thank you for your support!

Home Assistant Conference Videos

A couple of weeks ago, the Home Assistant Conference of 2020 took place. We had quite a few messages and requests for making all talks held at the conference available for viewing.

We have started the process of making those available on our YouTube Channel. So, if you haven’t done it already, go to our channel and subscribe and you’ll be notified when we make another talk available.

All videos of the conference will be added to the Home Assistant Conference 2020 playlist on YouTube as well.

Other noteworthy changes

This release has no big new features, but we do have quite a bit of tweaks that are definitely noteworthy to mention.

  • @spacegaier removed the “No Area” from the device tables, reducing the clutter in those lists.
  • Since 2020.12, entities can be assigned to areas. Thanks to @elupus, these areas are now sent to Google Assistant as room hints.
  • Rachio now has pause and resume services, thanks to @brg468.
  • A bunch of new sensors are added to Météo-France. Additional weather conditions, UV, and wind gust, done by @mbo18!
  • @alengwenus has been refactoring the LCN integration. While it does not bring new things to the surface, it does improve in quality and prepares for future improvements. Keep up the good work!
  • Homeatic IP Cloud now supports HmIP-HDM1 and HmIPW-DRD3, thanks to contributions by @SukramJ.
  • Accuweather now has Wind information, thanks @abmantis!
  • ReCollect Waste now has integration options, starting by giving the option to display pickup types by their human-friendly names. Thanks, @bachya!
  • @postlund rewrote the Apple TV integration for 2020.12, but he is not stopping! Besides some fixes, he extended the device information and added some attributes.
  • The SQL Sensor now supports MSSQL, thanks to @dgomes!
  • Support for climate devices with a temperature range, has been added to the HomeKit controller integration. Thanks, @thevoltagesource!
  • The MQTT integration discovery feature, now has support for device trackers, which has been added by @PeteBa.
  • Sending animations using the Telegram Bot is now possible with the new animation service added by @tofuSCHNITZEL.
  • If you have a Xiaomi Miio vacuum cleaner with a mop function, this release added status for the water box and the mop itself. Thanks, @JJdeVries!
  • WeMo now supports the outdoor plug, thanks @mattbilodeau!
  • The Music Player Daemon integration now shows album art in the media player. Looks good @mweinelt!
  • Amazon Polly has a new voice: Olivia. A female, Australian and neural voice. Thanks @aque0us!
  • Google Cloud TTS now has support for SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language). Thanks, @lufton!

New Integrations

This release has not introduced new integrations.

New Platforms

The following integration got support for a new platform:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2021.1.1 - January 9

Release 2021.1.2 - January 14

Release 2021.1.3 - January 15

Release 2021.1.4 - January 16

Release 2021.1.5 - January 23

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Backward-incompatible changes

Below is a listing of the breaking change for this release, per subject or integration. Click on one of those to read more about the breaking change for that specific item.

Météo-France

The unit of measurement of the UV sensor was missing and has been added. You may have to adapt your configuration accordingly, if you were depending on the unit of this sensor in any automations, scripts or 3rd party data loggers.

(@mbo18 - #43992) (meteo_france docs)

Glances

Previously, the Glances integration was presuming that all sensors were temperatures. Now, we can distinguish temperatures, fan speeds and battery charges.

In consequence, those entities have new Entity IDs, so you should update your configuration in the UI or in your YAML files.

Previously, they were all suffixed by _temp. Now they are suffixed by _temperature, _fan_speed and _charge.

Examples:

  • sensor.glances_core_0_temp => sensor.glances_core_0_temperature
  • sensor.glances_battery_temp => sensor.glances_battery_charge
  • sensor.glances_thinkpad_1_temp => sensor.glances_thinkpad_1_fan_speed

(@guix77 - #43500) (glances docs)

Neato

Neato now uses a new authentication method: OAuth2.

If you are an existing Neato user, you will need to update your YAML configuration, as per the updated Neato documentation. The integration will then automatically be migrated.

Vorwerk support is dropped from the neato integration. The parent library still supports Vorwerk however, the authentication is completely different and therefore will require a separate integration created.

(@Santobert - #44031) (neato docs)

Tado

The Tado Bridge sensor has been removed and replaced by its corresponding device sensor.

(@Noltari - #44475) (tado docs)

OpenTherm Gateway

This release breaks binary_sensor and sensor entities of the opentherm_gw integration. More specifically, all existing binary_sensor and sensor entities are recreated with a different entity_id, unique_id and friendly name.

Some entities are recreated once, others will be recreated twice for different data sources (boiler and thermostat). All entities that are recreated are disabled by default.

The old sensor and binary_sensor entities will log a deprecation warning and change behavior slightly if they are enabled. They will be automatically removed if they are disabled. Behavioral changes of the old entities may include a delayed update and a possible change of data source (boiler vs. thermostat) which may only become apparent when an override is active on the OpenTherm Gateway.

The climate entity is not affected.

The OpenTherm Gateway sits between the thermostat and the boiler and thus deals with 2 streams of information. Before this release, the status info we received contained overlapping information from both streams of information, which led to issues when the gateway was overriding some values.

As of this release, the status is split up in multiple parts to reflect this. Each part contains the status of its respective information stream. With this change, we create sensor entities for each stream where necessary.

(@mvn23 - #43352) (opentherm_gw docs)

BMW Connected Drive

BMW Connected Drive has been migrated for configuration via the UI.

Your old entries from configuration.yaml are automatically imported once for initial setup.

It is recommended to rename the device_tracker of your car(s) in config/known_devices.yaml (you can e.g., add _old to the entity name) before updating, otherwise a second device tracker entity (ending with _2) per car will be created.

After updating, the entity can be removed from known_devices as that will no longer be used.

(@rikroe - #39585) (bmw_connected_drive docs)

Farewell to the following

The following integrations have been removed:

Avri has changed their API and it seems not possible to use the new one.

All changes

Click to see all changes!