2024.11.3

Blog

0.108: Logos, Area Pages, Lovelace Entity Card, Lovelace Map History

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

Before we talk about anything that matches the title of this blog post:

On behalf of everybody working on the Home Assistant project, we hope you, your family and loved ones are safe and remain healthy during this pandemic. Our thoughts are with everyone that has been deeply affected by the current situation.

Stay strong, keep distance from each other, wash your hands and stay safe.

❤️

We made it all up to 0.107.7 the previous release, 7! patch releases.

Some have noticed and commented on the fact we do a lot more patch releases the past months, which is correct. This is not because everything was shipped in a broken state, but we are trying to ship any bug fix to you as soon as possible! Just so you don’t have to wait 3 weeks for something to get fixed.

So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Home Assistant Core 0.108!

Martin Hjelmare & Ashton Lafferty join Nabu Casa

We want to start by announcing Martin Hjelmare has joined Nabu Casa!

Martin is a core team member for a long time, and initially started out contributing to the project by his work on the MySensors integration back in Home Assistant 0.11 (2016)! Most contributors to Home Assistant, will know Martin for his endless patience on the incredible code reviews he does.

Furthermore, Ashton Lafferty (cogneato) has been working some hours for Nabu Casa, to help out with things like support. Most of you probably know him from that already, as he is very active in helping out on our Discord server.

We are happy to announce that Ashton will now join Nabu Casa full-time as well!

Congratulations Martin and Ashton! 🎉

Integration logos & icons

We have created a new repository on GitHub containing all the brand icons and logos Home Assistant is able to integrate with. These images are, for example, used in our documentation.

In 0.108, we made a start on using the content from this repository in the Home Assistant frontend. The device information page got a layout update and the integrations page as well.

These pages will now show the icons and logos matching the integration.

Screenshot of the device information page showing the Hue logo Device information page showing the Hue logo.

Looking for a way to contribute to the Home Assistant project? We still are missing a lot of images; So we are calling out for help!

Many integrations now available to set up from the UI

It is absolutely amazing to see all the upgraded integrations this release! Many contributors have gone out and added support to a lot of integrations to allow them to be configured via the Home Assistant frontend.

Not all of them were ready in time for this release; nevertheless, the list is amazing already:

Yes, @bdraco has been on fire this release! Amazing job!

Lovelace Map history

Maybe not very useful during home quarantine, but a very cool feature for when we are allowed to get out of our homes again. @Hoytron added the ability to show the history of persons or device trackers on the Lovelace map card. You can define how many hours of history you want to show and it will draw lines between all the points in that time frame.

Screenshot of the map card with history Screenshot of the map card with history.

New Lovelace card: Entity

@zsarnett added a new Lovelace card, the entity card. This card looks like the sensor card, but allows you to use any entity (not just sensors).

Screenshot of the entity card Screenshot of the entity card.

Area configuration page

We added an overview page for your areas. On this page you can see all the devices in the area, but also the automations, scenes and scripts that affect that area.

Screenshot of the area config page Screenshot of the area config page.

Horizontal stack now handles different heights better

When creating a Horizontal stack, the cards in the stack don’t always line up nicely. This has been adjusted. Horizontal stacks now deal better with the difference in heights of the cards on the stack.

Before and after screenshot for the Horizontal Stack improvements. Before and after screenshot for the Horizontal Stack improvements.

Other noteworthy changes

  • “Alexa, show the front door camera.” 😲 Alexa now has support for Cameras, thanks @ochlocracy!

  • Selecting your default Lovelace dashboard has been moved to the user profile page.

  • A lot of configuration pages are migrated to data tables, this means you can now search in your automations, scenes, scripts, users and areas.

  • Lovelace cards in panel views can now also be edited with the UI editor.

  • The graph from the sensor card is now also available as a footer for the entities and entity card.

  • The Markdown card has a new user variable that can be used to display the currently logged in user.

  • With the ZHA Zigbee integration, Zigbee groups now dynamically create entities for lights, switches and fans that are grouped together. This enables near-simultaneous control over a large group of lights allowing them to turn on or off at the exact same time. Thank you @dmulcahey!

  • Cameras added using the ONVIF integration now automatically use the still images provided by the camera, instead of Home Assistant generating one. Nice work @roleoroleo!

  • WLED got quite a few internal upgrades, has added new Wi-Fi sensors and now has a service to control the effects of your WLED device.

  • Docker images for Home Assistant are now using Jemalloc, to reduce memory fragmentation and speed up memory allocation. So, less memory and generally a faster Home Assistant.

New Integrations

New Platforms

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.

Read on →

0.107: Multiple Lovelace Dashboards, adds helpers, new media player card

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

George F. Will once said: “The future has a way of arriving unannounced.”

Well, George, we don’t agree: Announcing the release of Home Assistant Core 0.107!

This release brings a crazy amount of awesome new features and beautiful improvements to the frontend.

Bye old State UI

As announced with 0.105, the old States UI is now removed from Home Assistant. If you are using Home Assistant for a year or less, you might not have an idea what it is, since the “new” Lovelace UI has been the default. It is the UI we used before Lovelace.

If you are up for a flashback, maybe it is worth reading the release notes for Home Assistant 0.7 were the revamped (and now removed) States UI was originally announced. Now exactly 100 releases later, it is time to say goodbye to the states UI that has been with us for a long, long time…

As we announced the deprecation of the old States UI in 0.105, not everybody seemed to be that happy about it. So we surveyed to see what one would miss from States UI and learned that it is mostly used as an overview of all entities (besides having a nice layout that can be made in Lovelace).

In this release, we bring you a Lovelace solution for that and added a bit more…

Hello multiple Lovelace dashboards

You are now able to create multiple Lovelace configurations, called: Lovelace Dashboards!

You can have a dashboard with your main layout, one that is auto-generated (like the old State UI), one for experimenting, one for admins, one for your wall-mounted tablet, etc.

And, yes, you can even mix and match multiple YAML mode managed Lovelace Dashboard, UI managed Lovelace Dashboards and auto-generated Lovelace Dashboards at the same time.

Screenshot of the new Lovelace configuration panel Screenshot of the new Lovelace configuration panel.

Each dashboard can be added to the menu sidebar as well, with a configurable title and icon. Furthermore, it is possible to limit access to a dashboard to admin users only.

An unlimited amount of dashboards can be created right from the UI in the new Lovelace configuration panel, and YAML dashboards can be set up in configuration.yaml, see the documentation.

This awesome new feature comes with a deprecation if you use Lovelace in manual YAML mode: You need to move the resources section from your ui-lovelace.yaml to the lovelace: section in configuration.yaml. It is not a breaking change yet; we still load them from the previous location if we didn’t find anything in the lovelace: section, however, this fallback is being removed in a future version.

If you manage your Lovelace via the frontend, we automatically migrate your resources. Please note that resources are not in the raw Lovelace configuration editor anymore, but in the Lovelace configuration panel.

New media player card

@zsarnett is back on the frontend team and is not planning on letting that happen unnoticed. He did a ton of work on the frontend and created a beautiful new media control card for Lovelace.

It is inspired by the media control widget in Android and changes color based on the artwork of the played media. We think it looks absolutely gorgeous!

Screenshot of the new Media Control Card Screenshot of the new Media Control Card.

Helpers Configuration Panel

When you create advanced automations, you often need a helper. Like a toggle, to save a state, or another input field. Until now, you always had to define them in YAML and are known as the input_* fields/integrations.

We now have a UI to add and manage these Helper elements; this allows non-expert users, or anybody that prefers the frontend to manage their system, to also access this functionality.

Screenshot of a helper configuration dialog Screenshot of a helper configuration dialog.

Thanks @Adminiuga, for implementing the backend features that made this frontend change possible! Not only that, if you prefer YAML, these changes made by @Adminiuga also made it possible to reload the input_* YAML configuration without restarting Home Assistant.

Improvements to Lovelace editing experience

@zsarnett changed the looks of our card picker, instead of a simple button to pick a card, you now get a live preview with your own entities. @thomasloven added a UI editor for the horizontal and vertical stack cards and the conditional card.

Screen recording of the new card picker and stack editor Screen recording of the new card picker and stack editor.

Other noteworthy changes

  • @Misiu added a UI to set the visibility per user for views.
  • Data tables, for example, the Entities configuration panel, are now lightning fast! Even on mobile 🚀.
  • The logbook had some speed improvements, thanks @KapJI!
  • @bdraco just went all-in on the August integration, making it a top-notch integration! Awesome job there!
  • Initial support for HomeKit enabled televisions and support for occupancy sensors was added by @Jc2k.
  • @tulindo added support for newer SamsungTV models.
  • Alexa now supports starting and cancelling timers, thanks to @Tho85.

New Integrations

New Platforms

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.

Read on →

Community Highlights: 5th edition

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

Time for the fifth enactment of the Community Highlights!

We’ve received quite a few recommendations, but also closely monitored social media and found some gems to share again!

Controlling 7! marine aquariums with Home Assistant

Let’s start with showcasing a highly unusual, but impressive, Home Assistant setup. It is shared on our Facebook group by Kevin McPeake. Kevin’s setup has a total of 5 Home Assistant instances, controlling 7x marine aquariums!

Kevin's impressive setup for his 7 aquariums Kevin's impressive setup for his 7 aquariums.

Those are some big views Kevin! I bet you will be happy with the new Lovelace features that are coming in Home Assistant Core 0.107. It will help you to trim down that a bit, into multiple Lovelace Dashboards (now in beta, sneak peak?).

Click here to check out Kevin’s post on our Facebook group.

Thanks, Walt_H for sending in this item! 👍

Live energy consumption screen

Energy saving is good for the environment (and your wallet). However, to do that, you have to become aware of your actual usage. /u/Lau-ie shared his energy consumption screen on our subreddit.

This gives insight into the current usage, but also in the usage & costs of the consumed energy of the last 24 hours.

New energyconsumption screen, still tweaking it. from r/homeassistant

Do you actively monitor your energy usage? What does your dashboard look like?

A DIY smart magnetic key holder

And here is one from James Callaghan, who created really smart and easy to replicate magnet key holder, using a Xiaomi Aqara Door/Window sensor. Yes, this key holder works on Zigbee.

Consumer Reports: Open call for non-resident technologist fellows

Consumer Reports is an American non-profit organization that does independent, (product) testing and research for consumers to provide truth, transparency and fairness. Their results are published in a monthly magazine and on their website.

The Consumer Reports Digital Lab offers paid, non-resident fellowships to study the effects of connected (IoT) products and services. They welcome anyone interested in public technology research to apply for the fellowship.

If you are interested in this, more information can be found here:

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

See you next edition!

0.106.3: Coronavirus integration (COVID-19), track the outbreak

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

In December 2019, an outbreak of a novel Coronavirus also called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), began in the Wuhan region of China. This virus can cause the COVID-19 disease.

This novel Coronavirus is spreading globally at a disturbing rate, which keeps everybody on top of the news. The media worldwide is covering the spread of the virus constantly, and a lot of people are tracking the number of cases in their country.

This special release adds the Coronavirus integration, allowing you to track the outbreak from within Home Assistant.

The Coronavirus integration

While having a meeting at Nabu Casa, we caught ourselves talking a lot about the state of the virus spreading in the countries we live in. Which brought us to the subject of being able to track the virus in Home Assistant itself.

So together, we started working on an integration right away. We decided to bring you a special release of Home Assistant that includes this integration.

The Coronavirus integration tracks the number of people that are confirmed with, recovered from, and deceased caused by the virus in your country, or worldwide.

The data is sourced from the Johns Hopkins University.

Screenshot of the Coronavirus integration in Home Assistant Screenshot of the Coronavirus integration in Home Assistant.

Adding the Coronavirus integration

This integration can be configured via the Home Assistant frontend.

  • Go to Configuration -> Integrations.
  • Click on the + in the bottom right corner to add a new integration.
  • Search and select the Coronavirus integration form the list.
  • Follow the instruction on screen to add the sensors. Either choose for adding world-wide sensors, or a specific set of sensors for your country.

If you want to track both world-wide and one or more countries at the same time, you can repeat the configuration process described above to add multiple instances of the integration.

Resources

For the latest information about the Coronavirus, be sure check the website of the World Health Organization. The WHO provides good information on basic protective measures you can take against the new Coronavirus.

Community Highlights: 4th edition

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

For the 4th edition, I thought it fitted to devote the community highlights to 3D!

That is actually a lie, the 3rd edition would have been much more fitting, but was hijacked by Paulus ;) At least it’s my 3rd community highlight writeup, so that counts, right?

Ready for some highly inspiring and mind-blowing 3D creations?

3D home navigation and control, using Unity

Are you sure you ready? Because Harrie de Groot created a fully navigatable 3D model of his home using Unity, accessible from within Home Assistant.

You really need to watch the video below now…

Well done, Harrie! That looks slick!

More details on his creation can be found on the Home Assistant Community Forum.

3D printed interactive floorplan

If you have been around a bit, you might have come across a screenshot of someone with an interactive floorplan in Home Assistant. Ryan Connolly took that idea straight into the real world by 3D printing his floorplan, wired it, and hooked it up Home Assistant.

Talking about taking things into another dimension…

Getting started with your own 3D floorplan

Ok, so the above two, rather impressive, listings might be a bit out of reach for the most of us. Still, with some help, you could still achieve some pretty nice looking 3D floorplans. Aaron Godfrey wrote a couple of excellent blog posts on this.

In his first blog post, Aaron shows you what his floorplan looks like

He followed up with two blog posting on how to achieve this:

Bonus tip: HomeByMe

I’ve personally got recommended a tool for creating a 3D floorplan with a tool that is generally lesser-known, but actually pretty awesome! HomeByMe

Screenshot of HomeByMe.

This is a result of a 3D floorplan created with HomeByMe.

It works fully in the browser and I enjoyed the experience using that. So credits where credits due: Thanks for recommending me this sweet little gem Andrea Donno!

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

See you next edition!

0.106: Light brightness stepping, better Safe Mode and person dialog

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

Well, hello!, Home Assistant Core 0.106! We are happy to see you 😃

A great release that improves stability, reliability and a lot of helpful additions to make everything much more friendly and easier to use. So let’s dive in!

Safe Mode improvements

In Home Assistant 0.105, we introduced Safe Mode. Our goal is to make sure Home Assistant always starts and provide you an interface to work with. No matter what.

@balloob has been busy this release to improve on this feature even more, and Home Assistant is now able to overcome issues when things in the core system get into trouble and even when the Lovelace configuration isn’t readable. Besides that, the way Safe Mode is presented has changed, so you instantly know you are in Safe Mode:

Screenshot of Home Assistant running in Safe Mode Screenshot of Home Assistant running in Safe Mode.

Stepping up and down the brightness of lights

Ever tried to make an automation to brighten or dim your lights? Or tried to hook up a remote to control the brightness of a light? If you have, you probably know that doing that was pretty painful and involved some additional templating to get that going.

This release just made that a lot easier. An example device automation:

Screenshot of a device automation with dimming lights Screenshot of a device automation with dimming lights.

We have also added this functionality to the light.turn_on service. You can now change the brightness, based on the current brightness, using the brightness_step (-255, 255) and brightness_step_pct (-100, 100) parameters.

Good to know, when the brightness hits 0, it will turn off the light. If the light is already off, and you step the brightness up, it will turn on. This is awesome, because if you have a rotating dimmer button (for example, an IKEA SYMFONISK), you can rotate it to change the brightness, but also turn the light on/off by just rotating it.

Person more info dialogs improvements

Persons have a new more info dialog. They now show the location of the person on the map and if the person is not in a zone, you can create a zone with the current location of that person with one click.

Screenshot of the new more info for a person Screenshot of the new more info for a person.

Entities configuration panel now shows all entities

The entities configuration panel previously only contained entities that were uniquely identifiable by Home Assistant (they have a so-called: unique ID). However, those are not provided by all integrations of Home Assistant, confusing since the entities panel did not show all of your entities.

In this version, we now include all entities in the panel, giving you a nice complete overview of all available entities in your system. You can’t edit all entities, since that requires an entity to be uniquely identifiable. If an entity doesn’t have a unique ID, the pencil icon will be striked through.

Screenshot of uneditable entities in the configuration panel Screenshot of uneditable entities in the configuration panel.

Since all entities are now available in this panel, it does not only provide you a clear overview of all the available entities; you can also make use of the “related items” feature introduced in release 0.105 to see where they are being used!

Updates to the developer tools panels

The developer tools panel also got some nice little touches. In the “Info” tab you can now find a list of all integrations you are using and the logs are now aware of the integrations as well.

Both now include links to the documentation and our GitHub issue tracker. This allows you to dive in quickly when you run into troubles with an integration.

Screenshot of the integrations list and an example log message Screenshot of the integrations list and an example log message.

Sensor card

Our sensor card has had a style update. We initially got the design from the Lovelace Mini Graph Card and now updated to match the improved new look of that card.

Screenshot of the updated sensor card Screenshot of the updated sensor card.

Other noteworthy changes

But wait… there is more! Some other smaller noteworthy changes in this release:

  • In the zone editor that was introduced in the previous release, you can now change the location of your home zone. The radius of the home zone cannot be changed yet (we will work on that!), but you can drag the home zone on the map.

  • Also an improvement on a feature introduced in the previous release, the state_color option is now also available for other cards, so you can override the defaults of the cards.

  • New automations now default to device automations instead of state triggers and service calls. Device automations are so much easier and clearer to create from the UI. You can, of course, still use the old triggers and actions like you are used to.

  • In the generated Lovelace we no longer include automations and battery entities. You can find these in the automation configuration panel and the battery in the device configuration page. If you want to have your automations and/or battery in your Lovelace UI, you can always take control and add them.

  • Scripts and scenes now have the ability to set a custom icon. Previously, you would have to create a customization to do this, now, you can just set them in your configuration.

    scene:
  - name: Movies
    icon: mdi:movie-open
    entities:
      light.tv_back_light:
        state: on
        brightness: 125
      light.ceiling: off

Custom cards

Are you the creator of an awesome custom card for Lovelace?

We have made some changes to Lovelace that might impact your custom card, so be sure to read the blog post on the developers site about this.

New Integrations

New Platforms

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.

Read on →

Community Highlights: 3rd edition

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

It’s time for the third installment of our revamped community highlights. We got some really great stuff again.

This time I (Paulus) am in charge of writing the community highlights. The reason for this is that the main item involves Frenck’s own work, and he felt weird promoting his own awesome, great, wonderful, enlighting and fabulous work on the revamped Visual Studio Code add-on.

Visual Studio Code add-on updated

Visual Studio Code is a free text editor by Microsoft that works inside your browser. It makes it very easy to manage your configuration.

The add-on used to be only available for x64 devices like intel NUC. With this update, it is now also available for ARM64 devices, including the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 (the 64-bit version).

It comes installed with all the extensions necessary for editing Home Assistant related files:

If this is the first time you hear about the Home Assistant Config Helper, it is genius. It will set-up a realtime connection from VS Code directly to your Home Assistant installation so it can offer auto-complete suggestions when editing your configuration. This is pre-configured and works out of the box with the VS Code add-on.

To install the add-on, search for Visual Studio Code in the add-on store.

Screenshot of Visual Studio Code.

VS Code add-on part 2

But there is more in the add-on! Home Assistant contains an add-on service registry where add-ons can make their services available for other add-ons without requiring any configuration. The VS Code add-on uses this feature to offer a built-in terminal that has pre-configured tools to connect to the MariaDB add-on and the MQTT add-on.

To try it out, open VS Code, click on the menu button top left -> view -> terminal.

MQTT command-line

This requires the Mosquitto add-on to be installed and an MQTT sensor (instructions).

To publish a message to an MQTT topic:

mosquitto_pub -t home/bedroom/temperature -m 23

Or watch all messages that go through your MQTT broker:

mosquitto_sub -t \#

SQL command-line

This requires the MariaDB add-on to be installed and the recorder configured to use it (instructions).

To query the available tables:

mysql -D homeassistant -e "SELECT entity_id, state, last_updated FROM states LIMIT 0, 10"

Beta time!

Today we are releasing the first beta of Home Assistant Core 0.106. It is packed with awesome features. For a sneak peek of what is coming, check the beta release notes.

I’m personally most excited about the extended safe mode. It will guarantee that the frontend will always load, no matter how broken your configuration is.

Navigation Arrow

On Reddit user /u/Jenova70 showed a super slick navigation arrow that indicates the traffic on his daily commute. Very slick! Instructions can be found in the comments.

I built a physical "navigation arrow" that is changing color based on the estimated time of arrival at work (Waze commute data :) ) from r/homeassistant

Thanks, Jean-Loïc Pouffier & cogneato for sending in this item! 👍

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

See you next edition!

Home Assistant Companion for Android 1.6 and 1.7

Robbie Trencheny

Over the last week, we’ve released some awesome new features and improvements to Home Assistant Companion for Android. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the recent things that we introduced in 1.6 and 1.7.

Actionable notifications

Now you can define action buttons to attach to a notification dynamically. When you click one of those buttons, an event is fired back to Home Assistant so you can take action based on the button chosen.

Here’s an example to check with a user if they want to close the garage door after it has been left open for 30 minutes:

automation:
  - alias: "Notify apps when the garage door opens"
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: cover.garage_door
      from: "closed"
      to: "open"
      for: ‘0:30:00’
    action:
      service: notify.mobile_app_robbies_pixel_5
      data:
        message: "The garage has been left open"
        data:
          image: https://www.home-assistant.io/images/merchandise/shirt-frontpage.png
          actions:
            - action: "close_garage" # The key you are sending for the event
              title: "Close Garage Door" # The button title

  - alias: "Close the garage when notification action is tapped"
    trigger:
      platform: event
      event_type: mobile_app_notification_action
      event_data:
        action: close_garage
    action:
      service: cover.close_cover
      target:
        entity_id: cover.garage_door

After adding these automations, whenever your garage door remains open for 30 minutes, your device will get a notification that looks like this:

A notification showing an open garage

When you press that close garage button… your garage will close!

We are planning to expand notifications over the next few versions to continue to match the existing functionality available in the iOS app. That includes things like sending text back to Home Assistant and critical alerts.

Requesting location updates via notification

You can now send a notification with just the message request_location_update and once it reaches your device, it will update its current location in Home Assistant. Be careful using this too much though, as it can drain your battery.

Sensors

New in version 1.7, we have added the first sensors to the app. For now, you will find the following new sensors:

  • Battery percentage
  • Battery state
  • Current Wi-Fi network information

We plan to keep expanding sensors in the near future to add things like cellular status and more.

Docs

Thanks to a few dedicated volunteers and a mad dash, we have a newly refreshed docs website. It’s using the latest version of Docusaurus, which means it’s got a new coat of paint and even dark mode support. So much easier on the eyes!

In addition to the tooling updates, we’ve also begun documenting Android and iOS differences. Keep an eye out for the Android and Apple logos to denote what works where.

Over time we plan to bring Android and iOS as close together, in terms of features and the ways they interact with Home Assistant, as much as possible. To allow using both platforms in the same way, so that users who are using both platforms, or switching platforms, can use them without any modifications.

Finale

In addition to the highlights above, we’ve also killed an impressive amount of bugs. Thanks goes to JBassett, KBerstene, quthla and neopilou for their work on all of the above.

Enjoy the new release! Don’t forget to leave a rating if you like the app, it will help other users find the app.

Get it on Google Play

Community Highlights: 2nd edition

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

Thank god, it’s Friday! For most of us, it means we can tinker with our Home Automation projects again 😃

The second edition of the Community Highlights is here to provide you a fresh source of inspiration this weekend. And, if that is not enough, upgrading to the latest release of Home Assistant Core 0.105 is definitely a recommendation for your list. It introduces tons of new shiny features for you to play with.

So, what changes did you make to your Home Assistant setup this week?

DIY Smart Candles

For starters, if you are looking for a cool DIY project, 3ATIVE shared a YouTube tutorial on how to make sweet little smart candles that work with Home Assistant.

The code for this project is shared on GitHub: Smart-Candles.

Thanks balloob, for submitting this suggestion 👍

Vanlife: Home Assistant on the Road

Creative use of Home Assistant; we’ve seen quite a few vehicles in the past being fitted with Home Assistant (including boats). Zane Claes (aka Technically Wizardry), shares his story on building a vanlife van with a touch of home automation magic.

In the past few months on the road, he built out a Home Assistant installation that’s geared to work in a car/vehicle. A full blog post explains how he integrated with On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) to read out the status of the van, implemented a dash camera (that doubles as a security camera), temperature sensors and the monitoring cellular internet usage.

You can read Zane’s full blog post here:

https://www.technicallywizardry.com/iot-cars-vans-home-automation/

He also made his Home Assistant configuration publicly available on GitHub.

Thanks, Robbie Trencheny & cgtobi for sending in this item in! 👍

An auto-generating Lovelace UI theme

Dwain Scheeren shared a preview of his Lovelace theme on the Home Assistant Community Forum. The cool think about this theme, is that it automatically generates itself!

Unfortunately, the source code for this isn’t available yet, however, Dwain wrote on the forums that he is planning on releasing it soon. We are looking forward to that, Dwain!

You can follow the development of this theme on the dedicated topic for it on our Community Forum.

Visualizing everything in Grafana

Ivana Huckova had a Hack Day at Grafana (the company she works for) and decided to work on her home to visualize everything (in Grafana, of course).

Click on the tweet above to see the full thread of all tweets she did that day.

Oh, Ivana? Did you know we have Grafana available as an add-on? You can find it in the Home Assistant add-on store.

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

See you next edition!

0.105: Safe mode, Headers & Footers, New Zones Editor, Garmin, Sighthound

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof

In case you have missed it, we decided to change the names we use here at Home Assistant, you can read all about it in this blog post.

Therefore, this is release 0.105 of the Home Assistant Core!

The old “States UI” is now deprecated

In June 2018, we released Home Assistant 0.72, which introduced Lovelace. It became our official default user interface in January 2019, with the release of Home Assistant 0.86.

This means, it is now over a year ago that Lovelace was officially introduced as a replacement for the states UI, so it is time to say goodbye to the old states UI. This release deprecates it and in version 0.107, the states UI will be removed from Home Assistant completely.

If you are not using Lovelace yet, we advise you to switch to it today. Lovelace is, by default, almost the same as old states UI with the bonus of a lot of flexibility, if you want it.

In addition to this, all configuration options for the States UI are deprecated as well. Please be sure to read the backward-incompatible changes to see if you have options that need to be removed from your configuration.

Safe mode

We are humans, and we do make typos. However, if we make a typo in our configuration, we might end up with Home Assistant being completely unreachable. That really is not helpful. You lose access to Home Assistant and have to do a deep dive via other methods to find out: Why did this happen?

This release introduces a “Safe mode” for Home Assistant. If during startup, Home Assistant has problems reading your configuration (for whatever reason), it will still continue to start using bits and pieces from the configuration of the last time it did start.

When this happens, Home Assistant will start in “Safe mode”. In this mode, nothing is loaded, but it does give you access to the Home Assistant frontend, settings and add-ons (for example, the VSCode or Configurator add-on). This gives you the possibility to correct the issue and restart Home Assistant to re-try.

Screenshot of Home Assistant started in safe mode Screenshot of Home Assistant started in safe mode.

Please note, that this feature isn’t perfect yet, and only works if Home Assistant was able to start successfully, after upgrading to this release, at least once.

We believe this feature makes Home Assistant more robust, easier to use and more forgiving, even if you made a mistake.

Revamped Supervisor panel

Remember we used to have a Hass.io panel? Well, with the new naming for Home Assistant, it has been renamed to the Supervisor panel.

So @ludeeus has been busy! He rewrote the entire Supervisor panel to match our current frontend technologies and added some really slick new visual elements to it.

Thanks, @ludeeus, it looks incredible!

Screenshot of the revamped Supervisor panel Screenshot of the revamped Supervisor panel.

The new icons on the add-ons really make the add-on dashboard & store stand out. Also, new status indicators on the add-on cards make it easy to spot add-ons that need to be upgraded, or in case of visiting the add-on store, are installed already.

Please note, you need to be running Home Assistant Core 0.105 to see the new icons.

Configuration panel changes

In this release, we started the overhaul of the configuration panel. We have accumulated a lot of functionality in the configuration section in the last releases; now, it is time to bring it all together.

In upcoming releases, we will make changes to make things easier to find and connect the different elements with each other, making it easier to navigate around. For now, we implemented configuration sections, a new tabbed UI, as well as some visual tweaks.

Also updated, the device page to show the automations, scripts, and scenes a device is used in and added the ability to create new ones with the device easily.

Screenshot of the new device info page Screenshot of the new device info page.

In the more info dialog of entities, we changed the settings button to open the entity settings dialog, and added a related tab as well! This allows you to can see what device, integration, area, scenes, scripts, automations, entities, and groups belong to that entity.

For scenes, scripts and automations that are created in the UI, an edit button is added, right in the more info dialog so you can easily edit it without searching for it.

Header & Footer for the entities card

Two new types are added to the entities card, a header and a footer. At this moment, we have two options for these, an image and buttons.

It allows you to create some very cool looking cards, but also provides you the option to put buttons in the bottom of the card. Very useful for buttons that activate scenes, for example.

Screenshot of the new header and footer for entities card Screenshot of the new header and footer for entities card.

Improved zones editor

A brand new zone editor! You can no longer find your zones in the integration list, but they moved to their own section in the configuration panel.

In this new editor, you can move your zones with drag and drop and even change the size of your zones by dragging the circle.

Adding, and removing zones or changing the name of a zone, is now easier than ever.

Screenshot of the zones editor Screen recording of the zones editor.

The new editor will only work for zones that are created in the UI, zones that are set up in configuration.yaml are read-only. Additionally, if you define zones in your YAML configuration, please be aware that setting a name is now required.

As an extra added bonus, a new service was added: zone.reload. This service allows you to reload your zone configuration without restarting Home Assistant.

Icons no longer change color based on state

A change that is not really apparent at first, but you probably notice it sooner or later.

The entities card no longer changes the colors of icons based on states, except for lights.

Reasoning comes from a request, to make icons to become yellow for all types when an entity is active, and not for just a few entity types. However, this would get out of control very quickly, as shown in the screenshot below.

Yellow icon color on everything, isn't the solution either Yellow icon color on everything, isn't the solution either.

So, that is why we disabled it, by default, for all entity types, except lights. However, we did add a new option: state_color. Using this option, you can decide if you want to old behavior back, add it to more entity types or maybe even disable it for lights too!

Other cards will now display icons from more domains with an active color.

Other Lovelace and frontend improvements

There is a lot more done on Lovelace, more than we can mention, some other highlights:

  • In generated mode, entities that start with the name of the area or group they are in will be shown without the name of the area or group. So if you have a light named “Living room lights” that is in the area “Living room” they will be shown as “lights” in a card with the header “Living room”.

  • We no longer show device_tracker entities in generated mode. We advise you to bind one or more device trackers to a person that will be shown in the UI.

  • We added many accessibility features to Lovelace; you can navigate almost everything with the tab key. We will continue to work on this so that people with disabilities can also enjoy Home Assistant.

For a full list of changes, see the Lovelace changelog.

Even more frontend improvements:

  • Logbook panel is a lot quicker
  • Maps no longer fit zones, but only entities
  • ZHA panel now supports binding devices to groups
  • Ability to add new areas on the device page
  • Material Design Icons are updated to v4.8.95
  • A lot, like a really large amount, of bug fixes!

In other news

This section is now empty, but don’t be sad! The in “In other news” section now has its own dedicated blog post, which we will put out regularly:

Want to read the first edition? Community Highlights, first edition!

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant? Send us your Community Highlight suggestion, so that we can include it in the next blog post.

New Integrations

New Platforms

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.

Read on →