2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We organized a contest to celebrate what our voice assistants could enable with the community. The contest entries have been all amazing, the work produced outstanding. Personally, I learnt so much just reviewing all the entries, I learnt that our community is so creative and relentless. My personal project list grew quite a lot as I want to implement half of the entries at home! Today is the day we announce the winners!
It is important to note that while Year of the Voice is over, voice is now part of Home Assistant just like automations or dashboards. The sharp focus is over, but voice will get updates forever, just like every other part of Home Assistant.
The contest was split into 4 categories:
You can read more about the contest specifics in the blog post announcing the contest.
Due to a lack of entries, we removed the category âBest events organized, best group effortâ.
The competition was the most fierce in that category!
On the one hand, it pleases me to see how many of you managed to create something unique, quirky, and creative using our voice assistant functionalities. This means that our voice assistant is indeed aligned with our value of Choice. On the other hand, it made picking a winner even more complex đŹ.
So without further ado, the winner of the âmost creative satellite ideasâ category is dirtyharriv and their Bender Voice Assistant.
Congratulations on your entry! Your voice assistant embodies perfectly what we think when we talk about choice: Custom wake word, custom voice, in-character responses, a beautiful 3D printed case, LEDs⊠Itâs perfect!
Dirtyharriv wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!
We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!
Again, lots of entries in this category, it amazes me to see how many of you tried hard to provide something that could be re-used by other members of the community, whether it was a device that you can purchase, hack, or build yourself, or a series of videos you can follow to set something up in your own home.
Building something is already hard, but building something to offer it to others is even harder. This category was, to me, the category with the biggest amount of work done by the contestants, congratulations to you all.
The winner of the âbest starting guidesâ category is landonr with their homeThing S3.
The homeThing blew us away, itâs an iPod-style remote for your home that ticks so many boxes: Rotary dial, screen, IR blaster, microphone, speaker, battery âŠ
Everything is open source, up to the custom PCB that landonr created. The ESPHome configuration is open source. This is the perfect device to have in your home!
Landonr wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!
We also have a few runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!
This category was not about hardware, it was about providing the best software experience that elevates the voice experience in Home Assistant. I had the most fun reviewing this category because most of the entries can be re-used at home without any particular hardware! Instant improvement of my system!
The winner of the âbest voice experiencesâ category is dinki with their View Assist.
View Assist is a complete UI for Assist running on an old Android tablet that tries to replicate the UI of devices such as an Amazon Echo Show. It is very complete and well-documented, and I think can be a candidate for fully replacing a screen-based voice assistant such as an Amazon Echo Show or a Google Nest Hub.
Dinki wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!
We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!
I want to give a small shout-out to one of the runner-up: Lajos and their improvement of the S3 Box firmware to display text, you did something I personally considered impossible in the S3 box, and never tried to implement it because of this false assumption. Seeing your entry pushed me to give it a try and I am happy to announce that very soon, the official voice assistant firmware for the S3 boxes will allow everyone to display the spoken text of the request and the response on the screen.
We also asked you to vote for your favorite entry, the votes were fierce but one entry skyrocketed above the rest.
It is my pleasure to announce that the community vote is Rellu and their HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant.
HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant is an impressive voice experience that creates on-the-fly AI-generated videos of characters as visual feedback for Assist. The video that Rellu provides in his entry is really complete, with the ability to change characters and language directly via voice. Great job!
Rellu wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!
Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and the development of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects in general.
We will contact all winners and runners-up in the next few days to organize shipping. We are looking forward to having the winners on the livestream with us on the 10th of April.
I hope you enjoyed this first Home Assistant contest, rest assured that it wonât be the last.
JLo, Over and Out.
]]>Home Assistant Core 2024.3! đ
Yes, you read the title right! Iâm super stoked about this one. It has been talked about for ages⊠I promise it is real:
Drag ân drop for dashboards is finally here! đ
A first experimental version of the section dashboard that supports drag ân drop. A tremendous step forward and an even bigger milestone for Home Assistant!
But donât be blinded by these Dungeons ân Dragons; there is a lot more!
New intents for Assist (I can finally tell my vacuum to start cleaning!), using script inputs/fields from the dashboard, and a new energy graph for individual devices. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
PS: A big thanks and shoutout to @bramkragten & @balloob for organizing and running the beta and everyone who helped out making these release notes happen during my absence this beta. đ„°
Donât forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 6 March 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!
Our dashboard currently comes with three view layout types: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry. Since the past year, we have been working hard to research and ideate on how to make dashboards easier to customize and use, and we learned that our current layouts are not the best for such purposes. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards cannot work well with the Masonry layout.
We came up with a few solutions, and the first thing we would like to share with you is a new view layout type called âSectionsâ.
Home Assistant dashboards are robust and packed with information. Users will often place dozens of cards for all sorts of buttons, switches, graphs, indicators, and more.
Example of a dashboard section
By grouping cards into âsectionsâ, you can reduce the number of items you need to scan through when you are looking for a certain card, as youâll be able to look for the relevant group title first and then reduce the scope to scan that particular group for the information.
By packing cards in a section into a grid with a fixed number of columns, the relative positions of the cards within a section are not affected by changes in screen sizes, and so the spatial memory of the cards is retained, leading to a faster and less cumbersome experience.
A fully populated dashboard in the Sections view layout
Cards in the new sections view type are all aligned in a tidy grid to ensure consistency and predictability of their positions when the screen size changes. We currently have three cards reworked to fit the grid: Tile, Sensor, and Button cards. These cards will occupy the right amount of space in the grid, while other cards will occupy the full width of a section by default at the moment. Moreover, we have tweaked our âAdd Cardsâ dialogs to recommend Tile cards by default when the sections view type is in use.
To get started with the new Sections view type, create a new view on your dashboard and select Sections (experimental) as the view type. We currently do not have the option to migrate your current dashboard over yet.
For more information, check out our blog post about our new series A Home-Approved Dashboard: Chapter 1.
Amazing work! Thanks Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!
Wow! At long last!! The stars have aligned, and our experimental drag-and-drop feature for dashboards is finally here! đ„Č
With the new sections view type, we can finally implement a way to arrange cards and sections that is intuitive with drag-and-drop gestures and predictable with how the cards will rearrange while creating a dashboard that is easy to navigate and remember. You will no longer need to pray and guess where the cards will land when they change their order!
While your dashboard is in edit mode:
Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop
Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop
Donât you love it when instructions are so short? Simplicity FTW! đŠ
Thanks again Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!
ScriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more] in Home Assistant allow you to capture a sequence of actions
and choices in a reusable way. Scripts are extra powerful because they can
have input fields, allowing you to send in data for when the script runs.
Script fields can be defined in the script editor and show up when you call the script in your automation. In this release, script fields will be available in the more info dialog when tapping a script on a dashboard.
This allows you to provide the input fields and run the script, unlocking a whole new dimension of possibilities.
To accompany this new functionality, weâve created two blueprints to help you get started with using scripts on your dashboard:
Announce message: This blueprint allows you to create an announce script for your dashboard pre-configured to a specific media player and text-to-speech engine. When activated, it will ask the user for the message to play.
Add to to-do list: This blueprint allows you to create a script to add an item to a to-do list pre-configured to a specific to-do list. When activated, it will ask the user for the item to add.
Digging into your energy data is a very interesting way to find ways to reduce your householdâs energy usage and environmental footprint. đ±
One of the missing bricks was the ability to see the energy consumption of individual devices over time. Thanks to @karwosts, we have a brand new graph on the energy dashboard that provides this insight!
Using this new graph, you can now easily spot which devices are responsible for which part of your energy usage over time.
For example, in the above picture, it is very easy to see that the dishwasher was responsible for the morning spike and the oven for the spike in the evening.
Assist, our private voice assistant, learned a few tricks this month.
Support for valves has been added. You can now ask Assist to adjust the position of a valve, or just open or close a valve completely.
Also, cover support has been extended to support the control of the position of your devices. Currently, most languages only support a single use-case as a starting point. Setting the position of a single device by targeting its name:
Set the curtain position to 80%
We are working on extending the use-case coverage to set the position of multiple devices or complete areas, similar to what is possible with the open and close sentences.
The next new trick could be considered a bug fix: Until today it was not possible to start or stop a vacuum cleaner by voice; Now it can! Assist knows how to start a vacuum and return it to its base. Here are some example sentences, in case you have a vacuum cleaner named Dusty:
Start Dusty
Return Dusty to base
The biggest set of changes is for media players. Assist can now pause playback, resume playback, skip to the next media, and set the volume of media players!
Be aware that currently, these sentences are limited to targeting a single device by its name, for example:
Skip to the next song on the TV
We are actively working on extending the logic of these new intents to allow you to target areas and only affect the desired media player(s).
If you are using Home Assistant Cloud, you can access your Home Assistant instance remotely using the Remote UI feature.
Suppose this feature is, for some reason, disabled, and you are currently not at home. In that case, you can enable the Remote UI feature remotely by logging into your Nabu Casa account and request your Home Assistant instance to turn it on.
Feedback from the community has shown that this feature is not always desired, and this release adds a new option to disable the remote activation of the Remote UI feature. Once disabled, the Remote UI feature can only be enabled locally from your Home Assistant instance.
Are you using templatesA template is an automation definition that can include variables for the service or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions.
[Learn more] to send notifications in automations? If so,
@PiotrMachowski might just have added something new you need!
A new template method, state_translated
, to translate entity states directly
from your templates! Consider this template example:
# Untranslated
{{ states("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }} # Shows: on
{{ states("sun.sun") }} # Shows: below_horizon
The above example shows the raw state of two entities. However, with the
new state_translated
method, you can get the state in a human-readable form:
# Translated
{{ state_translated("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }} # Shows: Detected
{{ state_translated("sun.sun") }} # Shows: Below horizon
Even better, it uses the default language of your Home Assistant instance. So, if you use Home Assistant in a different language, the translated state will be in that language.
In case you didnât know, every release @bdraco improves the performance on some aspect of Home Assistant. He has been on it for a long time and keeps pushing to improve it.
As a matter of fact, it has become so regular that we donât always highlight his enormous efforts toward this goal in our release notes. Sorry! đ
However, in this release, his efforts are so noticeable that we wanted to call it out: Home Assistant now boots on average twice as fast! đ
That is a huge improvement @bdraco!! Thank you for your continuous work on making Home Assistant faster and faster! â€ïž
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:
climate.toggle
).
Thanks @arturpragacz!We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
This release also has new virtual integrations. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:
The following integration us now available via the Home Assistant UI:
aionotion
to 2024.03.0 (@bachya - #112675)pysnmp-lextudio
to version 5.0.34
(@bieniu - #112696)pysnmp-lextudio
to version 6.0.9
(@lextm - #112795)brother
library to version 4.0.2
(@bieniu - #113235)pysnmp-lextudio
to version 6.0.11
(@lextm - #113463)TimeoutError
in Brother
config flow (@bieniu - #113593)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and donât forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.
The daily data for the current day wasnât available after midday, and
now it will be. Automations and scripts relying on day[0]
for checking
the next-day forecast will have to be adjusted to use day[1]
instead.
(@Noltari - #107795) (documentation)
The JuiceNet integration has been removed.
Enel X has migrated from JuiceNet to JuicePass, rendering the JuiceNet integration useless. Background and alternative solutions to the juicenet integration can be found in the related issue.
(@emontnemery - #111477)
The met.no integration previously created two entities for each configured location: one provided daily weather forecasts, and one provided hourly forecasts.
The met.no integration now only creates a single entity that provides both daily and hourly weather forecasts.
(@emontnemery - #97023) (documentation)
Aux heat, deprecated in Home Assistant Core 2023.9, is now removed from the MQTT climate.
(@jbouwh - #109513) (documentation)
For Z-Wave climate
entities, the behavior of the climate.turn_on
service
has changed. Previously, the service would act in the following order depending
on whether the corresponding conditions were met:
off
mode and exactly one additional mode,
climate.turn_on
would set the mode to the additional mode.heat_cool
, heat
, cool
.Now, the service follows the following behavior in order:
resume
thermostat mode, it will be used to
restore the last mode you used before the entity was turned off.off
mode since the integration will
not know what the previous mode was.heat_cool
, heat
, cool
(no change to condition 2 above).dry
or fan_only
).(@raman325 - #109187) (documentation)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.3
]]>Home Assistant strives to be the best smart home platform, and a smart home allows its residents to automate, control, observe, and anticipate the comfort, security, and various conveniences of their home. Besides voice assistants, dashboards are also a great way to help users do just that!
Therefore, we have been working hard to make customization and organization of dashboards as easy and intuitive as possible, and to create a default dashboard that will be more useful, user-friendly, and relevant right out of the box. Matthias and I teamed up in April last year to tackle this problem together, and we called this series of improvements over our current dashboard âProject Graceâ, named after the influential and brilliant late Admiral Grace Hopper.
After months of user research and ideation to ensure that our design is âhome-approvedâ - to be easy and intuitive to use for you, your family, your guests, your roommates, and more - we are happy to share the first fruit of our success in the upcoming release 2024.3, with the help of Paul and of course the wonderful frontend team. We hope that these features will help you take the dream dashboard for you and your home from idea to reality much faster and much more easily.
For those of you who are curious about the features and the design thinking behind them, read on and check out our special livestream last week. You can also try out our updated demo and get involved by joining the Home Assistant User Testing Group! And last of all, thank you for supporting our efforts by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud!
Enjoy!
~ Madelena đ„ł
Grace was the codename we used for the series of improvements to be built on top of Lovelace, the framework for our dashboards. We aim to preserve the strengths of Lovelace, such as its flexibility and extensibility, and to mitigate its weaknesses, such as its steep learning curve, its lack of scalability, as well as the poor responsiveness of its layouts.
The three basic view layouts: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry
Our dashboard came with 3 default view layout types by default: Panel, which is simply one card covering the entire view; Sidebar, which is a two-column layout for cards; and Masonry, which is the most robust of them all.
While it is excellent at creating a tightly-packed screen space-saving dashboard, Masonry lays out cards in a logic that may not be immediately clear and predictable to many users, which leads to a frustrating user experience to create and customize the layout of the cards. And as the layout logic depends on the height of each card, the varying heights of the cards available for our dashboards become a blessing and a curse: Even a difference in height of 1 pixel would mean a card one would guess to be displayed on the leftmost column getting shifted all the way to the right.
Masonry arranges cards based on size.
Whatâs more, unlike most other smart home apps, Home Assistant prides itself on Choice. In terms of dashboard view layouts, Choice means that dashboards should be able to be displayed on any screens that are the most convenient to our users - whether itâs a phone, a tablet, a large monitor, or other display devices. While the Masonry layout is great at making neat walls of cards, as its name also implies, it is a wall of cards which does not care whether the bricks are laid, thus the muscle memory of where users remember the cards will be lost every time the dashboard is displayed on another screen.
Masonry does not care about where exactly cards are placed when the screen size changes.
For the past few years, we tried to create a more intuitive solution to rearrange the cards laid out by Masonry but ultimately the solutions did not work well for multiple screen sizes. Meanwhile, our users come up with solutions of their own, with many avoiding our default view layouts so that they can create a more predictable and memorable dashboard. As it turns out, âdrag and dropâ is not just an engineering problem; it is also a design problem.
To solve these problems with our layout, we realized that the Masonry layout, compatibility with multiple screen sizes, and easy âdrag and dropâ rearrangement of cards cannot co-exist. Over the past year, we ideated and identified a few solutions, namely:
Letâs dive in each solution and learn how they work together to make your dashboards easier to customize and use!
Case studies of our users' dashboards
Throughout this project, we have looked at dozens of different dashboards created by you and posted on our discussion boards. One thing we notice is that our more advanced users are all naturally drawn to creating âsectionsâ, groups of different cards delineated by a group title, manually with grids and markdown cards.
Home Assistant dashboards are robust and packed with information, and our users often place dozens of cards for all sorts of buttons, switches, graphs, indicators, and more. By grouping cards into âsectionsâ, our users can reduce the number of items they need to scan through when they are looking for a certain card, as they will be able to look for the relevant group title first and then reduce the scope to scan that particular group for the information. And by packing cards in a section into a grid card, the relative positions of the cards within a section are not affected by changes in screen sizes, and so the spatial memory of the cards are retained, leading to a faster and less cumbersome experience.
Example of a dashboard section
For our new Sections view, we are making these sections as the base unit of the view and we are streamlining its creation and editing procedures. Users will not need to fiddle around with grid cards and markdown cards to assemble a section manually, and instead a section now comes with all those amenities and much more.
The Create New View configuration screen
To get started with the new Sections view, create a new view on your dashboard and choose Sections (experimental) as the view type. We currently do not have the option to migrate your current dashboard over yet.
A new dashboard view laid out in Sections
You will be greeted by a clean new dashboard view, with one section already created for you.
To add a new section, select the Create Section button.
To edit the name of a section, select the Edit button on the top right of the section. (Tip: You can add any descriptive text for your section, including emojis!) When the section does not have a name, the section header will be hidden.
To delete a section, select the Delete button on the top right of the section. You will be asked to confirm the deletion.
A fully populated dashboard in Sections view layout
There are multiple ways to add cards into a section and populate your dashboard:
The easiest way to add cards is to select Add Card [Button icon] button inside the section.
The Add Card dialog will appear, and there are two options:
By Card
Add Card by Card type dialog
If you have a good idea of what card you want to use for an entity, browse the list of available cards on this screen. For the Sections view, we recommend the Tile card, which is now pinned to the top in a Suggested Cards section.
By Entity
Add Card by Entity dialog
If you want to add a bunch of entities in one go, select one or multiple entities on this list.
Card suggestions
Home Assistant will show a preview of the cards to be added, which will be displayed in Tile cards as the default of the Sections view. Tap the âAdd to Dashboardâ button to complete the process.Add to Dashboard feature on the device page
Another handy method for adding a bunch of sensors or controls belonging to the same device is to add them from the deviceâs page.
Navigate to the page of the device through Settings.
Tap the Add to Dashboard button on the screen.
You will be prompted to choose which dashboard view you want to add them to. If you choose a view using the Sections view layout, the sensors or controls will be added as tile cards placed inside a new section.
One major benefit of the new Sections view is that it is now much easier to build dashboards that work with multiple screen sizes.
Sections view adapt nicely to different screen sizes.
The view will rearrange the sections according to the amount of space available horizontally, while the number of columns of cards within each section stays the same, thus preserving your muscle memory of where the cards are located.
Our current dashboard views are organized in columns with cards of varying heights, and with masonry layout by default. As cards can vary in height in small amounts, it becomes hard to predict where cards will âlandâ when one moves a card to another column, or when screen size changes and moves all the cards, such as when viewing a dashboard on tablet vs on mobile. This creates friction in the customization experience of the dashboards.
Enter the grid system, a bastion of graphic design principles.
Examples of grid systems in use
Typographic grid systems have a long history in modern graphic design and print publishing, starting from its rise in the early 20th Century during the Constructivist and Geometrical art movements in Europe, which concerns the hidden rhythm behind a visual image. They are easily repeatable and, therefore, practical for generating an infinite amount of pages, yet also ensure aesthetic proportions and consistency for printable matter. They also bring order to a page. It helps users understand the relationship between each element on the page and whether one element belongs to another.
The Home Assistant dashboard grid system
When a UI is designed with a structured layout, that feeling of structure and organization comes through to the user in their first impression.
By introducing a grid system with cards of regular row height and column width multiples, we can help users rearrange cards more easily in a predictable manner, make Home Assistant adapt the dashboards to different screen sizes more easily, and, of course, make dashboards look tidier and more aesthetically pleasing.
Cards currently optimized for the grid system: Sensor card, Tile card, and Button card
To implement the grid system, we are now in the process of standardizing the widths and heights of our cards, starting with the Tile card, Button card, and Sensor card. These cards will occupy the right amount of space in the grid, while other cards will occupy the full width of a section by default at the moment.
For card developers, we will have more information on how to adapt your custom cards to the grid system soon.
With sections and a grid system in place, we can finally implement a way to arrange cards and sections that is intuitive with drag-and-drop, predictable with how the cards will rearrange, while creating a dashboard that is easy to navigate and remember by visualizing the information hierarchy and not disturbing the spatial relationship between cards. Users will not need to pray and guess where the cards will land when they change their orders anymore!
Comparison of four card arrangement methods
Throughout the design process, we looked at a few different ways of how cards should be arranged. Ultimately, we chose the âZ-Gridâ due to its simplicity, predictability, and memorability as the default, despite it may take up more space than other solutions. The Z-Grid works simply by laying out sections from left to right, and starting a new row when the row is full. The heights of the rows are determined by the tallest section on the row, while the width of the columns remain constant for responsive design.
While your dashboard is in Edit Mode:
Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop
Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop
(Donât you love when instructions are so short? Yay to simplicity! đŠ)
The new Sections view with drag-and-drop is just the first step of Project Grace, a Home-Approved Dashboard. We have a good idea of where we want to head next in our design and development process, but we want to hear from you first before we proceed so that we can prioritize and build a product that will help you the most.
To get feedback from all of you and your household members, we decided to release this early in its incomplete form as an experiment for you to try out the new Sections view. For those who are curious, feel free to check out our updated demo to play around and have fun!
We want to make sure that the new default dashboard will not only work for you, but also everyone who lives in your home. We would love to hear what they think as well. Please do not hesitate to leave your comments below!
From time to time, we will send out user tests to help us make the harder product and design decisions we identify. By joining our user testing group, you will help steer the direction of our product and will also get a sneak peak of potential designs that are work in progress.
Please fill out this form to join the Home Assistant User Testing Group!
Big thanks to all the folks who joined us for user interviews, Lewis from Everything Smart Home for sharing his treasure trove of dashboards for our case studies, and of course, the fabulous Nabu Casa team. đ
Thatâs all for now! Thank you for reading. Canât wait to show you whatâs next!
~ Madelena
]]>With the release of Home Assistant OS 12, we officially announce Raspberry Pi 5 support! Many Home Assistant OS users have extensively tested the preview releases during the last few months, and after some initial hiccups with the Raspberry Pi 5-specific update mechanism, things are stable and solid today. As a third of all Home Assistant users currently use a Raspberry Pi board as their dedicated Home Assistant system, we are sure this support will make many users very happy!
Compared to other Raspberry Pi boards, HAOS does not use U-Boot as an extra bootloader. Instead, the Raspberry Piâs built-in âtrybootâ functionality is used to automatically fall back to a previous release in case of an update failure. This new update mechanism integration required us to have a longer testing phase.
In our testing, the higher CPU clock of the Raspberry Pi 5 (up to 2.4GHz) makes Home Assistant feel noticeably snappier compared to previous Raspberry Pi boards. Additionally, a Raspberry Pi HAT that provides NVMe SSD support allows you to extend your Raspberry Pi with fast, reliable, and cost-effective storage. We do recommend using an SD card as the boot medium and using the data disk feature to move most of the Home Assistant installation onto the NVMe. This is easy to set up and guarantees a reliable boot.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is not the only new board that is supported with this release. We are happy to announce that the family of supported ODROID devices from the Korean manufacturer Hardkernel has become bigger thanks to a community contribution from Tim Lunn (darkxst), who implemented board support for the ODROID-M1S. The ODROID-M1S is the newest single-board computer from Hardkernel, which is similar to the already supported ODROID-M1, which was added in Home Assistant OS 10. This new board offers a slimmer form factor, 4 or 8 GB of RAM on board, and an embedded 64 GB eMMC storage. Home Assistant OS can be booted either from an SD card or the system can be flashed to the eMMC card using the procedure described in the documentation. While the board also has an NVMe slot for a solid-state drive, it is not supported as a boot device. However, just like on the Raspberry Pi 5, it can still be used as the data disk.
Just like its larger brother, the ODROID-M1S is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A55, but while ODROID-M1 has (very slightly) beefier Rockchip RK3568 SoC, this board sports the RK3566. Some of our more curious readers may notice this is the same processor that is found on our Home Assistant Green! While there are some similarities between those two boards, Home Assistant Green can offer you a seamless out-of-box experience, allowing you to set up your smart home in a matter of minutes. But Home Assistant is also about the freedom of choice, so if you are looking for a more DIY approach, ODROID-M1S might be the right choice for you.
Home Assistant OS 12 now comes with Linux kernel 6.6! This is good news for those who want to run their Home Assistant on newer hardware that lacked support in the previous 6.1 kernel. This version update also allows us to extend the list of supported Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, including ones you may find in new mini-PCs, a popular platform for Home Assistant OS. Those who run their installations on a Raspberry Pi (including the CM4 in Home Assistant Yellow) may notice their kernel version still starts with 6.1. This is because we are not using the upstream kernel but the downstream one maintained by the Raspberry Pi developers. But this kernel was also updated to the latest stable version, which we hope will resolve some sporadic bugs.
Home Assistant OS sticks to the LTS (long-term support) kernels, which are usually released once per year - just like Buildroot, the base system we use for Home Assistant OS. This time, we are slightly ahead of schedule, because usually the kernel update is done alongside the bump of the Buildroot version. But donât worry, the Buildroot update is coming soon as well, and we expect to include its update in one of the next minor Home Assistant OS releases coming in the following weeks. This will conclude this yearâs spring cleaning of Home Assistant OS, and we will be ready to focus on new features and improvements again!
Home Assistant Supervisor and Coreâs built-in backup functionality has become much faster. Thanks to contributions from bdraco, the backup feature gained faster compression speeds due to a library named isal, which provides optimized low-level functions for compression and decompression. More importantly, the backup feature now avoids intermediate copies, making it faster on slower storage media especially. If you used uncompressed backups before because the backup used to be too slow for you, now is the time to give compressed backups a try again! đ
Home Assistant OS usersâ backup functionality is part of Supervisor. Youâll have received the improvements incrementally over the releases of the past few weeks. At the time of writing, your installation should run on Home Assistant Supervisor 2024.02.0 with all these improvements built in.
Last, but not least, the Supervisor features an auto-update flag for add-ons. However, depending on the nature of an update to the add-on, the new version might need user intervention or have breaking changes. Add-on developers now have the option to prevent auto-updates to such versions. Users of the auto-update feature might see an update notification despite auto-updates being enabled. This means that the author of the add-on decided that this particular update should not be auto-updated and instead be manually approved by the user.
Note: We generally donât recommend auto-updates for add-ons, as even safe updates might interfere with regular operation. For example, during the automatic update of an add-on like Z-Wave JS, your Z-Wave devices would unexpectedly become unavailable for a short time. The better approach for such add-ons is to plan some time to maintain your Home Assistant system every once in a while and update your add-ons in a batch.
]]>Why is she important to us? Well, we have a habit of naming some of our projects after influential women in tech. And we have been working on a little something nice for the past year that we canât wait to show you!
For those who are interested in making your smart home easier to control and monitor for everyone in your home, tune in next week on the leap year day, February 29, 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET / 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT, for a special livestream. We will walk you through the past, present, and future of this special project.
]]>
2023âs Year of the Voice built a solid foundation for letting users control Home Assistant by speaking in their own language.
We continue with improvements to Assist, including:
Oh, and âone more thingâ: on-device, open source wake word detection in ESPHome! đ„łđ„łđ„ł
Check out this video of the new microWakeWord system running on an ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside one doing wake word detection inside Home Assistant:
Thanks to the incredible microWakeWord created by Kevin Ahrendt, ESPHome can now perform wake word detection on devices like the ESP32-S3-BOX-3. You can install it on your S3-BOX-3 today to try it out.
Back in Chapter 4, we added wake word detection using openWakeWord. Unfortunately, openWakeWord was too large to run on low power devices like S3-BOX-3. So we chose to run wake word detection inside Home Assistant instead.
Doing wake word detection in HA allows tiny devices like the M5 ATOM Echo Development Kit to simply stream audio and let all of the processing happen elsewhere. This is great, as it allows low-powered devices using a simple ESP32 chip to be transformed into a voice assistant even if they do not pack the necessary power to detect wake words. The downside is that adding more voice assistants requires more CPU usage in HA as well as more network traffic.
Enter microWakeWord. After listening to an interview with Paulus Schoutsen (founder of Home Assistant) on the Self Hosted podcast, Kevin Ahrendt created a model based on Googleâs Inception neural network. As an existing contributor to ESPHome, Kevin was able to get this new model running on the ESP32-S3 chip inside the S3-BOX-3! (It also works on the, now discontinued, S3-BOX and S3-BOX-Lite)
Kevin has trained three models for the launch of microWakeWord:
You can try these out yourself now by following the ESP32-S3-BOX tutorial. Changing the default âokay nabuâ wake word will require adjusting your ESPHome configuration and recompiling the firmware, which may take a long time and requires a machine with more than 2GB of RAM.
Weâre grateful to Kevin for developing microWakeWord, and making it a part of the open home!
Adding custom sentences to Assist is as easy as adding a sentence trigger to an automation. This allows you to trigger any action in Home Assistant with whatever sentences you want.
Now with the new conversation response action in HA 2024.2, you can also customize the response spoken or printed back to you. Using templating, your response can refer to the current state of your home.
You can also refer to wildcards in your sentence trigger. For example, the sentence trigger:
play {album} by {artist}
could have the response:
Playing {{ trigger.slots.album }} by {{ trigger.slots.artist }}
in addition to calling a media service.
You can experiment now with sentence triggers, and custom conversation responses in our automation editor by clicking here:
Assist users know the phrase âSorry, I couldnât understand thatâ all too well. This generic error message was given for a variety of reasons, such as:
Starting in HA 2024.2, Assist provides different error messages for each of these cases.
Now if you encounter errors, you will know where to start looking! The first thing to check is that your device is exposed to Assist. Some types of devices, such as lights, are exposed by default. Other, like locks, are not and must be manually exposed.
Once your devices are exposed, make sure youâve added an appropriate alias so Assist will know exactly how youâll be referring to them. Devices and areas can have multiple aliases, even in multiple languages, so everyoneâs preference can be accommodated.
If you are still having problems, the Assist debug tool has also been improved. Using the tool, you see how Assist is interpreting a sentence, including any missing pieces.
Our community language leaders are hard at work translating sentences for Assist. If you have suggestions for new sentences to be added, please create an issue on the intents repository or drop us a line at voice@nabucasa.com
Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support voice and development of Home Assistant, ESPHome and other projects in general.
Thanks to our language leaders for extending the sentence support to all the various languages.
]]>
Want to get a sneak peek of what you can expect from this chapter? Well, remember the hype around chapter 4? Get ready for more of that!
If you canât wait to get more hands-on with our voice assistants, join the Voice Assistant contest! You can win Home Assistant Green, Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a chance to be on a livestream with us to talk about your work. Watch our contest livestream, where we explain how each component of our voice technology works and guide you through building your own voice assistant, and take a look at the current entries!
]]>Z-Wave is a local smart home standard that has been around since 1999. Thanks to operating on sub-Ghz frequencies, it is able to create a reliable mesh network that can span your whole house. Its reliability also made it popular to power brands like Yale locks and Amazon Ring. The Z-Wave standard is developed by a consortium of companies under the Z-Wave Alliance.
With Home Assistant, we have integrated Z-Wave since our early days. We first relied on OpenZWave until we transitioned in 2021 to using Z-Wave JS created by Dominic Griesel. Z-Wave JS is a fully open-source implementation of the Z-Wave protocol. Combined with Home Assistant and a Z-Wave USB stick, it gives our users the best possible Z-Wave experience. Dominic is employed by Nabu Casa and can work full-time on Z-Wave JS thanks to the revenue generated from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers (thank you!).
We have thoroughly tested Z-Wave JS with the Home Assistant community. Our community is from all over the world and has access to a wide variety of Z-Wave devices from all generations. This has ensured that Z-Wave JS is able to deal with devices and their quirks all the way back to the original Z-Wave release.
However, our ambitions for Z-Wave JS are bigger than just making sure we have a rock-solid Z-Wave implementation for you. We want to make it easier for companies to develop Z-Wave controllers and grow the Z-Wave ecosystem. A bigger ecosystem is more appealing for manufacturers to make Z-Wave devices, which results in more choices for our users. And as Z-Wave works locally, it is a local choice.
Today, we are proud to announce that we have joined the Z-Wave Alliance to get Z-Wave JS officially certified. Certification shows other companies that Z-Wave JS is a full and correct implementation of the Z-Wave standard. It will allow other companies to feel confident that they can adopt Z-Wave JS to integrate Z-Wave into their products. HomeSeer, for example, has announced that it is migrating its platform to Z-Wave JS. We hope this will open up new opportunities as more companies follow our lead in the future.
With Home Assistant, we have a vision for the smart home that we call the Open Home. It revolves around three core values: privacy, choice, and sustainability. Anything that lives up to those values is worthy of being adopted by our community. Itâs why we have previously joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) to take part in the development of Matter and Zigbee, and have now joined the Z-Wave Alliance.
Z-Wave aligns with these three values: your data remains local, you can combine Z-Wave devices from any manufacturer, and devices will continue to operate even if the company behind them is no longer around. It is an important standard for the Open Home.
This is why, even though Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter are competing standards, we have joined both the Z-Wave Alliance and the CSA and will keep supporting each standard. Not every smart home is the same. Users need to have choice and be able to pick the standard that works best for their home. And competing standards push each other to improve and innovate, ultimately leading to all standards becoming better for users.
As part of the Z-Wave Alliance, we plan on bringing our unique insights as an open source community to the table. We want to make sure that the future direction of the Z-Wave standard continues to remain true to our Open Home values. Just like we do for Zigbee and Matter within the CSA.
]]>Home Assistant Core 2024.2! đ„°
Undoubtedly, youâve heard about last yearâs âThe Year of the Voiceâ. 2023 might be over, but we are definitely not done with voice yet! This release contains some very cool new features for voice.
Not just that, weâve also launched a voice assistant contest that you could join, and Iâm happy to inform you that we will have another voice-related live stream on 21 February 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET: Chapter 6!
But there is more in this release besides voice! Thereâs drag ân drop magic for our automation editor, and you can now update Zigbee devices directly from Home Assistant. We also have icons in more places đ€©, and quite a lot of new functionalities for Matter devices.
In general, contributions to our open-source project have been amazing this month. Iâve never seen so many contributed bug fixes, improvements, and new features in a single release. Like⊠21 new integrations! This is, without a doubt, the largest release weâve ever put out. A big shout-out to everyone who helped! â€ïž
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
Oh! And donât forget Valentineâs Day is coming up! đ
Donât forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 7 February 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!
Letâs start with some old-fashioned drag ân drop magic! đȘ
As of this release, dragging and dropping triggers, conditions, and actions in the automation editor are always enabled. Previously, you had to explicitly enable re-ordering in the automation editor settings, but now, it is just always active.
But even more exciting is that you can now drag and drop elements into other nested elements! For example, you can now drag a condition into the condition of an if-then or choose action. đ€Ż
The following feature might be small, but it is a big deal for many. Home Assistant stores your data privately and locally; it is your data. To make this data more accessible, weâve added a new feature to the history dashboard.
You can now download the data you are viewing in the history dashboard. This allows you to further analyze the data in, for example, Excel or to visualize it in other ways.
The button will export and download the data you currently view in the history dashboard as a CSV file.
Thanks for this one @balloob!
If you use Assist, our private voice assistant, you may have noticed that its responses were not meaningful when something was not understood.
Some of the errors encountered while using Assist can easily be fixed on your side by adding aliases to entities or areas, exposing entities to Assist, or assigning entities and devices to the correct areas.
So we are taking the first step to help you fix these errors: as of this release, Assist provides much better errors in case your intention is understood, but something else is missing (An unknown name, area, device class, or domain).
Like almost every other component and feature of Home Assistant, Assist can be customized and extended to understand more sentences.
A few releases ago, we introduced a very simple way to extend what Assist understands: The sentence trigger in our automation engine.
Up until now, using a sentence trigger always led to the same Assist response: âDoneâ. In fact, the only way to define a custom response was to write complex custom sentences in YAML.
This release introduces a new action to set a custom response in your sentence-triggered automations directly inside the automation editor.
The response field accepts templates, so it can be used to build complex responses, for example, listing all your room temperatures.
A very cool feature that might come in handy if you build an automation blueprint to submit as an entry for our voice assistant contest!
Last addition for voice, weâve added a small additional page to give you an overview of all the Assist devices you have active in your Home. You can find this on the Assist configuration dashboard by selecting the new âAssist devicesâ button.
Or, use this My Home Assistant button below to navigate to the voice assistants configuration dashboard:
ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation, our built-in Zigbee integration) now provides update entities to Home Assistant!
This means you can get notified when a device has a firmware update available, and you can trigger the update from Home Assistant!
Noticed the weird version numbers? Unfortunately, that is how version numbers in the Zigbee standard work and look. We havenât figured out a way to translate them to something more human-readable format that matches what the manufacturer communicates.
Currently, it supports updating Inovelli, OSRAM/Ledvance, Sonoff, and ThirdReality devices, and we are looking at adding support for more brands in the future. Be aware, Zigbee is a slow protocol, and firmware updates can take a long time (sometimes hours).
Home Assistant works actively to provide the best support for Matter devices out of the box. To help with that, we have added more information and controls for your Matter devices in the UI.
On the device page of the Matter device in Home Assistant, we will now show additional diagnostic information about the device. This information can be used to troubleshoot issues with the device or when reporting issues. Some examples include the network type the device uses, its addresses, and IDs, device types and its connected fabrics.
Besides more information, you can also take new actions on the device. For example, ping the device to check if it is available, force a full device interview to sync all its information, remove it from another controller, and even a new button to share your Matter device from Home Assistant with another Matter controller.
We completely changed how Home Assistant handles icons under the hood. A big effort from many people, with almost⊠no change! That is right, almost everything looks just the same as before. đ
We did make some improvements! For example, integrations can now provide icons for things like fan speeds or thermostat presets. Also, service call actions can now have their own icon as well:
Areas now have icons too! You can set them in the area configuration. They show up in the area selectors and in the area dashboard itself (in case you didnât upload a picture).
When one of your integrations has authentication issues, Home Assistant will now report this in the repairs dashboard.
Previously, this was only visible on the integration dashboard, but now it shows up in the repairs dashboard, as this is the place where Home Assistant reports all issues with your system.
For this release, @mib1185 completely revamped our Proximity integration. In case you are unfamiliar with it, it allows you to monitor the proximity of persons to a particular zone. It provides information on how close one is to a zone and if they are traveling towards or away from it.
It is an extremely powerful tool for automations. It allows you to create automations based on the proximity of people. For example, if you are within a certain range from your home and traveling towards it, you could use Home Assistant to turn on the lights, open the garage door, turn up the heating, and start your favorite playlist in the living room. Welcome home! đ€
The best part? This integration is now available to set up from the UI! Not just that, but it now uses normal sensor entities that we are all already familiar with. This will make automating and displaying the data a breeze!
Thanks @mib1185! You did an outstanding job on this one!
If you are already using this integration, this change will come with the deprecation of the old entities. See our backwards-incompatible changes for more information.
This release ships running on Python 3.12! In case you are wondering, what is that? Well, Python is the programming language Home Assistant is written in.
Why it matters? It provides many improvements to the foundation we are building Home Assistant on, most notably: It is faster! đ
Donât worry! If you run the Home Assistant Operating System or are using the Home Assistant Container installation type: You wonât have to do anything, as we handle the upgrade to Python 3.12 for you. Just upgrade Home Assistant as you normally would, and you are good to go! đ
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:
bitwise_xor
filter for you to use. Awesome!The Google Generative AI Conversation integration using the new Gemini Pro Vision models to describe what is seen on the doorbell camera.
We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
None
attribute values (@mib1185 - #110684)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and donât forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.
We changed the way refresh tokens are handled. Refresh tokens are part of what keeps you logged in to Home Assistant.
Refresh tokens will be automatically deleted when unused. A refresh token is considered unused if it has not been used for a login within 90 days.
If your logged-in session hasnât been used for 90 days, you will be logged out. You will need to log in again.
We recommend using Long-lived access tokens if you need a permanent token.
(@mib1185 - #108428) (documentation)
The options flow that gave the option to set a custom scan interval has been removed.
Adjustable scan interval is no longer allowed, but the option has had no effect on the integration since 2023.11.
You can use an automation as an alternative to create a custom polling rate (documentation). Updating one entity in a blink configuration will update all entities in each blink configuration.
(@mkmer - #106735) (documentation)
Update Wi-Fi diagnostic to match new API units - previously Blink reported RSSI dBm, now they report generic 0-5 for signal strength.
(@mkmer - #107539) (documentation)
This integration has been disabled. The upstream libraries used by Home Assistant are not compatible with Python 3.12.
This compatibility issue has been reported upstream.
(@frenck - #108163) (documentation)
The services ezviz.ptz
, ezviz.sound_alarm
, and alarm_sound
have been moved
to button and select entities in release 2023.8. Support for the deprecated
services has now been completely removed.
If you are using these services in automations or scripts, you will need to update them to match this change.
(@jpbede - #107582) (documentation)
Any previous integration setups might have to be recreated or reconfigured with
the new models/gemini-pro
instead of the legacy models/chat-bison-001
.
(@tronikos - #105789) (documentation)
The Gas meter ID sensor is removed and the meter ID is now shown as a serial number in the device info panel instead.
(@DCSBL - #100684) (documentation)
The preset mode was returning âunknownâ rather than ânoneâ.
Any references to preset_mode
may need to be updated.
(@mkmer - #108599) (documentation)
The services huawei_lte.clear_traffic_statistics
and huawei_lte.reboot
have
been moved to button entities in release 2023.8. Support for the deprecated
services has now been completely removed.
If you are using these services in automations or scripts, you will need to update them to match this change.
(@jpbede - #107578) (documentation)
The following sensors have been removed from the JustNimbus integration since theyâre no longer available through JustNimbusâ API:
The following sensors have been renamed:
total_saved
) -> Total saved (water_saved
)totver
) -> Total use (water_used
)reservoir_content_max
) -> Reservoir capacity (reservoir_capacity
)Automations or scripts using any of the removed or renamed entities should be updated. Once updated, the old entities can be safely removed.
(@kvanzuijlen - #99212) (documentation)
The services vacuum.turn_on
and vacuum.turn_off
were deprecated in 2023.11.
Support for the deprecated services has now been completely removed.
If you are still using them, please adjust your automations and scripts and
use vacuum.start
and vacuum.stop
instead.
(@jpbede - #107882) (documentation)
The Lutron integration previously created fans as light entities. This has been changed to create actual fan entities instead.
If you have automations, scripts, scenes, or dashboards that used these light entities, you will need to update them to use the new fan entities.
The daily energy sensors have been removed to prevent being throttled by the external API. This mostly affects ATW devices.
For ATA devices, this sensor is also removed. However, the total energy consumed (if your device supports that) remains available. The latter supports long-term statistics, providing insights into daily energy usage via the energy dashboard or statistic card.
This integration has been disabled. The upstream libraries used by Home Assistant are not compatible with Python 3.12.
This compatibility issue has been reported upstream.
(@frenck - #108163) (documentation)
MQTT sensor
or binary_sensor
configuration with an entity_category
explicitly set to config
will fail to set up. Maintainers should set the
entity_category
attribute to diagnostic
or omit the config attribute.
(@jbouwh - #107199) (documentation)
When an MQTT entity has a device name equal to the entity name or starts with the device name, this will no longer be corrected.
When entities like these are created, they will have device and entity names in the friendly name. Suppose the device name is omitted because it is the same as the entity name. In that case, the entity name attribute should be null in the JSON payload or YAML configuration.
(@jbouwh - #107188) (documentation)
The support for MQTT vacuum entities with a legacy
schema is removed after 6
months of deprecation. Users can use the state
schema instead,
which is now the default.
(@jbouwh - #107274) (documentation)
The proximity entity (proximity.*
) is deprecated and will be removed in 2024.8.
It is superseded by sensor entities.
For each tracked person or device, one sensor for the distance and the direction of travel to/from the monitored zone is created. Further, for each Proximity configuration, one sensor that shows the nearest device or person and its distance and direction of travel to the monitored zone is created.
(@mib1185 - #108730) (documentation)
The start time of day and start time of night sensors have been replaced by time entities. If you used these sensors in automations or scripts, you will need to update them to use the new time entities.
(@jimmyd-be - #105031) (documentation)
Call to RESTful command services will no longer silently fail and will raise an exception on, for example, timeout or decoding errors.
You could consider using continue_on_error
for scripts and automations that use RESTful commands that are allowed to fail
occasionally.
(@RoboMagus - #97208) (documentation)
The service vacuum.start_pause
was deprecated in 2023.8. Support for the
deprecated service has now been completely removed.
If you are still using this service, please adjust your automations and scripts,
to use vacuum.pause
or vacuum.start
instead.
(@jpbede - #107895) (documentation)
Setting last_reset
for entities with a state_class
other than total
is
no longer supported. Please update your configuration if state_class
is manually configured (for example, in templates or when using customize to
override this attribute).
(@jpbede - #108391) (documentation)
The state value of the sensor is now a standardized timestamp.
Further, all timestamps
and durations
in the additional fields are now also
proper datetime/durations.
(@miaucl - [#12341064855]) (documentation)
To prevent overloading the power strips, the energy data is now polled every
60 seconds. If you need to poll the data faster, please use an automation that
calls the homeassistant.update_entity
service.
(@bdraco - #104208) (documentation)
The YAML configuration for the Traccar integration has been deprecated and will be removed in Home Assistant 2024.8.0. Your YAML configuration will be automatically imported to the new Traccar Server integration.
If you previously used the scan_interval
option, this is not being imported.
If you are in need of a custom polling interval, you can use an automation
to define your own custom polling behavior.
Learn more about that here.
(@ludeeus - #109226) (documentation)
Tuya has provided an easier and improved login method for Home Assistant users.
Having a developer account with Tuya is no longer required; instead, you can scan a QR code with your Tuya Smart or Smart Life app to authenticate it with Home Assistant.
After updating to this release, Home Assistant will ask you to re-authenticate your Tuya Smart or Smart Life account using this new method.
(@frenck - #109155) (documentation)
The services vacuum.turn_on
and vacuum.turn_off
were deprecated in 2023.8.
Support for the deprecated services has now been completely removed.
If still use them, please adjust your automations and scripts and
use vacuum.start
and vacuum.stop
instead.
(@jpbede - #107896) (documentation)
Previously, Tuya would fall back to using the metric system if the temperature unit was not reported by a climate device. This behavior has been changed to use the default unit configured on your system instead.
(@DellanX - #108050) (documentation)
Since version 2023.7 you have been informed that the âlocal onlyâ option of webhooks will become the default. With this release this change is now put into effect. Please, if needed, adjust your automation triggers.
(@jpbede - #107670) (documentation)
In withings, the unit of measurement of all duration-related sensors (for example, sleep, goal, and active time today) has been changed from measuring in seconds to measuring in either hours or minutes.
If you want to measure in a different unit, please change the preferred unit of measurement in the entity settings.
The default rounding of numeric sensors to two decimals has been removed.
We now let the device and driver decide what precision should be reported. This allows devices with greater precision to report accurately.
You can change the display precision in the UI for the sensor or use a template sensor if you want to change the precision.
(@MartinHjelmare - #107100) (documentation)
Set suggested precision to 0 decimals for voltage sensors with a native unit in V. This will uniform the display precision of voltage sensors where there otherwise seems to be a variety of precision reported from different devices.
If you want to change the precision, you can do that in the sensor options in the UI or with a template sensor.
(@MartinHjelmare - #107116) (documentation)
The Fan and Dry climate Preset modes have been removed after a period of deprecation. If you havenât done so, you should update your automations or scripts to use the corresponding Dry and Fan HVAC modes instead.
(@jbouwh - #108124) (documentation)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:
The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.2
]]>CarPlay support now gives Home Assistant users easy access to their devices and areas and the ability to create custom actions. Custom actions allow users to create advanced action sequences like unlocking the front door and turning on the porch lights. And all of this works across the multiple Home Assistant servers that you have configured in the app.
Big thanks to DXspark for helping us make the foundation of CarPlay and kicking off the project.
The app is divided into four tabs to easily access the different functionality. Weâve followed Appleâs guidelines to give the user a familiar experience that they know from other CarPlay apps.
You donât have to configure the CarPlay app separately. It will automatically pick up your Home Assistant servers as configured in your app.
Actions are a concept in the Home Assistant iOS app that allows you to execute automation in Home Assistant. This means that you can execute any automation you want, such as:
These actions have been available in the Home Assistant for Apple Watch app and can be called from the Home Assistant widgets. With todayâs release, you can also easily trigger them from your CarPlay dashboard. This is the feature that has already become part of my daily routine.
If you havenât created an Action yet, the CarPlay App can send a notification to your phone to guide you to get started.
The controls tab will group your devices and entities by their domain. We have started small and included the most useful domains first:
For these domains, you can toggle lights and switches, activate buttons, script, scene actions, and of course, toggle your garage door or gate.
The areas tab allows you to find your devices and entities based on their area. Quickly scroll through an area to see the current states and toggle devices.
When youâre driving to your parents, you might want to be able to notify them or open their garage door as you arrive. With the âServersâ tab, you will be able to quickly change and control a different Home Assistant server.
This feature builds upon the multiple server support that has been part of the Home Assistant iOS app for a couple of years now.
I hope you will enjoy using Home Assistant on CarPlay. Please let us know what else you would like to see available for CarPlay!
In this blog post, weâve extracted the highlights of the stream for you. We also link to our updated Matter and Thread documentation where relevant.
You can watch the entire live stream here:
Weâll also highlight each segment of the live stream in this blog under each corresponding heading, so you can start watching the specific parts that interest you!
We believe in Matter: itâs open source, and most importantly, itâs fully local by default. Matter will allow us to control devices ranging from lights, to robot vacuums, to TVs, and to many other IP-connected devices, all through a standardized protocol. It is a huge step forward towards having more sustainable and worry-free smart home products. For this reason, Nabu Casa uses the revenue we get from the subscribers to Home Assistant Cloud (thank you all!) to employ developers who are dedicated to implementing Matter. And we have even joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) - the organization behind the Matter standard - as a participant to have a front-row seat and to defend the Open Home values during the development of the standard.
Matter launched only one year ago, compared to twenty years for a standard like Zigbee, so itâs important to account for that in your expectations. If youâve already invested heavily in an existing local standard, like Zigbee or Z-Wave, Matter is probably not your best choice at this point. We think there is no reason to throw these current smart home devices out, especially when they still work fine - after all, sustainability is one of our Open Home values. But if you are new to the smart home scene and looking for devices with local, cloud-free standards that will still work even many years from now, keep an eye on Matter. The standard is rapidly evolving, with major updates twice a year where new device types and enhancements to existing ones are released.
After this first year, the current selection of Matter devices is still a bit limited, but a lot of companies have been using this time to develop them, and we expect more to be released soon. More and more companies are joining the CSA and taking up the standard every month. We think Matter is here to stay and is going to be widely adopted.
To really understand what weâre talking about when it comes to Matter, we recommend you read our updated Matter documentation or watch this chapter from our live stream.
In this segment, our product manager JLo explains Matter in an easy-to-understand, visual manner, using the diagram you see above. Youâll no longer have to wonder about Thread, Border routers, Bridges, or other Matter terminology after youâve watched this video.
For the past year, we have been working on getting the foundation ready to support Matter devices in Home Assistant. Our implementation is based on the official Matter SDK, and we plan for it to become officially certified by the CSA to show that it will work problem-free with all products that carry the Matter logo. But we are not there yet; that is why we still label Matter as Beta in the integrations list. This will not change until our implementation has been certified.
We are still ironing out bugs, writing documentation, adding missing features, and doing a lot of troubleshooting. We are not alone on this, as many manufacturers needed this first year to get comfortable with the new standard as well, resulting in some unstable early devices coming to the market. Weâve also had to tweak our Home Assistant Operating System to work well with Matter, Thread, and its IPv6 requirement.
It has been a bumpy - sometimes even frustrating - ride, but everything is slowly getting into good shape. Vendors have ironed out bugs in their Matter device firmware, all kinds of new devices are popping up in stores, and the Matter 1.1 and 1.2 updates brought tons of stability fixes to the standard.
From our perspective, itâs amazing that Matter is already in this state after being started only a couple of years ago. You can clearly see the enormous power of so many companies, from small to big, believing in Matter and working together to improve it.
If you want to get started with Matter in Home Assistant, it is really important that you read the documentation or watch this chapter of our live stream, which covers it all.
Matter has a few gotchaâs you should know about, and because we are still in the Beta stage, not everything is as polished as we want it to be.
If you follow the requirements/recommendations in the documentation, you will see that there are four scenarios that are stable and work well in Home Assistant today:
Itâs very important to note here that for Thread-based devices, the current recommended setup utilizes border routers from Apple or Google that match the type of phone you have. Please donât worry - this doesnât mean you have to add your devices to their ecosystems. Home Assistant will just use them to get access to the Thread radio network. The communication between the Home Assistant Matter controller and your Matter devices is completely encrypted and secure.
Using Home Assistant itself as a Thread border router (for example, by using the Thread radio in the Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant SkyConnect) is still under development at this point and is only recommended for the more technically experienced users. Currently, due to a bug, it can only be set up if you use an Android phone. Setting the Home Assistant SkyConnect or Home Assistant Yellow up as a Thread border router is not yet possible for users in the iOS/Apple ecosystem. We recommend that iOS users place, for example, a HomePod Mini or other Apple border router near their Thread devices to get the required Thread coverage. Alternatively, you can stay with WiFi-based Matter devices.
You do not need any additional hardware or radios to work with Matter devices. Any device that is running Home Assistant Operating System, be it a Home Assistant Green, a Raspberry Pi, or any other installation, is already a fully functional Matter Controller. You can connect to WiFi-based Matter devices straight out of the box. Only if you plan to use Thread-based Matter devices do you need additional hardware in the form of a Thread border router.
Read the documentation for Matter.
The easiest devices to get started with are WiFi-based Matter devices and Matter bridges. Do note that many brands with Matter bridges also have excellent native integrations in Home Assistant, and these integrations may offer features not yet available in the Matter standard.
You need to run the Home Assistant Operating System. Other installation types are not supported.
You need a standard (flat) network. Enterprise-like network setups with VLANs, mDNS responders, etc., break the expectations that Matter has about the network and are not supported. Keep it simple, and it will just work.
Enable IPv6 on your home router and Home Assistant Operating System. You donât need to get IPv6 from your internet provider, as the Matter devices operate locally. But you do need to make sure itâs enabled on your home network.
If you are planning on using Thread-based Matter devices, you will need one or more Thread border routers in your home. Home Assistant can work with third-party Thread border routers from Google or Apple as well, without having to add your devices to their ecosystem.
Always check the device packaging to make sure it has a Matter badge. Thread is also used for other standards, so a device with a Thread badge on the packaging does not have to be a Matter device.
Note that Matter is still in an early stage, so not every advanced feature you are used to may currently be implemented in this standard.
Use the latest version of both Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Companion apps, as we are improving Matter support and fixing bugs continuously. Using the latest version can make the difference in being able to add a device to Home Assistant or not.
If you run into problems, please join our Discord server, where we have a dedicated Matter channel. Both our developers and many very experienced members of our community are active there to help you out with your Matter setup. Please only open an issue on our GitHub issue tracker if you encounter an actual bug.
In the near future, we are focusing on improving the user experience to onboard and manage Matter devices. Especially adding new Matter devices to Home Assistant should be as stress-free as possible.
This is what we are focusing on now:
This is what we will be focusing on next:
This is what we want to achieve in the long run:
On top of this, we will continuously focus on extending the support for new devices as new device types are added to the specification or existing ones are extended. In some cases, manufacturers even contribute to Home Assistant themselves to ensure a new device type is supported.
We are also continuously keeping the quality of our Matter integration up to the standard of Home Assistant and fixing the most impactful issues our users are facing. For example, right now, we are making sure Matter devices that lose power are handled better in Home Assistant.
As we mentioned while talking about the recommended scenarios earlier, using the Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant SkyConnect for Thread is still in development and only recommended for technically experienced users.
Thatâs why our current recommendation for Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect is to use the Zigbee firmware to power your Zigbee network. This is a stable solution that has worked reliably since the introduction of these products and offers a great experience.
As we continue to work on Matter in Home Assistant, weâre now focused on ensuring that the Thread experience will catch up and become a first-class citizen, making it easy to connect to your Thread-based devices in Home Assistant without a third-party Thread border router. The Thread firmware is already fully functional under the hood, but we still have some work to do to make the experience of using Thread-based devices in Home Assistant feel good. As we mentioned in our chapter on the future of Matter in Home Assistant, we expect great strides in this area within the following months. Once the experience has improved, we will recommend using this Thread firmware to power your Thread network as an alternative to using third-party Thread border routers from Apple or Google.
There is a third, experimental, firmware option that supports multiprotocol, which allows the Silicon Labs chip in these products to connect to both Zigbee and Thread networks with one radio. We announced our intent to release a firmware supporting multiprotocol when we launched Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect, and this firmware has been available since December 2022. It integrates the Silicon Labs SDK, which adds this support for multiprotocol. During the further development and testing of the multiprotocol firmware, we have concluded that while Silicon Labsâ multiprotocol works, it comes with technical limitations. These limitations mean users will not have the best experience compared to using dedicated Zigbee and Thread radios. That is why we do not recommend using this firmware, and it will remain an experimental feature of Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect. If you currently have the multiprotocol firmware installed but donât actively use it to connect to Thread devices, we recommend that you disable multiprotocol.
Nothing changes for current users of the multiprotocol firmware who are happy with their experience. The experimental multiprotocol firmware will remain available, but we will not recommend it to new users. Instead, we will focus on making sure the dedicated Zigbee and Thread firmwares deliver the best experience to users.
After our first year of implementing Matter, weâre very happy that the technical foundation is in good shape. We can now take the next steps to ensure the entire Matter experience is as good as it can possibly be! Thank you to all of the users who have been on this journey with us, have provided us with valuable feedback and bug reports, and have shared their experiences so we know how we can make Matter in Home Assistant even better. And thank you to all of the viewers of the live stream and everyone who sent in questions beforehand and during the stream; your input helps us make these streams the best they can be. And if you made it all the way down here - thank you for reading!
If you have any more questions or experience problems with Matter in Home Assistant, please join our Discord server! We have a dedicated Matter channel there, and our developers and many experienced members of our community can help you out.
]]>TL;DR: We are organizing a voice assistant contest between the 17th of January and the 10th of March. You can win some Home Assistant Green, Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a chance to be on a livestream with us to talk about your work.
2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We built some amazing things throughout the year, from a very powerful intent recognizer specifically optimized to run on a small computer like a Raspberry Pi 4, all the way to custom wake words created by our community.
In fact, we believe that what we built during the Year of the Voice allows almost anyone to build a voice assistant that embodies our Open Home values perfectly: Personalized, Private, and Sustainable. Every component of our voice assistants can be heavily customized to fit your language, your style and your needs, fully local options exist for each of them, and finally you can retrofit voice assistant into anything, even a 1970s Walkie Talkie found in a flea market
This is why, after spending a year building great things, we want to celebrate what our voice assistants can enable with the community: Weâre launching a voice assistant contest, with great prizes to win!
The contest will be held between Today (the 17th of January) and the 10th of March.
We tried to be as inclusive as possible. The contest is not only about building voice assistant hardware, it is also about building voice experiences that can be used with any voice assistant (For example, a blueprint that you can use to generate images from voice and cast them on your TV: âShow me a picture of an astronaut riding a unicorn!â)
An entry in the contest can take any form: A video, a blog post, a website, an event, etc.
The only requirement is for you to post on this forum category, this is how you officially participate in the contest.
Winners will be announced on the 15th of March.
A closing ceremony will take place on the 10th of April in the form of a livestream. Winners will be invited!
You can participate in the contest in four different categories.
We have all the ingredients to unleash creativity: Custom sentences, custom wake words, custom voices. This category is here to showcase your smartest ideas. We will be judging the creativity, uniqueness, and coherency of the whole package.
Example: Piitayaâs moving and talking droid.
Because our voice assistant can be heavily customized, starting can be daunting. This category showcases the easiest ways to create a voice assistant for a novice. From ordering parts, flashing the firmware, integrating it into Home Assistant, and using it. We will judge how easy the guide is to follow and how usable the final product is.
Example: The amazingly complete guide to build a Wyoming Voice Assistant Satellite by YouTuber FutureProofHome.
Building privacy-focused technology only makes sense if we can get people to use it. Go to a hackerspace, invite some people, and build some voice assistants together! We will be judging the impact of the event (Size, outcome, topics discussed, etc)
This category is here for people who want to participate in the contest but not necessarily build a hardware product. This is all about creating the best experience using a voice assistant on Home Assistant. We support custom sentences, custom responses, and custom actions. Go crazy, be creative, and show us how to unlock the potential of our voice assistants. We will be judging how useful the experience is, how easy it is to integrate it, and of course, of fun it is.
Example: Play any music on any speaker in your home from a blueprint.
For each category, the winner will receive:
Runners-up will receive a Home Assistant SkyConnect.
The community will also get a chance to vote for a favorite entry. The choice of the community will also receive the same prizes as a category winner (A Home Assistant Green, A Home Assistant SkyConnect, a spot on the livestream on the 10th of April).
Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and the development of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects in general.
We are looking forward to seeing what you will build and we are looking forward to having you on the livestream with us on the 10th of April.
Head over to the forum category to see the progress of the contest.
Have fun building, learning, and sharing.
]]>In late 2022, Matter was first released to the public. It promised to be the new local home automation standard that would unify various manufacturersâ ecosystems and smart devices. We joined the CSA, the alliance developing Matter, to have a front-row seat and make our implementation of Matter the best we can. Now, one year later, did Matter live up to its promise, and whatâs the state of Matter within Home Assistant?
We ask this question because lately, articles about Matter in the media have turned a bit sour. Compared to older standards like Zigbee and Z-Wave, they say, Matter is not yet in good shape. But this is not an entirely fair comparison: Zigbee and Z-Wave have had many years to develop into what they are now, while Matter was released just over a year ago. A new standard will always need some time to settle in and mature.
Our view on Matter is both more optimistic and still realistic. We think Matter completely fits our Open Home vision. In the future, Matter will give us all fast, reliable, and local control of our smart home devices. At the same time, weâre realistic; this perfect vision of Matter has yet to arrive, and not everything we hoped for is possible today. Still, significant companies and organizations around the globe have committed to Matter, and they are improving it every month. We believe Matter is here to stay.
So, instead of discussing what isnât currently working in Matter, we want to explain what Matter can offer you today. We want to show you the potential Matter has for the future and how your first steps with Matter today prepare you for that. Talk about what Thread is, how it relates to Matter - it is not the same! - and how to build your Thread network. And much more.
On Wednesday, January 10, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET, weâll be hosting a State of Matter livestream to discuss this and address your questions and concerns about Matter and Home Assistant. Weâll make sure itâs an excellent watch for both beginners and more technically-oriented viewers - our Matter developers will be there to give you a technical deep-dive into Matter, too. Please save the date in your calendar and post all your questions and concerns in our comments section!
Happy New Year! đŸ
We wish you, and all the loved ones around you, all the best for 2024! đ„
I cannot think of a better way to start the new year: Home Assistant Core 2024.1! đ
This release is fairly small, as expected; we are just coming out of the holiday season. However, it does contain some nice improvements and features to be excited about and a stunning total of 13 new integrations!
My favorite: the automation editor changes. It had quite a bunch of user interface tweaks. Most are focused on making it friendlier and easier to use for new and long-term users, making it quicker to find the right trigger, condition, or action.
I greatly like this improved experience, and I hope you do too!
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
Donât forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 3 January 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!
The automation editor got some love for this release, with many small improvements to make it easier for both new and long-time users.
As there are many small improvements, letâs go over them individually.
PS: One quick note: all changes are UI changes, meaning that these changes do not affect the underlying automation configuration. All your existing automations will continue to work as they did before.
If you start with Home Assistant, visiting the automations dashboard would result in an empty page. That is not very helpful if you see this for the first time. So, weâve improved that!
You are now greeted by the little automation robot that explains what an automation is and references to the documentation that can help you get started.
A small but effective improvement to help new users get started. We have also applied this same improvement to the scripts and scenes dashboards.
When starting a new automation from scratch, you used to be greeted by some, possibly, new terminology and almost a blank page with some buttons to add triggers, conditions or actions. As a new user, this immediately imposes a challenge: what do I need to do?
You guessed it: We have slightly improved that. We have changed the big headers to be more descriptive and less technical. We have also added some help text to explain each section, including examples of what they can be used for.
Donât worry; weâll hide the explanation once you add elements to the sections to keep the overview of existing automations as clean as possible.
You might have noticed in the screenshots above the conditions and actions have a new button next to them: + Add building block.
Selecting these new buttons allows you to add logical elements to your automation or scripts, like And, Or, If-then, Choose, etc.
These used to be mixed in with the conditions and actions but now have their own dedicated button. It makes it easier to find them and declutters the list of conditions and actions.
Notice how this now opens up a dialog? A dialog gives us more space to describe what each building block does and room for a search box to find the one you need.
The bigger change can be found in the buttons to add a trigger, conditions, or actions to your automation. This change was not just aimed at new users but also long-time users.
All these buttons are used to give a dropdown that allows you to select the type of trigger, condition, or action you want to add. This dropdown has been replaced by a new dialog similar to the one we just saw for the building blocks.
Like the building block, it describes what each trigger, condition, or action does. These descriptions are important, as they help you understand what they do.
If you add an element, we will first show you the most used triggers/conditions/actions by our community. We now have all others neatly grouped. For actions, we took it a step further and unified them with service calls.
If you have been using Home Assistant for a while, you are probably familiar with the âservice callâ-action that you can add to your automation. But, honestly, what is a âservice callâ? It is a bit of a technical term that is especially confusing for newer users. You just want to turn on a light, right?
This release unifies those âservice callsâ with all other actions, meaning there is no âservice callâ anymore; that layer has been refactored from the UI. Instead, you add an action and select the action you want to take, for example, turn on a light.
This means that if you add an action, you see all actions (including all service calls), categorized, with description, and searchable! Being able to search through all available actions is a huge improvement.
By default, just like with the triggers and conditions, we show you the most used actions first and the actions for the entities you have on your system. All others are neatly grouped by integration in the Other actions section.
The to-do list integration keeps getting better and better. This release adds support for descriptions and due dates!
If the integration you are using supports it, you can now add descriptions to each task on your list. It fully supports the Markdown markup to add links, bold text, etc. If due dates (or due date + time) are supported, you can set these.
As shown in the screenshot above, there is a whole new dialog to adjust your to-do item. But this is not the only change. The list itself has been improved as well.
It is much cleaner, all big text boxes are gone, and each item is nicely formatted, including an excerpt of the description and the due date. If the due date is overdue, it will be highlighted.
A brand new entity type has been added to Home Assistant: Valve!
Integrations can use this entity type to expose valves, such as a valve on a radiator, pool, sprinkler system, and main house gas or water line.
Currently, the Shelly integration supports it and now provides a valve
entity
for the Valve addon for Shelly Gas. Additionally, support for it has been
added to MQTT, and the valve entities also work with Amazon Alexa
and Google Assistant.
Tip: Do you have a switch entity that controls a valve? You can now change the entity type to valve in the entity settings.
By popular demand, the thermostat and humidifier cards now support setting current temperature/humidity as the primary information to show on the card.
You can enable the show current temperature as primary information option in the card, which will result in the target temperature being swapped with the current temperature in the card.
Last year, we saw many new features added to the cards, so letâs start the new year with some more!
@Quentame added the climate fan mode card feature. This feature can be used with both the thermostat and the tile card:
Also new is the update actions card feature. This addition by @piitaya allows you to add buttons to a card to trigger update actions when pressed.
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:
median
and
statistical_mode
. Thanks, @TheFes!We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
gen
from config entry data (@bieniu - #107019)device_class
type for Shelly Gen1 sleeping sensors (@bieniu - #107683)aioridwell
to 2024.01.0 (@bachya - #108126)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and donât forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.
The service calls of Blink have been adjusted. This affects
blink.trigger_camera
, blink.save_video
and blink.save_recent_clips
.
This change will require these service calls to be updated with a target
for
the camera and by removing name
from data
of the blink service calls.
For example, service call before 2023.11:
service: blink.save_video
data:
name: Front door
filename: test.mp4
Service call after 2023.11 and before 2024.1:
service: blink.save_video
data:
device_id: 87dc3b85c18ee84f8c322a95e8230eb2
name: Front door
filename: test.mp4
New service call:
service: blink.save_video
target:
entity_id:
- camera.front_door
data:
filename: test.mp4
The blink.send_pin
service now uses an integration/configuration entry selector:
Example service call before 2023.11:
service: blink.send_pin
data:
pin: "1234"
Service call after 2023.11 and before 2024.1:
service: blink.send_pin
data:
pin: "1234"
device_id: 87dc3b85c18ee84f8c322a95e8230eb2
New service call:
service: blink.send_pin
data:
config_entry_id: a1bee602deade2b09bc522749bbce48e
pin: "1234"
The blink.blink_update
service is deprecated and will be removed in 2024.7.0.
Use the homeassistant.update_entity
service instead.
(@mkmer - #105413) (documentation)
The event key in the (undocumented) trigger data for the homeassistant
trigger
platform is now the string shutdown
for a homeassistant
trigger configured
to fire on shutdown instead of an Event
object.
(@tetele - #91165) (documentation)
Setting swap: none
has been removed from the Modbus configuration.
It is identical to omitting it: swap:
.
(@janiversen - #104713) (documentation)
(@Skaronator - #103396) (documentation)
The Reolink Infrared lights in night mode
entity has been migrated from
the light
to the switch
domain.
This means the entity ID also changed, and automations and dashboards may need to be adjusted to use the new entity ID.
If you want to go back to the light domain, use the
switch_as_x âShow asâ option
on the new Infrared lights in night mode
switch entity and select light.
The minimum supported firmware version for generation 1 devices is 1.11.0 (2021-07-15). The minimum supported firmware version for generation 2 devices is 1.0.0 (2023-08-03).
You must update your devices to the firmware versions listed or newer.
(@bieniu - #105384) (documentation)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.1
]]>If you have HomePods or Apple TVs and you also have a Thread border router in Home Assistant, you may want to take advantage of Appleâs network to control devices in your home. You can now import your Apple Thread credentials into Home Assistant and then make Apple the preferred Thread network.
We updated the Apple Watch App Icon with the new Home Assistant logo.
Previously, you would have to disable scenes one by one to hide them on your Apple Watch. If you, like me, have a Philips Hue bridge, you would probably see several auto-generated scenes (like âBathroom concentrateâ and âBathroom Arctic auroraâ below :D ) that are not always relevant to see on your watch. We added a button to quickly toggle between all scenes now in the iOS companion app.
We have added a Whatâs new? link in companion App settings so you can quickly access the latest App release notes.
In the new year, we will do some housecleaning to make sure that the iOS Companion App is prepared for the future. To do so, we will stop supporting iOS 12, 13, and 14 in release 2024.01 of the Companion App. We know our users are repurposing older phones and tablets into dashboards and controls for their homes, which aligns with our focus on sustainability. Itâs why we try to keep our apps running on older devices for as long as we can.
Currently, less than 1% of our users (according to the App Store analytics provided by users who gave permission to share their data with Apple) are still on these three iOS versions. Supporting them makes the codebase hard to maintain and blocks us from using newer iOS features. This change will make it easier for new contributors to feel comfortable contributing to the iOS codebase, which is also one of my goals. With a more modern codebase, we can give more attention to PRs and help other contributors have everything they need to feel comfortable submitting PRs.
This does not mean your iOS 12, 13, or 14 devices have become unusable. You can still access your Home Assistant using the browser if you have a device that canât update past iOS 12, such as the 2014 iPhone 6 or iPad Mini 3. All other devices currently capable of running iOS 13 or 14 can be updated to iOS 15 or higher and use the new versions of the iOS Companion App.
Wondering what we have on the roadmap for our Apple apps? Weâre still working on it, but you can expect further developments to make Home Assistant on the Apple ecosystem more integrated, bringing shared features between iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac - and Iâm looking forward to getting my hands on Apple Vision Pro and seeing the possibilities it brings to the Open Home. Weâre also planning on improvements to Siri shortcuts widgets and as many new sensors as possible. Another feature that is on our radar is Assist; in 2023, we completed the Year of the Voice. Android users benefitted from some extra functions compared to iOS users, and we want to make sure we catch up and bring these features to iPhones as well!
]]>We have heard the concerns from the community that this functionality can open up your Home Assistant instance to a user enumeration attack from within the local network. A malicious actor with access to your local network could get the names and pictures of all Home Assistant users. They could use this information to make attacking your Home Assistant instance easier.
A security issue was filed for this on December 10, we have accepted and published the corresponding GitHub Security Advisory, and have disabled the redesigned login page functionality in patch 2023.12.3 released on December 14.
While researching the feedback we received, we were troubled to discover that the users who experienced problems with the new login page often used misconfigured reverse proxies. When the reverse proxy is not configured correctly, Home Assistant is no longer able to discern between traffic from your local home network or a public network. These users would see the redesigned login page when accessing Home Assistant from outside their home network.
To improve the network security of these users, we are researching how we can use Home Assistant to detect more variations of misconfigured proxies and inform them about it.
We redesigned the login page because we believed the local home network is within the privacy of your own home and a trusted environment for showing the people in it. We assumed that users attempting to log in on the local network are also trusted and allowed to see other user profiles, similar to what Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and other companies assume in their products.
That said, we do hear you and take your feedback, and the potential security risk to users with misconfigured reverse proxies, seriously. Thank you for bringing this to our attention and being open about your concerns.
]]>Weâve reached the end of Home Assistantâs Year of the Voice! It was our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant by speaking in their own language.
At the start of 2023, Home Assistant had basic text-based control for some devices in English only. As the year closes, users can now control and ask questions of their smart homes with voice in over 50 languages across a variety of devices, including:
Home Assistant users can now create multiple voice assistants by mixing and matching components of a voice âpipelineâ. Home Assistant Cloud subscribers automatically gain access to high-quality voice components in over 130 languages and dialects. Fully local components are available as well, such as our Piper text-to-speech system, allowing for 100% offline voice control.
In Chapter 4, we added wake word processing directly into Home Assistant by leveraging the openWakeWord project. This allowed tiny voice satellites such as the M5 ATOM Echo Development Kit to offload wake word detection by streaming audio to a Home Assistant server. The community has been hard at work training a variety of custom wake words that everyone can use to make their voice experience unique.
For the final chapter of 2023, we have expanded the available types of voice commands to include weather, temperature, and to-do lists. Voice satellites are now aware of which area theyâre in, and more hardware/software options are available too.
Happy holidays!
Espressif recently released the ESP32-S3-BOX-3, an update of the discontinued ESP32-S3-BOX (and âliteâ variant). This âAIoTâ development kit contains an ESP32-S3 chip, dual microphones, a small speaker, and a screen. Several docks are available in the box, which expose a USB-C power connector and GPIO pins for expanding the device.
The ESPHome team has been hard at work adding support for the S3-BOX-3, including the ability to customize the display! Check out the S3-BOX-3 tutorial to get started.
Starting all the way back in Chapter 1, we added voice commands for:
For Chapter 5, weâve extended this list to include:
Make sure youâve exposed the devices you want Assist to have access to, and that they are named properly. You can always add an alias when youâd like to refer to a device by something more convenient for voice. For example, adding an alias âBerlinâ to a weather entity would allow you to say âwhatâs the weather like in Berlin?â.
Voice satellites can be placed all around the house, and itâs important to keep their area in mind when interpreting commands like âturn on the lightsâ. This command will now turn on all of the lights in the satelliteâs area, and âturn off the lightsâ will do the opposite. You can still target the lights in a different area, of course, by specifying: âturn on the lights in the bedroomâ.
This is a small start to satellites being aware of their context, and adjusting behavior accordingly.
To date, Raspberry Pi-based voice satellites have used Home Assistantâs websocket API. This had several limitations, such as requiring an API token, not knowing which area the satellite was in, and not being able to configure it in Home Assistantâs UI.
Weâve extended the Wyoming integration to communicate directly with remote satellites. These satellites are automatically discovered, and can be configured much like ESPHome-based satellites with the ability to set an area and voice pipeline.
Several satellite modes are supported, including:
Audio clean up, such as automatic gain control and noise suppression, may be done in Home Assistant or on the satellite. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W has more than enough power to do local audio clean up and wake word detection, allowing you to have many satellites without straining your Home Assistant server. Reuse your old Raspberry Piâs, and start your journey with smart home voice control!
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (MSRP: $15 USD).
Although the Year of Voice is coming to a close, voice in Home Assistant is just getting started! I, Mike âThe Voiceâ Hansen, will continue at Nabu Casa to improve and extend the voice and natural language capabilities of Home Assistant.
On the roadmap for next year, weâre planning things like local wake word detection on the S3-BOX-3, and integration with large language models (LLMs) like GPT. Weâre also still on the hunt for the perfect voice satellite hardware: inexpensive with great audio, but also capable of running open source wake word models locally.
Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and development of Home Assistant, ESPHome and other projects in general.
Thanks to our language leaders for extending the sentence support to all the various languages.
]]>
Silicon Labs is the company behind Z-Wave and designs chips for Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread, and more standards. Their chips provide connectivity to many devices, including Philips Hue, Ring, IKEA TRĂ DFRI, and our own Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect products. In fact, every Z-Wave chip in a Z-Wave product ever made came from Silicon Labs.
We love open standards because they live up to our Open Home values for the smart home: privacy, choice, and sustainability. This is why Nabu Casa, with the revenue received from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, invests heavily in integrating these open standards, which involves working on a daily basis with Silicon Labs technologies. For example, we employ Dominic to work full-time on Z-Wave JS and Nikita to work full-time on Zigpy, the library powering Zigbee in Home Assistant. Other developers are dedicated to making sure the Silicon Labs chips inside our own hardware work perfectly in Home Assistant.
Z-Wave JS is the only open-source implementation of Z-Wave, powering an increasing number of Z-Wave platforms beyond Home Assistant. Our work is fundamental to the growth of the Z-Wave ecosystem, and we are happy to see this get acknowledged by Silicon Labs with this partnership. With Home Assistant, we are exposed to many different devices running Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread. And as a partner, we are now able to collaborate with Silicon Labs to report bugs and get our issues fixed with priority.
]]>HomeWizardâs journey to becoming a partner started with an engineer working on their energy meters, who developed a custom Home Assistant integration in his spare time. This custom integration grew and became part of Home Assistant core in release 2022.2, and its popularity with HomeWizard customers has led to HomeWizard adopting it and becoming an official partner today!
As a result, the HomeWizard Energy integration has been developed by listening to the Home Assistant community. Features like a local API in their products and the ability to disable cloud communication were added in response. Currently, the integration supports the following products:
Wi-Fi P1 Meter (model: HWE-P1): Sensors for power import/export, energy consumption (single or three phases), information about your smart meter, and gas.
Wi-Fi Energy Socket (model: HWE-SKT): Sensors for power import/export, energy consumption, and switches for controlling the outlet.
Wi-Fi Watermeter (model: HWE-WTR): Sensors for active and total water usage.
Wi-Fi kWh Meter (models: SDM230-wifi, SDM630-wifi): Sensors for power import/export and energy consumption.
While HomeWizard is a Dutch company, their products work in many countries. For example, the P1 Meter works on most modern meters that have a P1 port, the Water meter on analog water meters with Itron, Elster, or Sensus mounting holes, and the kWh Meters can be mounted on DIN rails. All of them can be purchased from HomeWizardâs webshop.
Weâre very excited about this news, and we love the journey that the HomeWizard integration has taken from one engineerâs hobby to an official partnership. Check out our original announcement for more information about the Works with Home Assistant partner program.
]]>Home Assistant Core 2023.12! đ
The last release of 2023 is here, and we are going out with a bang! đ
2023 has been the Year of the Voice, and please stay tuned, as we will host a final 5th chapter live stream on our YouTube channel on 13 December 2023, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET! But that is not the end of the voice journey⊠Be sure to tune in!
This release has some nice quality-of-life improvements, making it feel like Christmas already! The thermostat card has been redesigned to match the gorgeous new entity dialog introduced, a new feature for the ever-improving tile card, re-importing blueprints, and much more!
Iâm most excited about the new login page that this release brings. It is beautiful, modern, and literally welcomes you into your own home! đĄ Home is where Home Assistant is, right? đ
This is it for 2023! What a year it has been! I just got one last thing to say this year:
Thank you for using Home Assistant! â€ïž
Happy holidays & enjoy the release!
../Frenck
Donât forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 6 December 2023, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!
This feature has been disabled in Home Assistant 2023.12.3.
Read more about it here.
The login page of Home Assistant has been redesigned to be more modern and match the recent redesign of the Home Assistant onboarding.
When Home Assistant detects you are accessing it via your local home network, it means you are in your trusted home environment; you will be greeted by this beautiful new login page, which resembles how most platforms, like Windows, macOS, Netflix, and others, handle this: by showing your user profiles.
It is also much smarter! It works seamlessly with trusted networks, and when home, we automatically remember your login. So, no more forgetting to check the âkeep me logged inâ checkbox. đ
Of course, when logging in from outside your home network, we canât do this as that would give away privacy-sensitive information about your system and who is in it. So, when you are outside of your home network, the login page will ask for your username and password, just like before.
Oh! And you can now change the language straight from the login page! đ
Home Assistant 2023.9 introduced a gorgeous new entity dialog for thermostat entities. As a result of that, many have been asking for a similar design for the thermostat card. Well, here it is!
There is nothing you have to do to use this new card. Once you upgrade to this release, the thermostat card will automatically use this gorgeous new design.
We took it one step further and added support for features. Features are additional functionality that you can add to a card, previously only available for the tile card. This release adds support for features to the thermostat card as well!
For the thermostat card, it allows you to add HVAC mode buttons and presets. By default, these features are hidden, giving it the cleanest look possible.
Oh! The same design has been applied to the (de)humidifer card, of course, including its respective tile features đ.
The tile card is very powerful, and @JosephAbbey is even extending it this release by adding a new ânumeric inputâ feature.
The numeric input feature works with all number entities and number helpers. It allows you to control the number entity from the tile card directly and provides the choice to use it as a slider or as an input with up/down buttons.
The default dashboard now has options that will allow you to change its behavior. You can now configure the default dashboard to hide certain areas, hide entities that donât belong to an area, and the option to hide the energy summary card.
When selecting Areas, you can choose to hide the areas but also change the display order of the areas by dragging them around.
A first step in making the dashboards configurable, but above all, it gives you more control over the default dashboard, especially when you have just started with using Home Assistant.
When adding a new dashboard, we added a dialog similar to the ones we show when you create new automations or scripts. It gives you the option to start with an empty manual dashboard or create a new default dashboard.
The history dashboard did get some love from @karwosts this release; he added a big improvement to all the graphs shown there.
Previously, the graphs would only show the state history, limited to a few days, until the data is removed. This is not always very useful, for example, when you want to look back further in time.
@karwosts came up with a solution for this, and the history dashboard now combines the state history with the recorded long-term statistics to provide insights into the past.
The right and darker part of the graph line is provided by the state history (like before), and the long-term statistics provide the left and lighter part of the graph line (and is thus downsampled hourly data).
If you have manually modified the days to keep before purging recorder on your system, consider removing that customization. With the long-term statistics and new feature, you most likely donât need it anymore, resulting in a smaller database and, thus, faster and smaller backups.
The first iteration for support for to-do lists was added in the last release, and there has been continued work on this feature in this release.
First of all, there are two new services available. A much-requested service to list all items on a to-do list and a helpful service to remove all completed items from a to-do list.
It is nice to see integrations adding support for the to-do list feature. For example, the CalDAV integration now supports adding to-do items to your CalDAV server, and with Picnic and OurGroceries you can now manage your shopping list. In the case of Picnic, it will even look up the product you add in their store to your shopping list and add the product to your shopping cart.
Also, when viewing a to-do list from the Home Assistant interface, you can copy/paste or bookmark the URL, which will always bring you back to the same oneâa small but very helpful improvement.
This release adds the ability to re-import the blueprint from the source from which you originally imported it. The newly downloaded blueprint will overwrite the existing blueprint, providing a simple âupdateâ feature for blueprints.
If you use Blueprints, for example, the ones created by our incredible community, you might have noticed that when you import a blueprint, it will not update when the author updates it. The only option you had was to manually adjust the YAML of the blueprint to make it match the latest version published by the author. To make this last bit easier, we added this re-import ability.
A helpful feature that will make it easier to keep your blueprints in sync with the latest version published by the blueprint author.
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:
We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
to_json
template filter in parsing dict key (@jbouwh - #105327)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and donât forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.
calendar.list_events
uses an outdated response data format and is now
deprecated, pending removal in Home Assistant 2024.6.
Please use calendar.get_events
, which supports multiple entities, instead.
The output of this newer service changed slightly, as it now returns a mapping of entity IDs to lists of events instead of a list of events.
(@eifinger - #102481) (documentation)
The previously deprecated counter.configure
service has been removed.
DSMR entities will not automatically update on each received DSMR telegram when the value between telegrams has not changed.
If you rely on this, for example, for graphing, please refer to the statistics integration.
(@gigatexel - #104037) (documentation)
For users using the 5B version: The previous gas sensor (Gas consumption) will change to Gas consumption mbusX. Also, multiple gas sensors will be possible.
(@dupondje - #84097) (documentation)
The previously deprecated detection sensitivity service has been removed.
The initial state of the smart plug did not reflect the same state as in the Genius Hub application. Correcting this creates a backward-incompatible change in that the behavior is now correct but different.
If you have an automation that relies on this state, you should check if your automation or script is still behaving as expected.
(@GeoffAtHome - #102110) (documentation)
When calling a service via the Home Assistant REST API, the service used to be canceled on connection drop, which is no longer the case. If you relied on that behavior, you would need to revisit the logic. With this change, a connection drop will not cancel the service call.
Also, a REST post to call a service with the /api/services/<domain>/<service>
endpoint will no longer timeout after 10 seconds.
(@Shulyaka - #102657) (@MartinHjelmare - #104709) (documentation)
The HomeWizard HWE-SKE (the wall plugs), SDM230, and SDM630 provided duplicate sensors for energy import and export: A total and a tariff of 1.
As only a single tariff is available on those, the total and tariff 1 are always the same. To clean this up, tariff 1 has been removed.
If you used this sensor in your energy dashboard, you will need to configure your energy dashboard to use the total import/export sensor instead.
(@frenck - #104493) (documentation)
S-Series entities priority-3102, hot-water-demand-mode-40057, and oper-mode-40238 are changed from a number entity to a select entity with mapping values for the possible choices.
If you have the old number entities enabled, you can delete them since they will no longer be provided by the integration.
(@elupus - #103788) (documentation)
Remove rounding of the exchange rate.
Exchange rates are generally more sensitive to small changes, and some quotes need many decimal numbers to be accurate. The Open Exchange Rates service will provide different significant digits for different quotes.
You can change the display precision or use a template sensor to customize the rounding of the value.
The option to set a custom polling interval has been removed. If you are using
custom interval and really need it, you can use the homeassistant.update_entity
in an automation to poll at your custom pace. See our documentation on
defining a custom polling interval
for more information.
(@jpbede - #103743) (documentation)
Support for the, in November 2019 deprecated, attributes brightness_pct
,
color_name
, flash
, kelvin
, profile
, and transition
have
been removed from light scenes.
If you have used these attributes in your scenes, you will need to adjust those to this change.
(@emontnemery - #104254) (documentation)
The SMTP integration will send images as attachments to a plain text email
instead of HTML in-line when the html
field is not set.
Previous behavior was to send all images as HTML in-line even when the html
field was not set. To continue sending images as in-line, please set the
optional html
field and include the images
as <img src="cid:image_name.ext">
within the HTML block as described in the
documentation.
(@aptalca - #93562) (documentation)
Trafikverket Weather has changed its endpoint and is no longer providing the information for wind direction and precipitation in plain text, so therefore, these sensors have been removed:
weather.get_forecast
uses an outdated response data format and is now
deprecated, pending removal in Home Assistant 2024.6.
Please use weather.get_forecasts
, which supports multiple entities instead.
The output of this newer service changed slightly, as it now returns a mapping of entity IDs to lists of forecasts instead of a list of forecasts.
(@eifinger - #102534) (documentation)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:
The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2023.12
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