0.118: Grid and logbook cards, quick navigation, native template types

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Home Assistant Core 0.118!

The second last release of 2020, while the end of the year is slowly closing in.

This also means we have only one more release left this year… And we plan to finish the year with a big bang! Also announced: the Home Assistant Conference. I am really excited about that one! The last major release of this year will be during the conference on December 13.

Back to 0.118! Some nice additions this release: Navigating around with the Quick bar (oh, I just love that feature), some new Lovelace cards, native types in templates is now the default and the Nest thermostat is back! 🎉

All in all, a fine release, with an exciting one ahead of us.

../Frenck

Table of contents

Home Assistant Conference

Exciting news! Home Assistant is hosting an online conference this year!

An event to celebrate our community, share ideas, history, creations and celebrate major milestones! The event will take place on Sunday, December 13.

Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, will give the opening and closing keynote, aided by other Home Assistant developers. In between, we have three different tracks of talks (for everyone, advanced users and developers) with a total of 16 different talks.

Check out the conference schedule to see the subjects of the talks and the list of speakers.

The Home Assistant Conference will be hosted on Hopin, an online conference platform. Tickets to attend will cost $1, which will cover the cost of the platform.

Get your ticket

The conference will also be available as a free YouTube live stream. The live stream will be limited to the keynotes and the “everyone” track. You won’t have access to the chat and have that online conference feeling, so we recommend getting a ticket!

For the latest information, check our dedicated Home Assistant Conference page.

Home Assistant Conference header

Edit: We all hate ads! But we do like to show off our users!

For those who don’t keep up with the release notes, we added an announcement about the conference in the Configuration panel. It was always set to disappear automatically when the conference is over, but when you are ready to be rid of it, just press the x!

We realize it is invoking concern of future ads and that it could have had a better execution. In fact, within some of the (yes, sometimes heated) discussions about it during the beta, there were some good thoughts and examples shared for working toward a truer “community news” integration. Such an integration could pull in future and ongoing community events, news, and project highlights, which could be enabled or disabled like any other integration. For now, it is this banner which will be removed on the next release.

Grid Card

Ever since the start of Lovelace, users have been making grids. However, this was not easy as it involved fiddling by combining horizontal and vertical stacks — a confusing and frustrating experience.

@balloob to the rescue! This release adds a new Grid Card. You won’t have to write a complicated YAML soup combining both horizontal and vertical stacks.

The Grid Card offers straight forward options to mimic these setups and adds an option to force each card to be square to boot.

Screenshot of the Grid Card Screenshot of Grid Card.

*Note that the square option won’t work with all cards.

Quick Bar navigation

The Quickbar, which was introduced in Home Assistant 0.117, really took off! We are happy to see you like it.

If you haven’t tried the new Quick Bar yet… you should! It is a quick and easy way to get to entities or run commands. From anywhere in Home Assistant; press e for entities or c for commands.

This release, support for navigating Home Assistant via the Quick Bar was added. You can now jump to any place, from any place. Amazing job @donkawechico

Screenshot of navigating around using the Quick Bar Screenshot of navigating around using the Quick Bar.

Native types support for templates

Announced in 0.117, but now by default enabled. Native template types allow templates to result in not just strings (text), but also other types.

Ever tried to make a list of entities or set an RGB color via a template? If so, you probably would have learned, that it is not that simple. In Home Assistant, the result of a template always has been a piece of text (a string), even if you made a list.

script:
  my_script:
    alias: "Example"
    description: Example script with native lists in templates
    variables:
      entities:
        - light.living_room_window
        - light.living_room_table
      color: [255, 0, 0]
    sequence:
      service: light.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: "{{ entities }}"
      data:
        rgb_color: "{{ color }}"

This is an extremely powerful change to our template engine, that allows for more advanced future additions and can significantly reduce the complexity of existing templates in your set up.

It should be mostly compatible with your existing templates; However, be sure to check the backward-incompatible changes section for known possible breaking scenarios.

Logbook Card

Another new Lovelace card this release. @zsarnett added the Logbook Card.

This card allows you to show the logs of one (or more) entities on a Lovelace Dashboard. This can be really helpful if you want to monitor, for example, the motion events of a sensor or a camera.

Screenshot of the new Logbook Card Screenshot of the new Logbook Card.

Header & Footer Editor

Entity cards in Lovelace have support for customizing the header and footer of that card. This is really useful for adding a nice image, a couple of buttons or a graph to the card.

Up until now, you needed some YAML magic to achieve that. Thanks to @zsarnett we now have a Header & Footer editor available in the UI making this feature much easier to use.

Screenshot of the new Header/Footer editor. Screenshot of the new Header/Footer editor.

Supervisor Network Configuration

Expected to be available soon, a new Supervisor version which includes a new network layer with added support for wireless networks, multiple network interfaces and even VLANs.

This should cover most of the feature requests we had around networking.

New Supervisor Network configuration UI New Supervisor Network configuration UI

The next step is that we use all the information from our new network backend to simplify some add-ons. Also, updates for Snapshot/Restore of these network settings are planned.

Home Assistant OS

The last few days, two new Home Assistant OS releases have been published.

While 4.17 continues to make small improvements in the 4.x release series, the latest pre-release 5.5 comes closer to our goals to declare 5.x release series stable. In particular, this pre-release includes the Linux 5.4 kernel for all Raspberry Pis! We also intend to declare 64-bit the recommended installation method for Raspberry Pi 4.

Release 5.5 is also the first release to support Hardkernel’s ODROID-C4, a very cost-effective single board computer featuring the Amlogic S905X3 SoC and 4GB of DDR4 memory (thanks @ubergeek801). Testers welcome!

Other noteworthy changes

  • The new Nest SDM integration now supports thermostats! Thanks, @allenporter!
  • Entity pickers in the UI will now show the full name of the entities. Thanks, @spacegaier!
  • The Roon media player now supports media browsing but also has support for grouping and transferring between different players. Thanks @pavoni
  • @cnorick added a button to duplicate Scripts from the UI.
  • The Shelly integration now has real-time status updates, which has been implemented by @thecode!
  • @apop880 prepared the WLED integration for Christmas by adding a service for loading WLED presets.
  • Date pickers in entity cards have been replaced with a modern, good looking version. Thanks, @thomasloven!
  • @joshmcrty Made numbers shown in the frontend formatted in a way that matches your language settings.
  • @spacegaier has been busy improving the frontend, making it more accessible to people with disabilities. In this case, ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) labels have been added, so screen readers can use our + buttons. Thanks!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integration this release:

New Platforms

The following integration got support for a new platform:

  • 1-Wire now supports binary sensors and switches, added by @epenet

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 0.118.1 - November 19

Release 0.118.2 - November 20

Release 0.118.3 - November 23

Release 0.118.4 - November 26

Release 0.118.5 - December 5

If you need help…

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

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Backward-incompatible changes

Below is a listing of the breaking change for this release, per subject or integration. Click on one of those to read more about the breaking change for that specific item.

PTVSD

The ptvsd integration has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in Home Assistant Core 0.120. A full-featured replacement is available with the debugpy integration, which is now considered stable.

(@frenck - #42351)

Flu Near You

Per ADR-0010, this PR deprecates YAML configuration for Flu Near You until 0.119.

Existing YAML configuration has already been imported automatically in the previous releases and can now safely be removed from your configuration files.

(@bachya - #42535) (flunearyou docs)

DirecTV

DirecTV has fully transitioned to configuration via UI. YAML configuration is no longer supported. Existing YAML configuration has already been imported automatically in the previous releases and can now safely be removed from your configuration files.

(@ctalkington - #41961) (directv docs)

Roku

Roku has fully transitioned to configuration via UI. YAML configuration is no longer supported. Existing YAML configuration has already been imported automatically in the previous releases and can now safely be removed from your configuration files.

(@ctalkington - #41960) (roku docs)

Templates - Removal of extract_entities

This breaking change is for custom component developers only!

The template.helpers.extract_entities has been removed as it has not been used in core, been deprecated, and thrown warnings since the new template system tracking was introduced.

homeassistant.helpers.event.async_track_template_result should be used instead.

(@bdraco - #42601)

OpenWeatherMap

OpenWeatherMap has fully transitioned to configuration via UI. YAML configuration is no longer supported. Existing YAML configuration has already been imported automatically in the previous releases and can now safely be removed from your configuration files.

Additionally, previously the OpenWeatherMap integration used Pa as their unit of measurement for air pressure. However, air pressure is measured and reported as hPa so the unit of measurement has been changed to hPa. This could be a breaking change for using such entities in, for example, influxdb.

(@nzapponi - #39839) (@randyxxl - #42801) (openweathermap docs)

Shelly

Shelly devices configured with new (fw >= 1.9) property “appliance_type” can now be added to the light domain instead of the switch domain.

(@chemelli74 - #42508) (shelly docs)

Epson

The Epson integration is now configured via the UI. Existing YAML configuration if automatically imported on upgrade and can be safely removed afterward.

The SSL option has been remove, as there is no signs that anybody used it with success.

(@pszafer - #39697) (epson docs)

Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS)

The integration will not consider bounding box geometries anymore when calculating the distance to an event from the feed. In practice it has turned out that these bounding boxes are way too large around the event to make them useful for the purpose of notifying users about these events.

Any existing configuration will continue to work and does not need to be modified. However, please consider changing the radius defined for your integration to match your expectations, especially if your main concern are widespread and moving events such as tropical cyclones.

(@exxamalte - #42957) (gdacs docs)

Templates

This feature was introduced as an opt-in beta feature in Home Assistant Core 0.117, and is now enabled by default.

A template would always result in a string (text). This made it hard to use things like lists, or numbers as a result of a template. For example, returning a list of entities or an RGB/HS/XY color.

This change may impact your existing templates, as templates now can return other types; For example, string, float, integer, boolean, lists or dictionaries.

The following templates can be impacted by this:

  • Entities with templated attributes. Attributes keep their native Python type, thus if the attribute is used/processed in a template again later, the type might be different.
  • Templates working with lists or mappings (dictionaries). Previously, such collection would be returned as a text, for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. We’ve seen examples where such results are decoded using text processing again (e.g., by splitting the result on a, to get the separate values). The additional processing is no longer needed, as the returned value will be a collection now.
  • Note: The entity state in Home Assistant is always a text (string). Even with native types being supported in Templates now if a result is stored as an entity state, they will be converted to a string.

In case this new feature causes a problem for you, you can enable the old-style template rendering again, by setting the following configuration:

homeassistant:
  legacy_templates: true

Please note, this option is a temporary/transitional option, that will be removed in the future. Adjusting your templates to the new situation is therefore advised.

(@frenck - #42967)

Jewish Calendar

Entities for this integration now use a “timestamp” device class. Therefore, the timetamp attributes have been removed.

(@yuvalabou - #41397) (jewish_calendar docs)

Sisyphus

This release contains updates to improve stability and support newer Sisyphus table firmwares. There is a small chance that older firmwares will have issues with this release; if you have trouble with the Sisyphus integration after this update, make sure your table is running at least firmware 1.10.73.

(@jkeljo - #42995) (sisyphus docs)

Neurio energy

As of July 26, 2020, due to an API change; You now must provide a sensor_id for the Neurio sensor to work; otherwise, an error returns that the request is unauthorized.

(@czechmark - #42728) (neurio_energy docs)

AirVisual

Per ADR-0010, this PR deprecates YAML configuration for AirVisual until 0.119. If you already use the AirVisual integration, you do not need to take action, as your configuration has already been imported into the UI.

(@bachya - #42581) (airvisual docs)

Notion

Per ADR-0010, this release deprecates YAML configuration for Notion until 0.119.

Existing YAML configuration will be imported automatically when upgrading and can be safely removed from your configuration files afterward.

(@bachya - #43026) (notion docs)

FRITZ!

The default value for password was set to “admin” in the fritz and fritzbox_callmonitor integrations. This has been corrected and moved to be the default value for the configuration option of username.

Tile

Per ADR-0010, this release deprecates YAML configuration for Tile until 0.119.

Existing YAML configuration will be imported automatically when upgrading and can be safely removed from your configuration files afterward.

(@bachya - #43064) (tile docs)

KNX

The parameter context_timeout is now optional for binary sensors and will default to None. If you’ve previously not specified this parameter you’ll have to adjust your configuration and add it like this:

knx:
  binary_sensor:
    - name: sensor
      state_address: "1/2/3"
      context_timeout: 1.0

This prevents users that do not use this feature from waiting one second until automations are triggered.

The parameter reset_after for binary sensors expects seconds now instead of milliseconds to streamline the different configuration options. (context_timeout also uses seconds).

The parameter ignore_internal_state for binary sensors now defaults to False as most users do not use this feature. It defaulted to True before.

If you have validation errors of your configuration after the update and you are using the operation_modes parameter for your climate devices, please add all erroneous entries to the new controller_modes parameter.

(@marvin-w - #42026) (knx docs)

Farewell to the following

  • The iAlarm integration has been removed. It was using webscraping to gather its data, which is not allowed. (@frenck - #43010)

All changes

Click to see all changes!