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Using MQTT with Home Assistant
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MQTT
A great example is shown in a Laundry Automation post in this blog.
This post will give you a small overview of some other possibilities on how to use MQTT with Home Assistant.
Read on →0.7: Better UI and improved distribution
As Home Assistant is gaining more and more users we started to feel the pain from not having a proper release mechanism. We had no version numbering and required users to checkout the source using Git to get started. On top of that, as the number of devices that we support keeps raising, so did the number of dependencies that are used. That’s why we decided to change the way we roll. From now on:
- Each release will have a version number, starting with version 0.7. This was chosen because it shows that we have been around for some time but are not considering ourselves to be fully stable.
- Each release will be pushed to PyPi. This will be the only supported method of distribution.
- Home Assistant is available after installation as a command-line utility
hass
. - The default configuration location has been moved from
config
in the current working directory to~/.homeassistant
(%APPDATA%/.homeassistant
on Windows). - Requirements for components and platforms are no longer installed into the current Python environment (being virtual or not) but will be installed in
<config-dir>/lib
.
A huge shout out to Ryan Kraus
And while Ryan was fixing distribution, I have been hard at work in giving Home Assistant a face lift. We already looked pretty good but lacked proper form of organization for users with many devices. The new UI moves away from a card per entity and has cards per group and domain instead. The demo has been updated so give it a spin.
Read on →Laundry Automation: insight and notifications
This is a guest post by Home Assistant user and contributor Nolan Gilley
In our house, laundry has been a struggle for quite some time. Our washer and dryer both lack a buzzer which leads to forgotten laundry, and stinky mess that needs to be rewashed. I decided to create a solution by monitoring the washer and dryer myself with some cheap electronics.
As an avid user of Home Assistant, I decided it would be the perfect application to manage the UI and notification system. Now all I needed was a way to monitor the washer and dryer. I tried using sound sensors but found them unreliable. I ended up opting for an accelerometer attached to the back of each appliance. I also added magnetic reed switches on the doors of the washer and dryer to detect if the doors are open or closed. I connected the accelerometers and reed switches to a Moteino
After taking some sample data from the accelerometers while each appliance was in operation, I decided to plot the data to help determine the proper thresholds of when the devices were running or off. I had to do this in order to get precise ranges so the dryer sensor wouldn’t get tripped by the washer or vice versa. In the plot below you can see the acceleration in the x direction for the accelerometer connected to the washing machine. It’s easy to see when the washing machine is in operation here. I used the same technique for the dryer’s accelerometer.
Graph showing the accelerometer data
Verisure devices and modern TP-Link routers now supported
A minor bug fix release to fix some issues that have come up since the last release. Please upgrade as soon as possible by running git pull
from the Home Assistant directory.
This release is a major milestone in our test coverage as we’ve crossed into the 80s! It has to be noted that this covers mainly the core and automation components. Platforms that communicate with IoT devices have been excluded.
As we didn’t want to just push out bug fixes, this release includes a few additions:
- Support for modern TP-Link routers like the ArcherC9 line has been contributed by @chrisvis
. - Improved support for MQTT topic subscriptions has been contributed by @qrtn
Verisure Support
Home Assistant support to integrate your Verisure
# Example configuration.yaml entry
verisure:
username: [email protected]
password: password
alarm: 1
hygrometers: 0
smartplugs: 1
thermometers: 0
MQTT, Rasperry Pi, Logitech Squeezebox and ASUSWRT routers now supported
It’s time for the August release and there is some serious good stuff this time. The core of Home Assistant has gone some serious clean up and a bump in test coverage thanks to @balloob
MQTT Support
The big new addition in this release is the support for the MQTT protocol by @fabaff
# Example configuration.yaml entry
mqtt:
broker: IP_ADDRESS_BROKER
# All the other options are optional:
port: 1883
keepalive: 60
qos: 0
username: your_username
password: your_secret_password
IP Cameras, Arduinos, Kodi and Efergy Energy Monitors now supported
Another month has passed and some great new features have landed in Home Assistant. This month release has been made possible by balloob
This release includes some architectural changes by me. The first is that the frontend is now based on a NuclearJS
IP Camera Support James has worked very hard to add support for IP cameras to Home Assistant which is included in this release. The initial release focusses on providing generic IP camera support. This means that any webcam that can exposes a JPEG image via a URL can be integrated.
Home Assistant will route the requests to your camera via the server allowing you to expose IP camera’s inside your network via the Home Assistant app.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
camera:
platform: generic
name: my sample camera
username: MY_USERNAME
password: MY_PASSWORD
still_image_url: http://194.218.96.92/jpg/image.jpg
Release notes for June 10, 2015
Wow, almost a month has gone by since the last release and this release is packed. The biggest part of this release is probably one that you won’t notice: the frontend has been upgraded from Polymer 0.5 to the brand new released Polymer 1.0. Polymer has been declared stable by the Google overlords which will allow us to expand functionality that was waiting for this moment to arrive.
This release sets a record for the amount of people involved: 8! Andythigpen
A big improvement has been brought this release by wind-rider. He took the time to revive the Chromecast support and started improving the media player integration. This triggered other people to join in resulting in a revamped media player experience and support for the Music Player Daemon.
Example of the new media player cards
Release notes for May 14, 2015
Almost three busy weeks have past since the last release. We used this time to finally make the overhaul to use UTC as the internal date time format. We added a bunch of test coverage in the process to make sure the transition went smoothly. Pleas see the blog post about the UTC refactor for backwards incompatible changes.
This release includes a significant startup boost for the frontend and a fix for Wemo discovery after their latest firmware upgrade.
I would like to give a big shout out to our newest contributor fabaff
UTC & Time zone awareness
I have recently merged code to refactor Home Assistant to use only UTC times internally. A much needed refactor. I’ve added some extra test coverage to time sensitive parts to ensure stability. The code has been live in the dev branch for the last 9 days and will be soon released to the master branch.
From now on all internal communication will be done in UTC: time changed events, datetime attributes of states, etc. To get the current time in UTC you can call homeassistant.util.dt.utcnow()
. This is a timezone aware UTC datetime object. homeassistant.util.dt
There is also such a thing as local time. Local time is based on the time zone that you have setup in your configuration.yaml
. Local times should only be used for user facing information: logs, frontend and automation settings in configuration.yaml
.
Setting up your time zone
Setting up a time zone happens in configuration.yaml
. If you have no time zone setup, it will be auto detected using the existing detection code using freegeoip.net
homeassistant:
time_zone: America/Los_Angeles
Compatibility
The changes to the code are mostly backwards compatible. The old hass.track_time_change
and hass.track_point_in_time
use now internally two new methods: hass.track_utc_time_change
and hass.track_point_in_utc_time
. The usage of the old methods have not changed and should be backwards compatible.
This refactor adds a new migration for the database adding a utc_offset
column to events and states. This information is currently not used but can prove useful in the future when we start analyzing the historical data.
Backwards incompatible stuff
All built-in components have been upgraded. The following list is only for people that run custom components:
-
hass.track_time_change
andhass.track_point_in_time
will now return a time zone aware datetime object. Python does not allow comparing a naive with an aware datetime object. - the sun attributes for rising and setting are now in UTC. The methods
sun.next_rising(hass)
andsun.next_setting(hass)
are backwards compatible, just be careful if you used to read the raw attributes. - the API sends all times in UTC. If you use anything else besides the frontend to talk to HA, make sure it handles it differently.
Release notes for April 25, 2015
It’s been a month since the latest update and a lot has happened again. Here a quick overview of the new things.
Line Charts
James
ISY994 hub support
Ryan
He has created an extensive getting started guide which can be found on the ISY994 component page.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
isy994:
Logbook
I (Paulus) have added a logbook component. The logbook component provides a different perspective on the history of your house by showing all the changes that happened to your house in chronological order. See the demo for a live example.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
logbook: