From time to time we come along things that are worth sharing with fellow Home Assisters. Here a list of some cool stuff from last week:

First is the public beta of Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that is free, automated and open. This means that it will now be very easy to secure your connection to Home Assistant while you are away from home. W1ll1am23 has written up a guide how to get started.

The next thing is a show-off of some of the cool stuff people do with Home Assistant. This is miniconfig talking to Home Assistant using the Amazon Echo!

And last but not least, Midwestern Mac did a microSD card performance comparison for the Raspberry Pi. If you’re using a Pi, make sure to check it out!

Around a week ago we started with the first survey. Now 30 people have participated. Thank you very much if you did. We think that’s enough time to have some “only partially representative” data. It’s hard to tell how many Home Assistant users are out there. Currently there are 215 members on our Discord chat server and last week PyPI counted 5063 downloads.

The idea was to anonymously collect some details about the usage of the different parts of Home Assistant and a little bit about the environment its running in.

We have all been hard at work to get this latest release ready. One of the big highlights in this release is the introduction of an extended iconset to be used in the frontend (credits to @happyleavesaoc for idea and prototype). To get started with customizing, pick any icon from Material Design Icons, prefix the name with mdi: and stick it into your customize section in configuration.yaml:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    switch.ac:
      icon: "mdi:air-conditioner"

Backward-incompatible changes

• Any existing zone icon will have to be replaced with one from Material Design Icons.
• LimitlessLED light services require colors to be specified in RGB instead of XY.

Changes

• Thermostat: Honeywell now supported (@sander76)
• Switch: Orvibo now supported (@happyleavesaoc)
• Camera: mjpeg camera’s now supported (@ryanturner)
• Notify: Pushetta now supported (@fabaff)
• Light: MQTT now supported (@hexxter)
• Light: Z-Wave now supported (@leoc)
• Switch: Z-Wave now supported (@leoc)
• New component logger allows filtering logged data (@badele)
• New component updater will notify users if an update for Home Assistant is available (@rmkraus)
• Notify: PushBullet now allows targeting contacts/channels/specific devices (@tomduijf)
• Light: Allow controlling color temperature (@tomduijf)
• Frontend: about page added (@balloob)
• Switch RGB as the color unit used in light component (@balloob)
• Re-install platform and component dependencies after a Home Assistant version upgrade (@balloob)

After two weeks of hard work I’m proud to announce the release of Home Assistant v0.7.6. For this release the main focus was bugs, test coverage and documentation. And we exceeded expectations on all three fronts. Bugs have been squashed, test coverage increased to 85% and thanks to the hard work by @fabaff and myself the component section on the website has gotten a complete revamp.

Changes

• Device tracker: Newer TP-Link routers now supported (@mKeRix)
• Alarm Control Panel: Manual alarm added (@sfam)
• Thermostat: Radiotherm now supported (@toddeye)
• Media Player: Amazon FireTV now supported (@happyleavesaoc)
• Device Tracker: Geofancy now supported (@wind-rider)
• New component Shell Command can expose shell commands as services (@balloob)
• Scripts can now be customized using customize key in configuration.yaml (@balloob)
• Light: Hyperion now supported (@MakeMeASandwich)
• Sensor: aRest can now also read out pins (@balloob)
• Sensor: Forecast.io now supports specifying units in configuration.yaml (@balloob)
• Thermostat: Heat Control has been completely rewritten (@balloob)
• Switch: Rest now supported (@bachp)
• Media Player: Plex can now be auto discovered and configure itself (@tomduijf)
• Downloader will now treat relative paths based on config dir (@tomduijf)
• Line Charts will use interpolation for sensor data and show current and target temperature for thermostats (@balloob)
• Device Tracker: OpenWRT via ubus now supported (@krzynio)

{::options coderay_line_numbers=“table” /}

I recently learned about the ESP8266, a $5 chip that includes WiFi and is Arduino compatible. This means that all your DIY projects can now be done for a fraction of the price.

For this tutorial, I’ll walk through how to get going with ESP8266, get the temperature and humidity and report it to MQTT where Home Assistant can pick it up.

Picture of the final setup (+ 2 LED for decoration)

Home Assistant will keep track of historical values and allow you to integrate it into automation.

We discovered two issues annoying enough to warrant the release of 0.7.5:

• Home Assistant package did not include the CloudMQTT certificate.
• A bug in the core caused issues when some platforms are loaded twice.

This release also includes some new platforms (because they keep coming!):

• Light: blinkstick platform added (@alanbowman)
• Device Tracker: SNMP platform added (@tomduijf)
• Light: rfxtrx platform added (@badele)
• Switch: rfxtrx platform added (@badele)
• Notify: telegram platform added (@fabaff)

Also, the media player was extended by @maddox to support the play media command. This has been implemented for the iTunes platform.

A few weeks have past and it is time again for another release: version 0.7.4. This time we’re very glad to be able to introduce brand new integration with OwnTracks to allow tracking of people on a map. The geo support consists of three different parts:

• OwnTracks platform for the device tracker to get locations for devices
• Brand new zone component to define zones to identify locations and trigger automation
• A map in the UI to see all this (see it in action in the demo)

We have added a new getting started section to get up and running.

Map in Home Assistant showing two people and three zones (home, school, work)

Ofcourse more things happened in the last three weeks. I’m moving away from my usual long post to a short summary of highlights:

• Sensor: rest platform added (@fabaff)
• Alarm Control Panel: MQTT platform added (@sfam)
• Media Player: Plex platform added ([@miniconfig](https://github.com/miniconfig, @adrienbrault)
• Dev Tools: services can now show description of fields (@balloob)
• MQTT: Support for certificates and improved error reporting (@balloob)
• Light: limitlessled platform extended with white light support (@auchter)
• Fuzzy matching for scenes (@pavoni)
• Scene support for media player (@maddox)

It’s like someone opened a can of rock solid developers and emptied it above our chat channel because it exploded with great conversations and solid contributions. Featured in release 0.7.3: Sonos, iTunes, Alarm component and Automation upgrade.

See GitHub for more detailed release notes.

Migration note: the scheduler component has been removed in favor of the automation component.

Sonos Sonos support has been added by @rhooper and @SEJeff. Home Assistant is now able to automatically detect Sonos devices in your network and set them up for you. It will allow you to control music playing on your Sonos and change the volume.

iTunes and airplay speakers @maddox has contributed support for controlling iTunes and airplay speakers. For this to work you will have to run itunes-api on your Mac as middleware.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_player:
  platform: itunes
  name: iTunes
  host: http://192.168.1.50
  port: 8181

Today we announce the release of Home Assistant v0.7.2 which includes brand new support by @sfam to integrate with IFTTT. IFTTT stands for If This, Then That and is a webservice that integrates with almost every possible webservice out there. Adding Home Assistant to this mix means Home Assistant can connect with all via IFTTT.

It is now possible to disable your irregation system if it is going to be cloudy tomorrow or tweet if your smoke alarm goes off.

Head over to the setup instructions to get started with IFTTT. Click the read more button for some example recipes.