2025.1.2

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Explaining the Updater

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

On Saturday, we released Home Assistant 0.31 which includes an improved updater component that checks for new versions using the Home Assistant servers. We wanted to update the community on its rollout and answer some questions that have come up. As part of the update check anonymous information about your operating system and Python version is submitted to Home Assistant servers unless you have opted out.

Read on →

0.31: Reading you the news, some serious business, spooky hackery and a breaking Z-Wave change

Robbie Trencheny

Hello again friend,

How are you? Having a good day? We sure are. If you aren’t having a good day, this might cheer you up…

Every other weekend around here gets a little hectic leading to a big sigh of relief as we release a new version of Home Assistant to the world. And this time is no different. Our developer community has once again built us a beautiful new release with lots of new features and improvements. We hope you like it.

One last thing before we get going though, I should warn you… @balloob got a bit lazy this week and let me (@robbiet480) step up to the plate again to write the blog post and do the release. I guess I didn’t do such a bad job in 0.27. You’ll never know what surprises I have in store. Now that i’ve got all that stuff out of the way, let’s get started…

Stats Update

Sadly, no big amazing stats to update you with this time, but we did recently pass 7,000 commits! This release featured submissions from 45 contributors. Hopefully with the new updater component we will be able to give you some really good stats in the 0.32 blog post.

Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest logo

October means Hacktoberfest time and our community has really come through with some excellent improvements and additions. As of this writing, we have 194 merged and 41 open pull requests to the home-assistant repository and 209 merged/28 open pull requests submitted to the home-assistant.github.io repository. If you want to get in on the fun check out our Hacktoberfest blog post or the Hacktoberfest website. You get an awesome t-shirt for free if you have 4 pull requests merged in the month of October! We even have tasks that a non-developer can easily accomplish with a tiny bit of work. Better hurry up though, only 9 days left and most of the easy tasks are gone!

⚠️ A greatly improved updater component (Please read this!) ⚠️

This release includes an update to our updater component. The responsibility of the updater component is to check if a new version is available and notify the user if this is the case.

It used to be that this component would check with PyPi (the Python package manager) to see if a new update was available. This had a couple of problems:

  1. We are unable to do a slow rollout
  2. We are unable to show the user extra information (like a link to a changelog or the release date)
  3. We are unable to warn users for critical security updates

So to work around these problems, we decided to start hosting the version check service ourselves. Since we had to get some infrastructure spun up anyway, we figured we would take it a step further. Which leads me to this bit of the update (the most important part):

What you need to know (the important bit!)

Remember how I mentioned that up there in the title that there is some serious business in this release? Well, we also added some basic analytics to the updater component which get sent to the server and stored so that we get a better idea of our user base.

Each Home Assistant instance running the updater component will generate a unique ID (based on UUIDv4) that will be used for the updater to be able to differentiate between instances. This UUID will be stored in your config directory in a file called .uuid.

Opting out

There are two ways to opt-out. The first way is by using the new opt_out option for the updater. This way the updater will continue to check for updates, but no information about your system will be shared with us.

updater:
  reporting: false

You can also disable the updater component entirely by removing updater: from your configuration.yaml although we would not suggest you do this as you would miss any critical updates.

Finally, you can also reset your unique identifier by deleting the .uuid file and restarting Home Assistant.

Data stored on the Home Assistant update server

Here is what my production Home Assistant instance looks like from the server side:

Name Description Example
arch CPU Architecture x86_64
distribution Linux Distribution name (only Linux) Ubuntu
docker True if running inside Docker false
os_name Operating system name Darwin
os_version Operating system version 10.12
python_version Python version 3.5.2
timezone Timezone America/Los_Angeles
user_agent User agent used to submit analytics python-requests/2.11.1
uuid Unique identifier 10321ee6094d4a2ebb5ed55c675d5f5e
version Home Assistant version 0.31.0
virtualenv True if running inside virtualenv true

In addition to the above collected data, the server will also use your IP address to do a geographic IP address lookup to determine the city that you are from. To be extremely, extremely clear about this bit: The Home Assistant updater does not: store your IP address in a database and also does not submit the location information from your configuration.yaml.

Geo-lookup on my IP resolves to Oakland with latitude/longitude pointing at the geographical center of the city.

The server also adds two timestamps to the data: the original date your instance UUID was first seen and the timestamp of the last time we have seen your instance. This gives us the following extra data:

Name Description Example
first_seen_datetime First time instance ID was submitted 2016-10-22T19:56:03.542Z
geo_city GeoIP determined city Oakland
geo_country_code GeoIP determined country code US
geo_country_name GeoIP determined country name United States
geo_latitude GeoIP determined latitude (of the city) 37.8047
geo_longitude GeoIP determined longitude (of the city) -122.2124
geo_metro_code GeoIP determined metro code 807
geo_region_code GeoIP determined region code CA
geo_region_name GeoIP determined region name California
geo_time_zone GeoIP determined time zone America/Los_Angeles
geo_zip_code GeoIP determined zip code 94602
last_seen_datetime Most recent time instance ID was submitted 2016-10-22T19:56:03.542Z

This data is held in the highest security. The update system runs in a secured Amazon Web Services account owned by me (@robbiet480). I personally have 5 years of experience with complex AWS deployments and have an extensive security background. I have audited the entire system and made sure to take every step to protect the data, including limiting who has access (just @balloob and myself). While not directly personally identifiable we absolutely understand some users hesistance to giving this information out. Please understand that we are only collecting this information to better understand our user base to provide better long term support and feature development then is currently possible.

We currently have no plans to publicly expose any of this information. If we did do such a thing in the future we would of course notify you in advance. It must also be stated that we will never sell or allow the use of this information for non-Home Assistant purposes.

We thank you for understanding why we are collecting this data and hope that you leave the feature enabled but fully understand if you feel uncomfortable with this.

This section was updated on October 24 to be more clear about geo-lookups being on the city level. See original version.

Now, back to the fun stuff…

Good evening. I’m Ron Burgundy and here’s what happening in your world tonight.

Home Assistant got a crazy idea recently that it couldn’t do enough already and wanted to challenge itself even more. I really don’t understand how it came up with this kooky idea, but it now thinks that its newest hobby should be a minor career in journalism.

0.31 adds support for the brand spanking new Alexa Flash Briefing API, allowing you to get updates from Home Assistant anytime you ask Alexa to read your flash briefing. What’s the use case you ask? Well, now when I wake up in the morning and get my flash briefing, Home Assistant adds this to the end of it for me:

Drive time with traffic is 35 minutes. There is an UberPOOL that will cost $11.52, estimated to be 2 minutes away, for a total of 37 minutes. BART is currently estimated to take 29 minutes. You should take BART, as it is estimated to be faster by 8 minutes.

Now I know how to best get to my real job (no, Home Assistant is not my real job, it does seem like it sometimes though) every morning. Obviously not the best home automation example, but I think you get the idea. I could see this being used to tell you any major events that happened in your home overnight or reading you your hyperlocal weather report. Thanks to the audio support you could even replace all of the default Alexa Flash Briefing sources with your own news feeds. Home Assistant supports both text and audio content as well as displaying data in the Alexa app. I also want to point out that unlike the existing Skill integration, the Flash Briefing API does not require HTTPS (but you should still be using HTTPS if possible). For more information, check out the new docs.

You stay classy, San Diego. (It's funny, because balloob lives in San Diego))

Major breaking Z-Wave changes ahead

A rather nasty Z-Wave issue was discovered recently by @lukas-hetzenecker. There was a somewhat large chance that if you had multiple of the same model Z-Wave device they may both try to use the same entity IDs. To fix the issue the internal Z-Wave index is now appended to the end of all Z-Wave entity IDs.

What this means for all you Z-Wave users is that you will need to update your configurations to reflect the change. I personally have quite a few (17) Z-Wave devices and went through the process this week. Here’s what I had to do:

  • Update customizations
  • Update groups
  • Update my zwave.customize section
  • Update my Alexa skills that used old entity IDs
  • Because I use emulated_hue with Alexa and emulated_hue uses the entity ID as a unique identifier I also had to remove all Z-Wave devices from Alexa and re-add them.

Your todo list may be a little different from mine, I just wanted to outline the steps I took to give you an idea of what you need to think about. It’s not a very hard process, especially when using global find and replace in Sublime Text but did take me about 20 minutes to complete.

This is super annoying, I know, especially since we had said in 0.12 that Z-Wave IDs should hopefully never change again, but we are now forced to eat those words. I will state again that Z-Wave IDs shouldn’t change in the future but obviously we see how that went. To sum up on this section… sorry but it had to happen.

All changes

Release 0.31.1 - October 24

  • Identify special character encoding error in YAML files (@kellerza, @lwis)
  • iOS app component bug fixes (@robbiet480)
  • Fix a spelling problem on user-facing error (@robbiet480)
  • YAML includes will ignore dirs/files prefixed with . (@lwis)

Backward-incompatible changes

  • The HTTP component now takes a different format for authenticating IPs
  • Configuration format has changed for Proximity
  • The Arduino platform are now covered by the configuration check. Please check the documentation to see how.
  • The Z-Wave entity ID change mentioned above

If you need help…

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

Until next time

Thanks for reading all of the above, especially since this week was a pretty long post. We should be back with a new post around November 5th announcing the arrival of 0.32.

– Robbie

0.30: More Async, HASSbian, Digital Ocean, statistics, REST

Fabian Affolter

Yes, after only nine days comes 0.30. Don’t worry, we will try to keep our usual release cycle and not start to release every day.

We guess that you already know: The Raspberry Pi image is available now. For Hassbian, @Landrash has combined the most essential parts for a Home Assistant setup in an easy-to-use image for the Raspberry Pi device family. Hassbian is quite young, thus we are looking forward to receive feedback, issue report, and suggestions to improve it.

A large amount of resources of the development are still focusing on the effort to move Home Assistant further to asynchronous programming. It’s a labor-intensive task, comes with segmentation faults, and unstable instances when certain combinations of sensors are used. The benefit will be more speed in the near future.

To reduce the run-time of your tests, @balloob did a lot of tweaking. For now the RFXtrx tests are excluded which cut the needed time for running on your Pull Request in half.

Documentation

All configuration sample entries are now minimized. This should help to avoid problem for starters and newbies as they only get what’s needed and not a full sample with all optional entries. If there is an issue with an entry in your configuration.yaml file the error message will provide you an URL that point to the documentation.

As soon as the Hacktoberfest started there were a lot of incoming Pull Requests for the documentation. A huge “Thank you” to all participants. Especially, we would like to give a cookie to @hillaryfraley. She created around a dozen Pull Requests so far and didn’t only fix typos but complete sections. The Hacktoberfest is still on-going and we are looking forward to get more Pull Requests.

Statistics

With the statistics sensor we would like to introduce a new sensor that is similar to the template sensor or the trend sensor. This sensor is consuming values from another sensor and is doing some statistical analysis of the data. Over a group of samples is the average/mean, the min/max, the total, the standard deviation, and the variance calculated which can be used in your automation rules. If the source is a binary sensor then the state changes are counted.

As the results are processed on-the-fly you still need to use the data from your database for an in-depth analysis of your stored information. Check the latest notebook for doing statistics with your Home Assistant database.

REST! We don’t…

There was a lot of work done on our implementation which are working with RESTful APIs. @w1ll1am23 extended the aREST platforms to display if an aREST unit is available or not. The aREST implementations are now covered by the configuration check as well. Please check the Backward-incompatible changes section for more details.

The REST sensor supports now HTTP authentication (basic and digest) and custom headers. This will allow you to access resources which are protected. This sample sensor will access GitHub and retrieve the latest release number while by-passing the rate limit for non-authenticated requests.

sensor
  - platform: rest
    resource: https://api.github.com/repos/home-assistant/home-assistant/releases/latest
    username: YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME
    password: YOUR_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN
    authentication: basic
    value_template: "{{ value_json.tag_name }}"
    headers:
      Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json
      Content-Type: application/json
      User-Agent: Home Assistant REST sensor

Misc

  • GitHub released with a recent update a review feature. This will give you more control over your comments while you review an open Pull Request.
  • Thanks to @robbiet480 we are now running mention-bot. It will help you when you create a new Pull Request to identify potential reviewers.
  • The Home Assistant Community Forum has now an additional section called “Installation”.

All changes

Release 0.30.1 - October 8

  • Device Tracker known_devices.yaml validation is now more accepting (@kellerza)
  • Handle X10 light numbers greater than 9 (@mtl010957)
  • Fix command line covers without a template (@roidayan)

Release 0.30.2 - October 12

  • Handle Volvo’s with dashes in their name (@molobrakos)
  • Fix some html5 push notification configuration options were discarded after first use (@T3m3z)
  • Fix Homematic device name with autodiscovery (@pvizeli)
  • Make ‘pin’ optional for zigbee device config (@flyte)
  • Fix when sending a notification to a service with target attached (i.e., notify.html5_unnamed_device_2) the target was not submitted to the platform as a list causing iteration over every character in the string. (@robbiet480)
  • Fix for Slack targets (@fabaff)
  • Fix for Pushover targets (@Nixon506E)

Backward-incompatible changes

  • All deprecated condition options from automation have been removed (deprecated since May and have printed warnings to your console):
    • use_trigger_values is gone. You have to copy your triggers to conditions and adjust for the correct config.
    • condition_type is gone. Use condition: or instead.
    • To specify the type of a condition, use condition: instead of platform:.
  • The Forecast.io was renamed to Dark Sky. Replace your - platform: forecast with - platform: darksky.
  • The aREST configuration between the sensor and the switch platform was aligned.

If you need help…

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

Participating in Hacktoberfest

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Home Assistant will join this year for Hacktoberfest, an event organized by DigitalOcean and GitHub to support and celebrate open source. The idea is that open source projects like Home Assistant will gather a bunch of entry-level bugs, features and documentation enhancements and that you, a current or future contributor, will fix them. If you submit four pull-requests during the month of October you will have earned yourself a limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt!

Why contribute to Home Assistant:

  • Written in Python3 with 94% test coverage
  • Active and helpful community
  • Friendly to new contributors

Resources to get started:

Are you not a programmer but still want to contribute to Home Assistant? Check out our list of entry-level issues for the Home Assistant website.

Hacktober fest logo

We have a Raspberry Pi image now

Fredrik Lindqvist

Today we’re happy to announce our brand new Raspberry Pi image! It is based on Raspbian Lite combined with HASS so we decided to call it Hassbian.

This image comes pre-installed with everything you need to get started with Home Assistant right away.

To get started, check out the installation instructions in the getting started section or watch the latest video by BRUHAutomation:

Under the hood

It’s based on Raspbian Lite and generated with a fork of the same script that builds the official Raspbian images. For installation of HASS it follows the same install instructions as the Manual installation. Please note that this project has no association with the Raspberry Pi foundation or their projects.

On first boot the latest release of Home Assistant will be installed and can be reached after 3~5 minutes. Pre-installed on this image is the MQTT broker Mosquitto, Bluetooth support and settings for the homeassistant account to use the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi. Mosquitto is not activated by default.

As it is today there is no pre-compiled Z-Wave support but it can be installed by following the Getting started instructions for Z-Wave.

Happy Automating!

0.29: 🎈 Async, SleepIQ, OpenALPR, EmonCMS, stocks, and plants

Paulus Schoutsen & Fabian Affolter

Two weeks ago, September 17 marked our 3 year anniversary. In this time Home Assistant managed to grow from a simple script that turned on my lights when the sun set to a kick ass open source project with the best community an open-source project could wish for. This release contains features, bug fixes and performance tweaks by a total of 50 different people! We have also managed to cross the 1000 forks on GitHub. Talking about momentum!

This is a big release as we’ve completely overhauled the internals of Home Assistant. When I initially wrote Home Assistant, still figuring out the ins and outs of Python, I went for an approach that I was familiar with for an application with many moving parts: threads and locks. This approach has served us well over the years but it was slower than it needed to be, especially on limited hardware.

This all changed when @bbangert came around and took on the tough job to migrate the core over to use asynchronous programming. He did an amazing job and I am happy to say that the initial port has been done and is included in this release! On top of that, we have been able to keep our simple and straightforward API at the same time. We are still in the process of migrating more and more components over to the asynchronous API, so expect more speedups and awesome features in the upcoming releases.

SleepIQ and OpenALPR

There now is support for two new super cool things: Beds and license plates. @technicalpickles created a SleepIQ component that let you monitor the sensor data of your bed. @pvizeli has added license plate recognition based on OpenALPR! This means that you can now be notified about which car is parked on your driveway or in your garage. I also would like to use this opportunity to give a big shoutout to @pvizeli for being such an awesome member of our community. He joined us at the end of June and has helped crush bugs and add awesome features ever since (65 pull requests already!).

Configuration validation

On the voluptuous front we have also made great progress. We were able to fully remove the legacy config helpers and have migrated 323 of the 346 components and platforms that needed migrating! This does mean that for some components the configuration has slightly changed, make sure to check out the backward-incompatible changes section at the bottom for more info. Thanks everybody for reviewing the Pull requests, testing the changes, and reporting issues.

Delayed Release

As you might have noticed, this release has been delayed by 5 days. This was due to a rare, difficult to reproduce problem with the Python interpreter. A huuuuge thanks to all the people that have helped countless hours in researching, debugging and fixing this issue: @bbangert, @turbokongen, @lwis, @kellerza, @technicalpickles, @pvizeli, @persandstrom and @joyrider3774. I am grateful to have all of you as part of the Home Assistant community.

Hide automation rules

Since 0.28 automation rules can be reloaded directly from the frontend.

All changes

Hotfix 0.29.1 - September 29

Hotfix 0.29.2 - September 29

Hotfix 0.29.3 - September 29

Hotfix 0.29.4 - September 30

Hotfix 0.29.5 - September 30

Hotfix 0.29.6 - October 1

  • Fix segmentation fault (@bbangert) 🎉
  • Fix nested templates in data_template would incorrectly get cached (@balloob)

Hotfix 0.29.7 - October 5

  • Fix handling SIGTERM and SIGHUP signals (fixes Systemd restart issues) (@pvizeli)

Backward-incompatible changes

  • The template methods now and utcnow have been changed from variables to methods. To get the current time replace now with now().
  • yahooweather default name is now yweather. Also min and max temperature are now correctly called Temperature Min and Temperature Max.
  • ffmpeg is now a component for manage some things central. All ffmpeg_bin options have moved to this compoment from platforms.
  • Config has changed for X10 lights.
  • For Wink, make sure your config only contains the access token as in the docs.
  • Nest sensor ‘mode’ has been renamed to ‘operation_mode’

If you need help…

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

0.28: Reload automation and groups, API documentation, car tracking, Pi-Hole stats

Fabian Affolter

It’s already time for 0.28 thanks to our super short release cycles. Now, it’ official…we hit 4000 stars on Github. That’s amazing. Sorry, not as amazing as all the stuff that was going on for 0.27 but still pretty awesome.

Reload automation rules

This release brings you a huge improvement of the automation and group handling. Both can be reloaded without a Home Assistant restart by calling their new reload services. The automations can be controlled directly from the frontend.

Raspberry Pi installation guide

Singleboard computers are very popular to run Home Assistant. To support this fact, the installation documentation for the Raspberry Pi devices was re-written to get users started as quickly as possible. @Landrash took the lead with on this tasks with help from @kellerza and @MartinHjelmare.

Climate and cover

There are countless bugfixes included in this release which will make your experience with the climate and the cover platforms better. Two week ago was the biggest merger of implementations released that ever happened in the history of Home Assistant. Thanks to @turbokongen, @pvizeli, @djbanks, @danielperna84, and others the improvements on the code and the frontend side is continuing…

API documentation

The Home Assistant API Documentation is a great addition to the already existing user documentation. The focus is not end-users but developers who want to get details about the code without actually browsing the code on Github.

Configuration validation

The validation of the configuration is still on-going. Approximately 80 % is done. This means that we will propably talk about this topic in the next release notes again. To align the configuration of components and platforms we needed to break some. Please refer to the Backward-incompatible changes section to check if you need to update your configuration or simple check your log for configuration validation errors. Thanks to @kellerza, @fabaff, @Teagan42, and @pvizeli for your effort!

All changes

  • Light: Added bitfield to Flux LED since we are supporting effects (@tchellomello)
  • Device tracker: Owntracks waypoint import (@pavoni)
  • Climate: A lot of bugfix (@turbokongen, @pvizeli, @djbanks)
  • Notify: Improvement of the title handling (@lwis)
  • RFXtrx: Sensor cleanup (@turbokongen)
  • Device tracker: Fix for BLE device tracker (@open-homeautomation)
  • Device tracker: Allow ‘None’ MAC addresses to be loaded from known_devices file (@kellerza)
  • Cover: Bugfixes (@turbokongen, @danielperna84)
  • Sensor: Support for displaying details about crypto currencies (@fabaff)
  • Device tracker: Support for automatic to track your vehicles (@Teagan42)
  • Devie tracker: Add exclude option to Nmap device tracker (@danieljkemp)
  • Device tracker: Improved login errors for Asus device tracker (@kellerza)
  • Sensor: Support for displaying the status of Xbox Live accounts (@mKerix)
  • Notify: Adding link_names for sending Slack message (@salt-lick)
  • Binary sensor: Add the occupancy sensor class (@robbiet480)
  • Fan: Add supoort for MQTT fans (@robbiet480)
  • Docs: Add Sphinx API doc generation (@bbangert)
  • Core: Allow reloading automation without restart (@balloob)
  • Sensor: Added scale and offset to the Temper sensor (@mKerix)
  • Sensor: New support for [Trend] sensor (@pavoni)
  • Device tracker: Keep looking for new BLE devices (@Bart274)
  • Switch: Added device state attributes and support for legacy firmware for D-Link switches (@LinuxChristian)
  • Sensor: Improve 1-Wire device family detection (@Ardetus)
  • Modbus: Update to be thread safe (@persandstrom)
  • Camera: FFMpeg is abale to get the images (@pvizeli)
  • Core: Reload groups without restart (@balloob)
  • Core: Fix remove listener (@balloob)
  • Sensor: Support for monitoring your battery on a Linux host (@fabaff)
  • Core: Add support for complex template structures to data_template (@pvizeli)
  • check_config: Improve yaml fault tolerance and handle border cases (@kellerza)
  • Core: Add additional template for custom date formats (@lwis)
  • Sensor: Support for getting stats from Pi-Hole systems (@fabaff)
  • Modbus: New write_registers Modbus service (@persandstrom)
  • Device tracker: Fix TP-Link Archer C7 long passwords (@snikch)

Hotfix 0.28.1 - September 12

  • Fix: Simplisafe alarm control panels accept any string for code (@tchellomello)
  • Fix: Z-Wave would sometimes not detect all thermostats (@turbokongen)
  • Fix: Automatic device tracker when 2 or more cars are tracked (@teagan42)
  • Fix: Group ordering is now based on config again (@balloob, @kellerza)

Hotfix 0.28.2 - September 13

  • Light - pilight: Fix send RF code (@DavidLP)
  • Recorder: Fix specifying SQLite (@pvizeli)
  • Wink: Fix garage door detection (@turbokongen)
  • Climate - Ecobee: Fix inverted high and low temperatures (@turbokongen)
  • Allow changing covers using scenes (@nvella)
  • Device tracker - Automatic: Fix polling (@teagan42)

Backward-incompatible changes

  • OpenweatherMap entity IDs are now like sensor.owm_temperature. Previously they were like sensor.weather_temperature. Apologies for this change, but we needed to make OpenWeatherMap more generic now that we have many weather platforms.
  • Updates of configuration variables due to configuration check or alignment with other platforms. Please update your configuration entries according to the documentation:
  • Custom components extending BaseNotificationService need to be aware that kwargs.get(ATTR_TITLE) will now return None if a title has not been set, and will need to specify kwargs.get(ATTR_TITLE, ATTR_TITLE_DEFAULT) if they always require a title.

If you need help…

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

ESP8266 and MicroPython - Part 2

Fabian Affolter
So, part 1 of [ESP8266 and MicroPython](/blog/2016/07/28/esp8266-and-micropython-part1/) was pretty lame, right? Instead of getting information out of Home Assistant we are going a step forward and create our own sensor which is sending details about its state to a Home Assistant instance. Read on →

0.27 is here to break eggs and take names: notifications, Hue fakery, safety and unification come to Home Assistant

Robbie Trencheny

This week’s blog post could only be possibly described by exactly one hashtag:

#Amazing

or maybe#supersized

Keep reading to see what #Amazing things we have in store for you this week 😄! And make sure you read all the way to the end, because I left a present down there for those committed few among you :)

But first…

Some general housekeeping

Paulus (@balloob) is on vacation in Europe this week, so you will all have to deal with me, Robbie (@robbiet480) for this release blog post. Don’t worry, Paulus will be back to tearing apart your pull requests in no time 😈.

Special thanks to my awesome helpers for this week’s release who are looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s: @Teagan42, @infamy and @fabaff.

For my next trick, let’s hand out some…

Trophies

I felt that I had to 1-up Paulus (@balloob) somehow with his 500,000 pageviews stat he shared in the 0.26 blog post, so I pushed myself and our development community as a whole super hard the last two weeks to put a lot of love into Home Assistant to bring you not just one, but six #Amazing stats for this release. As of 0.27, we have now surpassed the following milestones:

In addition,

Now that we have that great news out of the way, onto this week’s release which is going to keep the #Amazing gravy train rolling right along and get to the stuff you all really are here for.

0.27

While this release is #Amazing, we had to break a few eggs (now you understand the title reference!) to make a beautiful omelette (using home automation obviously) so some platforms and components have needed to introduce backward-incompatible changes. Please make sure to read the Backward-incompatible changes section below.

Hue Bridge Emulation

Thanks to @mgbowen we now have the functionality previously provided by @blocke’s ha-local-echo built right into Home Assistant! This means that for those of you with devices that either lack or have a subpar integration with Home Assistant (looking at you Amazon Echo) you can now have a better experience by having your Home Assistant pretend to be a Hue Bridge. Personally, I have used @auchter’s Haaska previously but found that it was slow to respond and sometimes failed entirely. With the new emulated_hue component, you can have local control of entities through Amazon Echo.

Notification improvements

We have some excellent upgrades to the notification system coming to you in 0.27, courtesy of me, @robbiet480.

HTML5 Push Notifications

This release adds support for HTML5 push notifications on Chrome/Firefox/Opera on both desktop and Android devices. This means that you can send a notification to your phone even when your Home Assistant is not open in your mobile browser. When using Chrome you can even include 2 action buttons so that you can control your Home Assistant from your phone’s lock screen, allowing you to do things like sound alarms or unlock your front door, all without leaving the notification. Thanks again to me (@robbiet480) and Paulus (@balloob) for all the hard work on this!

Notification Groups

Using the new notify group platform allows you to cut down a lot of duplicate automation logic by combining multiple notification platforms and targets into a single notify service. Check out the documentation for more info.

target is no longer needed

For platforms that support it, starting with the new HTML5 platform, any targets that are available will be exposed as individual services, so no more having to remember which targets to use. Please note that the existing services also still exist so you can keep using target if you wish.

Validate configuration before restarting Home Assistant

Ever restarted Home Assistant to test a configuration change just to find out there is a validation error? Well, not anymore! @kellerza has added a command line script that will validate your configuration as if you started Home Assistant.

hass --script check_config

Configuration validation

This release includes a big push on making sure all platforms contain proper configuration validation. This should help in getting your configuration right. Thanks to @fabaff, @pavoni, @pvizeli, @nkgilley for all the hard work on this, you all rock!

FFMpeg motion/noise sensing

It’s now possible to use FFMpeg to monitor a video stream and detect motion thanks to a new binary sensor platform by @pvizeli.

Component clean up - Thermostat & HVAC -> Climate. Rollershutter & Garage Door -> Cover

Due to our wild growth we ended up with a few components that had a lot of overlapping functionality. @turbokongen took on the hard job on merging them. Thermostat and HVAC platforms are now combined under the new Climate component. Rollershutter and Garage Door platforms are now combined under the new Cover component. You can easily upgrade by just swapping out the name. For example replace thermostat with climate. The old components have been deprecated and will be removed in the near future.

A new fan component

Along with the new climate component, @Teagan42 and I (@robbiet480) decided we needed something simpler to just control a fan. Currently it has support for controlling Insteon fans. MQTT support will appear in 0.28.0. I tried to get it implemented before 0.27.0 but spent too long writing this blog post 😢.

All changes

Backward-incompatible changes

  • Ecobee3 occupancy sensors have moved from sensor platform to binary sensor platform.
  • Forecast.io entity IDs are now like sensor.forecastio_temperature. Previously they were like sensor.weather_temperature. Apologies for this change, but we needed to make Forecast.io more generic now that we have many weather platforms.
  • The Loop Energy sensor configuration format changed slightly, please reformat based on the revised documentation.
  • The configuration for the SABnzbd sensor has slightly changed. The prefix type: is no longer required for monitored variables.
  • The IMAP sensor now uses username instead of user.
  • The NZBGet sensor has had so many changes I can’t list them all. Please refer to the documentation for more info.

Deprecations

  • Using the thermostat and hvac components has been deprecated. Please migrate to the new climate component. (just change the component name, the configurations are compatible)
  • Using the rollershutter and garage_door components have also been deprecated. Please migrate to the new cover component. (just change the component name, the configurations are compatible)

Finishing up

Thanks all for sticking with me to the end. I’ll be taking over a lot of Paulus’s (@balloob) work while he is gone, but as I said, don’t worry because he’ll be back well before 0.28.0 comes out. Hopefully you didn’t find this jovial blog post too jarring from our standard style, I just wrote a lot of this at 2am after being awake for almost 20 hours, so I’m a little loopy hahaha 😴.

Also, thanks as always to our developer contributors, documentation contributors, but most of all our users! This would’ve just been a script that Paulus (@balloob) used to control his lights at home if we didn’t have your enthusiasm.

Feel free to let me know what you thought of this blog post and release on Discord or my Twitter, or even the Home Assistant Twitter. Did I mention we have a brand new Facebook page that you should absolutely Like? There’s a convenient Facebook Like and Twitter follow button right on the sidebar.

I almost forgot about your 🎁 for reading all the way to here: a 🍪! Hope you enjoy it in good health 😄.

Talk to you soon on Discord and in your pull request comments!

– Robbie

(p.s. To those of you that scrolled directly to the bottom to get your present, just know that you didn’t earn it like the others did. 😄)

Hotfix 0.27.1 - August 30

  • Migrate APCUPSd to voluptuous (@fabaff)
  • Ecobee operation mode fix (@turbokongen)
  • update ha-ffmpeg version to 0.9 (@pvizeli)
  • Device tracker component & platform validation. No more home_range. (@kellerza)
  • Added option to use effect:random for Flux Led light bulbs (@tchellomello)
  • Use voluptuous for smtp (@pvizeli)
  • Upgrade sendgrid to 3.2.10 (@fabaff)
  • Upgrade TwitterAPI to 2.4.2 (@fabaff)
  • Fix bug in wemo discovery caused by voluptuous addition. (@pavoni)
  • Bug fix for asuswrt device_tracker. (@Danielhiversen)
  • Remove units for humidity in Wundeground sensor (@arsaboo)
  • Fix media_player descriptions and select_source (@MartinHjelmare)
  • Allow user to configure server id to perform speed test against (@Teagan42)
  • Bug fix for asuswrt device_tracker. (@Danielhiversen)
  • More Ecobee operation mode fixes (@turbokongen)
  • Map Modes to setpoint indexes (@turbokongen)
  • fix voluptuous and cover autodiscovery (@pvizeli)
  • Fixes wrong statevalue and problem with zwave setpoint (@turbokongen)

Hotfix 0.27.2 - September 3

home-assistant

home-assistant-polymer