Blog

0.72: Lovelace UI, KIWI Doorlocks, Wireless Tags, Insteon X10.

I am super excited about this release as it brings some great examples of how we are refining the system to become more customizable and, at the same time, user friendly. The first thing that I am really excited about is a new experimental user interface that we call Lovelace. Check this awesome rundown of all the features by @ciotlosm. The TL;DR: a faster, more customizable and more extensible UI with the same look and feel as the old one.

Be aware, this is experimental, so things will change. However, we felt like we didn’t want to keep this away from you any longer. Check the Lovelace UI docs on how to get started. Make sure to share your creations!

Thanks to all the people that have been hanging out in the #beta channel on Discord helping development, finding and squashing bugs and making suggestions. Especially thanks to @c727 for all his development work and @arsaboo for being the first guinea pig.

Example user interface created using Lovelace. Example user interface created using Lovelace ([source](https://gist.github.com/ciotlosm/9508388876edf92c4c1f3579e740fbd5#file-ui-lovelace-yaml))

Another change is that Nest, Sonos and Cast will now have to be configured using a config entry. Config entries can be created via the integrations page in the config panel. This is a concept that we have been developing for a couple of months now and it’s our goal to eventually use this as the way to configure all components.

Screenshot of a browser showing a dialog to link a Nest account to Home Assistant. Screenshot of the Nest config entry.

And as if this releases even needs more cool stuff, the Insteon integration now supports X10 thanks to @teharris1. It was a frequent requested feature from the Insteon community.

And finally, we’ll be extending the open beta for Home Assistant Cloud until the first of September.

Enjoy this release and have a good weekend all!

New Platforms

Release 0.72.1 - June 25

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →

0.71: Lagute LW-12, Iperf3, Hydrawise, Ryobi Garage Doors

0.71 has arrived. My favorite feature in this release is the conversion of the Nest component from cloud poll to cloud push. Sure, it’s still through the cloud but changes are now made available in Home Assistant as soon as they happen. Thanks @awarecan!

We’ve continued the frontend tweaks after the major overhaul in the last release. We’ve had some issues with the Hass.io panel on both Firefox and Safari. They have been addressed and all browsers should hopefully work again.

On the frontend side, custom panels have gotten some new tricks, including support for building panels using React. So if you’re a developer, check it out. And thanks to @c727 a lot more strings can now be translated. More info on how to help with translating the frontend can be found here.

HomeKit support also keeps growing. This release includes support for media players, automations and outlets thanks to @schmittx.

And in case you missed it, @OttoWinter has created esphomeyaml, which allows you to program and deploy ESP chips throughout your house by using a Home Assistant inspired configuration.yaml. Check it out.

Have a good weekend everyone!

New Platforms

New Features

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →

esphomelib - A comprehensive solution for using ESPs with Home Assistant

The ESP8266 and ESP32 are dirt cheap WiFi-enabled microcontrollers that have established themselves as the base for many DIY home automation projects. Even quite a few manufacturers like iTead with their Sonoff devices have chosen these controllers because of their competitive price.

Setting up these microcontrollers for some basic functionality has also gotten really easy over the years with popular projects like ESPEasy or Sonoff-Tasmota: You just download their firmware and flash it onto your chip. But if you’ve ever tried to go a bit beyond the basic set of functions of those frameworks and tried to do some customization, you will have probably noticed that it’s not that easy. Often times you’ll end up having to download some Arduino code project from the internet and customizing it to your needs.

This is where esphomelib comes in: The esphomelib suite is a set of tools that are designed with the goal of achieving the best possible user experience. esphomelib a) allows for lots of customization without touching a single line of code and b) has complete Home Assistant integration. Inside the esphomelib ecosystem, you essentially just have to write a simple YAML configuration file. The rest like compiling, flashing, uploading etc. will then be taken care of automatically.

Read on →

0.70: Facebox, SpaceAPI, Konnected Alarm System

It’s time for release 0.70. It’s a little later than expected because of a major overhaul of how our frontend is build. It should not have any impact on how the frontend looks or behaves. Thanks to all the people running the beta who helped test this. Right now it looks like Firefox is still having some issues running the Hass.io panel. We’re working on releasing a fix for that soon.

If you’re using custom UI or Panels, some changes have been made. Make sure you run the latest version. More info on our developer blog.

Talking about our developer blog, this is a new blog with accompanying Twitter account. This is part of our ongoing effort of splitting content and interaction for users and developers of Home Assistant.

One cool new component in this release is Konnected (product page). It allows you to connect your existing wired alarm systen and plug it … straigt into Home Assistant!

Another cool one this release is Facebox. It will allow you to do local face detection on your camera feeds. Can’t wait to hear the cool things people will do with this.

New Platforms

New Features

Release 0.70.1 - May 31

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →

0.69: Matrix Chatbot, PostNL, Social Blade, Xiaomi Mijia sensors

Not much time to write a great intro this time as we’re hanging out at PyCon! Some fixes for the Hue and Wink colors thanks to @amelchio. Initial foundation for users has landed, it’s not anywhere near usable. We’ll keep hacking on it. Google Assistant for Home Assistant Cloud now supports room hints. This will cause Google Assistant put the devices in the right groups when you link your account.

New Platforms

Release 0.69.1 - May 12

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →

0.68: HomeKit control, Eufy, FritzBox, SigFox sensors

Weekend is around the corner and that means that it’s time for the next release of Home Assistant. 0.68 brings a ton of great goodies and bug fixes.

One of the coolest features this release is by @mjg59: you are now able to control HomeKit devices. Previously, it was possible to control Home Assistant from iOS devices using the HomeKit protocol. With this release, Home Assistant is able to become the controller and use HomeKit to control lights and switches directly. Since HomeKit is vendor agnostic, it means that any HomeKit light or switch will now be compatible with Home Assistant. Very cool.

Another cool new platform, also by @mjg59, is support for Eufy devices. Eufy is the Home Automation brand of Anker and they have been producing reasonably priced devices which can now be controlled by Home Assistant too. Thanks for all your contributions @mjg59 ❤️.

New Platforms

New Features

Release 0.68.1 - April 30

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →

New developer website

When we launched the website in December 2014, we’ve only had a handful of components and usage instructions. Since then the website has grown to over a 1000 pages touching a wide range of topics. The growth, while great, also has put a lot of strain on how the docs are organised. One of the places that was especially suffering under the growth was the developer section. It was living under a single top menu item and had to contain everything in a single sidebar.

To fix this, we’re releasing a new website: developers.home-assistant.io. The website is aimed at people that are developing Home Assistant. It will contain resources how to setup your development environment, how to fix bugs, help with translations or improve the frontend. The main website will now solely be focused on Home Assistant users.

Go check it out and let us know what you think: developers.home-assistant.io.

Screenshot of the developer website


Our Google Assistant skill is live!

Home Assistant logo and the Works with the Google Assistant badge

Guess what? Yep, our Google Assistant Smart Home skill is live! It’s a mouthful but it means that you can now control your Home Assistant devices via any Google Assistant enabled device by simply saying things like “Ok Google, turn on the lights”.

To get started:

  • Enable Home Assistant Cloud
  • Install our skill for Google Assistant. As of this writing, the link is not live yet: you can find it by opening the Google Home app -> Home Control, tap on the blue + at the bottom right and find Hass.io in the list.
  • Optional: Tweak the devices that are getting exposed to Google Assistant.

Things to note:

  • The skill is called Hass.io, but will work with normal Home Assistant too. The name was necessary to avoid confusion between Home Assistant, Google Assistant and Google Home.
  • Works with Home Assistant 0.65.6 or later.
  • All message handling is done local and is open source.
  • If you have an Android device with Google Assistant, you can control your devices too.
  • Home Assistant 0.68 will introduce a button to the Cloud config panel to trigger a sync of available devices.

Home Assistant Cloud is still in open beta and free to use. Open beta period has been extended to June 1. Many thanks to Quadflight for providing the Raspberry Pis that Google used for physical testing and thanks to Arsaboo for helping with testing.


Hass.io 2018

We noticed that there is some confusion in the community about how Hass.io relates to Home Assistant and what impact the upcoming Hass.io changes will have. We will try to clarify it all in this blog post.

What is Hass.io

Hass.io is a complete solution to run Home Assistant, by the authors of Home Assistant. The goal of Hass.io is to provide an easy to use and secure system, entirely managed from within the Home Assistant user interface.

Hass.io is a complete solution, which means that it comes with its own highly secure and optimized operating system, a supervisor application to maintain and configure that system, and of course Home Assistant itself.

When using Hass.io, you’ll see a new Hass.io panel inside the Home Assistant UI. From here users can configure the system and install Home Assistant updates with a simple click of a button. Users are also able to make snapshots of their system, making it easy to migrate all their configuration to a new system or restore their system to a previous state.

We wanted to be able to provide the convenience of seamless updates and configuration via the UI to other applications too, and so we introduced Hass.io add-ons. Any application can be packaged up as a Hass.io add-on, allowing any user to install and manage it easily. Since the introduction, we’ve seen an amazing growth in users sharing their add-ons with the community. It’s now possible to install an adblocker for your network, an MQTT broker or Tor with a single click.

Upcoming changes to Hass.io

We’ve introduced Hass.io last July. Since then, we’ve noticed some room for improvements in making Hass.io easier to use, lighter to maintain and easier to integrate with other host systems.

Note that the descriptions of upcoming improvements can get quite technical. Feel free to jump to the conclusion.

Automatic add-on configuration

Home Assistant has recently introduced configuration entries. We’re going to hook into this new functionality and allow add-ons to configure their related integration in Home Assistant automatically. For example, if a user installs the MQTT broker add-on, we will automatically set up Home Assistant to connect to it.

Host management

To control the host system, we currently use a custom service called HostControl. This allows the user to manage here host and restart/shutdown the computer from within Home Assistant. Instead of relying on our own system, we’re going to change to use D-Bus. D-Bus is a standardized mechanism for services and applications to communicate. Using a defined standard means that all parts of the host can now be remotely configured: sound, network, etc, etc. We will be extending the Hass.io panel in Home Assistant with controls to configure various parts of the host.

Hass.io OS

Hass.io is currently using a forked version of ResinOS as our operating system. ResinOS has been designed to run a minimal environment for Docker, simple over the air updates and connect to the ResinIO cloud. Our fork removed the ResinIO logic. Over time, ResinOS has been evolving but not in a direction that is aligned with our goals, resulting in the maintenance of our fork to take up a lot of time.

The ResinOS build system is based on the Yocto Project. This is a very powerful system, but also requires specific support for each hardware platform need to be specifically added and maintained (like each version of Raspberry Pi), which caused long build and development times for Hass.io.

All these factors made us decide to build our own, custom, operating system. We’re obviously not starting from scratch, but instead, are basing it off Buildroot as the foundation and use RAUC for over the air updates.

Some things that the new operating system will be able to do:

  • Easier to add support for new hardware.
  • Updating will be atomic and has a Fail-safe. If a system fails to boot after an OS upgrade, it will fallback, by booting the previous working version.
  • Updates are required to be securely signed by the Home Assistant team, adding a whole new level of security.
  • Compressing the root file system, making it faster on SD cards and slow IO-Interfaces.
  • Compressing parts of the memory so that we can store more information.

What Hass.io users should do to prepare for these updates

At this moment: Nothing.

The new Hass.io supervisor still supports the old ResinOS builds (our official downloads for Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC) and generic Linux installations. If you’re using a generic Linux installation on SUSE Linux or Ubuntu, you have to update your local AppArmor profile if you want to use the new functionality (instructions will be provided upon release).

Once our new installation images with HassioOS are released, you have to reflash your device once. You can do this without losing any configuration by using our Snapshot feature:

  • Create a snapshot of your current installation and download it to your PC.
  • Flash the SD card with the new Hass.io OS image.
  • Restore your snapshot.
  • Enjoy a new and improved Hass.io

0.67: Mastodon, Tahoma switches, Nanoleaf Aurora Light Panels

Release 0.67 is here! In case you missed the announcement from yesterday, Ubiquiti is paying me to write these release notes. Ooooooh yeah. With more time on my hands I’m going to be focusing on major improvements that we have been postponing for a while, first up will be a user system.

This release includes a security fix. The error log was accessible via the API without requiring authentication in previous releases. Although not a leak on its own, combined with a faulty component that would log sensitive information to the error log could lead to that being exposed (we don’t know of any component that does this). Thanks to Matt Hamilton for disclosing this issue to us.

New Platforms

Release 0.67.1 - April 17

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

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 →