Home Assistant Home Assistant

Logitech's stance on local APIs

Paulus Schoutsen two minutes reading time
  • Public-Service-Announcement
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This post originally talked about Logitech not willing to support local APIs after removing their private, but widely used, local API. This decision has been reversed and this blog post is no longer applicable to Logitech. More information on the events can be found in this blogpost.

Logitech has decided to remove a widely used local API of their Logitech Harmony hub. We’ve been tracking the story here. This has caused a lot of commotion among our users, and users of other smart home solutions, that integrated with the Logitech Harmony hub and all of a sudden were surprised with a broken smart home. Not a nice way to start the already busy holiday season!

Since it’s 2018, a lot of these discussions are playing out on Twitter. While browsing the discussions, we came across this statement by a senior manager for product marketing for Logitech Smart Home, Todd Walker:

We have a lot of opinions about this, but felt that they were appropriately covered by Twitter user, and contributor to Home Assistant, Jon Maddox:

[Update: resolved, API reinstated and commitment to keep it around] Logitech Harmony removes local API

Paulus Schoutsen six minutes reading time
  • Public-Service-Announcement
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Update 6 (21 dec): Great news! Logitech has announced in a forum post that it has introduced an XMPP Beta Program that makes it possible to install a developer firmware version which reinstates the XMPP API as it was, including the security vulnerabilties. Note that installing this version voids your warranty.

Logitech is also working on a new version of the hub firmware that fixes the vulnerabilities. This is great and this restores our trust in Logitech. Thanks Logitech for turning around and working with your users.

Screenshot of the developer-only firmware reinstating the local XMPP API. Also includes a disclaimer that it voids your warranty. The developer-only firmware that reinstates the local XMPP API. Voids warranty if installed.

Tenable, the cyber security firm that discovered the security vulnerabilities, has released a Research Advisory detailing the issues and the disclosure timeline.

Update 7 (21 dec): Even better news! Someone from Harmony posted in our forums and stated that they are now committed to maintaining their local XMPP API.

We will verify with Logitech if this post is official, and if so, we will revert the Home Assistant implementation back to using the XMPP API. Until then, we don’t expect the websocket API that we are using since 0.84.3 to go away or change until we migrate back, so if your Harmony setup works today, don’t change anything. (Verified, it’s from an account connected to a logitech.com email address)

Screenshot of someone from Harmony stating that they are going to keep the local XMPP API around. Forum post by Harmony employee on the Home Assistant forums.

Original Post:

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0.84: Cloud webhooks, Wunderlist and USGS Earth Quakes

Paulus Schoutsen 25 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
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Time for the last release of the year. We were hoping to end the year with an enourmous bang and make Lovelace the default UI. However, in our final stretch we realized that to get to the experience that we wanted, we had to make more last minute changes than we felt comfortable making. If you are a Lovelace tester, please read the section for existing testers below.

We want to wish everybody happy holidays and want to thank all our contributors to the code, the documentation and all the ones in the chat for making up our amazing community. We had a great year with a lot of accomplishments and are looking forward to see all the great stuff you all come up with in 2019. Cheers! 🥂

Paulus

We will skip our next release in our bi-weekly release cycle and plan to be back on January 9. See you then!

Cloud webhooks

This release introduces a new Home Assistant Cloud feature available: cloud webhooks. With cloud webhooks you can enable any webhook-enabled integration or automation in Home Assistant to be accessible via a unique URL in the cloud without having to open up a port on your router.

This means that you can send any data back to your instance for OwnTracks, IFTTT or an automation with a webhook-trigger. Check the cloud page in the configuration panel to get started or read more about the new functionality at the Nabu Casa website.

Improved state restoring

We have a new more reliable way of state restoration introduced by @armills. Instead of relying on the database it will now leverage the storage helper to keep track of states that need to be tracked. This should improve reliability and startup speed.

This comes with a downside: we will be unable to restore states the first time you start 0.84.

This means that on upgrade to 0.84 any automation that doesn’t have an initial_state defined will be disabled.

Improved service calling

We have improved how we call services with better validation checks. This means that if you have an automation or a script that sends invalid data, we will now stop the execution and be better able to point out where your incorrect calls are coming from.

For existing Lovelace testers

If you are currently testing Lovelace, please read the notes thoroughly as a lot has changed. First, we now have now three different Lovelace modes: auto-generated, storage, and yaml (the old way of doing Lovelace). The UI editor will be limited to the storage mode, in which we control how the config is stored.

So if you were using Lovelace before 0.84, you now have two options. Option one is to use the new storage mode and import your existing file. You can do this by opening the Lovelace UI and click on Configure UI, this will prompt you to change to storage mode. This will unlock a new option in the menu called “raw config editor”. Open this and paste the content of your ui-lovelace.yaml file into it and click save. Note that YAML comments are not persisted and !include/!secret are not supported if in storage mode.

If you want to continue managing a YAML file, check here how to enable the YAML mode. The file ui-lovelace.yaml will now follow the same options as configuration.yaml. This means that the Lovelace YAML config is now parsed with YAML 1.1 instead of YAML 1.2. Major change is that you need to make sure that you wrap on and off with quotes in your configs!

We have also aligned the configuration of all the cards, causing breaking changes. Changes are especially focused around how we define actions for short and long presses. See the docs for more info.

Editor UI is now further processed. You can manage your Lovelace UI without leaving your browser! It is possible to add, edit and delete views. It is possible to add, edit, move and delete cards, including custom cards!

New Platforms

Release 0.84.1 - December 12

Release 0.84.2 - December 14

Release 0.84.3 - December 17

Release 0.84.4 - December 19

Release 0.84.5 - December 19

  • Fix Harmony for people not running Home Assistant in Docker (@ehendrix23)

Release 0.84.6 - December 21

  • Fix incorrect local check when creating webhooks via a config flow (impacted all but Owntracks) (@balloob - #19494)

Frontend

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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0.83: Fibaro Home Center Hubs, locks via voice, Traccar

Paulus Schoutsen 25 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
 Comments

It’s release day! Today we’re happy to release Home Assistant 0.83. If you might have noticed, this is using our new release schedule which evolves around releases on Wednesdays instead of Fridays (this one is one day late). It’s the same 2-week release schedule as before, except that it has moved 5 days later.

So what’s new? A LOT. First, a contributor milestone. This release the backend has 99 contributors. That means that in the last 2,5 weeks since the last release, 99 people have written code that is now part of Home Assistant. The frontend has another 15 contributors. It’s amazing to see how as a community we can rally around building the best piece of home automation software out there and get it done.

I want to give a shout out to @MartinHjelmare who is doing an amazing job going through PRs and helping out where possible. Good job! ✨

Alright, time for some highlights. First is that thanks to @pbalogh77, Fibaro Home Center hubs are now supported. If you had already invested in a Z-Wave network with Fibaro, you can now seamlessly integrate that into Home Assistant and combine it with all the other intgrations out there.

The second cool thing is that Google Assistant now supports locks. Locking is enabled by default, but if you want to support unlocking, you will need to go to the Home Assistant Cloud settings to enable unlocking, or, if you’re using the manual config, add allow_unlock: true to your config.

Screenshot of the Google Assistant card on the cloud panel. See what entities are exposed to Google and enable unlocking of locks.

The frontend team hasn’t sit still either. The extended release notes are here but the main highlight is the new shopping list card. @iantrich took the shopping list panel and shrunk it to the size of a Lovelace card.

Oh and if you’re into GPS tracking: OwnTracks is a lot easier to get started with in this release. But if you really like all the data in the world: @ludeeus has added support for Traccar, including accompanying Hass.io add-on by @frenck.

Note, this release includes a migration to add an index to speed up the logbook queries. It might take a bit on first boot, please be patient.

New Platforms

Release 0.83.1 - November 29

Release 0.83.2 - November 30

Release 0.83.3 - December 3

We had an issue where users that are still using the legacy auth for API access but not for UI access could end up with a legacy auth user without any permissions. If you run into this issue, we suggest to upgrade your scripts to use long lived access tokens, which offer the exact same functionality. Alternative is that you manually upgrade the legacy API user to be part of the admin group using these instructions.

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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State of the Union

Paulus Schoutsen 1 minute reading time
  • Video
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Photo of Paulus Schoutsen presenting the state of the union.

Last Wednesday, November 14, we had a meetup in Amsterdam hosted by ING. Over 80 Home Assistant enthusiasts gathered to hear me, Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, speak. I talked about how Home Assistant got started, what makes Home Assistant so successful (community!) and what we’re working towards.

Special thanks to:

  • Jeroen Joosse for the initiative and organizing
  • Erik-Jan Riemers for co-organizing and making it this big
  • ING for hosting the event
  • Franck Nijhof for providing the Hass.io demos
  • Klaas Schoute for providing the TensorFlow demos
  • Frank Kuiper for editing the presentation video

More photos after the click.

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0.82: TensorFlow, Lovelace UI edit, Z-Wave Barrier Class

Paulus Schoutsen 19 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
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It’s time for another great release. As this includes the tail-end of HacktoberFest, it’s packed again with stuff. Hope you like stuff.

I want to do a shout out to all the people who help with the documentation. Since the beginning of HacktoberFest, we’ve seen 953 PRs get merged, 953! Especially thanks to @klaasnicolaas who has converted 240 pages to the new configuration format. DAAAAANG.

We also got some cool new features. The first one being that you can now use TensorFlow, a machine learning framework, to detect objects on your cameras thanks to the hard work by @hunterjm. Check out the docs for more info.

Next up is that @rohankapoorcom has been working hard on converting more integrations to the Webhook format. This allows for easy setting up via the UI and generates difficult to guess urls. This release includes Mailgun, Twilio and DialogFlow.

The frontend team has been BUSY. We’re prepping Lovelace for general release and slowly all pieces are coming together. This release introduces an experimental, alpha, ultra-raw, (enough warnings already?) UI editor for Lovelace cards. It requires that your card has an ID but then, it just works. Including a live preview of the config you’re editing.

Screenshot of editing a Lovelace card Screenshot of editing a Lovelace card.

Also frontend related, in version 0.81 we removed all config splitting functions for ui-lovelace.yaml, we are happy to report that we managed to add back support for !secret and !include. The rest of the config splitting commands you are used to in configuration.yaml will not be available for Lovelace. Mind that you can not edit content in !include from the UI, and !secret cannot be used in the UI or preview at the moment.

And we have one more thing… we have soft-forked Open Z-Wave and have added support for the barrier command class! This means that now you will be able to control your garage doors from Z-Wave without compiling Open Z-Wave yourself. We’ll continue to monitor what other features we can add to our fork while remaining close to the OZW project.

New Platforms

Release 0.82.1 - November 15

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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0.81: new Lovelace cards, LG soundbars, Dyson fans, Elk-M1

Tinkerer 25 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
 Comments

This release is a major milestone – 100 contributors have contributed over the last two weeks. A great bit thank you to everybody who contributed, both those returning and those who’ve been involved for their first time.

To go with the configuration entry support, MQTT also now also integrates with the device registry. Not to be left out, LIFX, SimpliSafe, and Z-Wave have all gained both device registry support, and configuration entry support.

Lovelace has another three new cards, the alarm panel, the button card, and the thermostat card:

Screenshot of the thermostat card Screenshot of the thermostat card.

The glance card, and the button card can also be themed now, and the way the columns in the glance card has changed. There’s also long press support, custom UI support, and more (yes, Lovelace is feeling the love this release).

Other things to be aware of:

  • We have a new service homeassistant.update_entity to request the update of an entity, rather than waiting for the next scheduled update. This means you can set a really long scan_interval in the platform_options and then update on demand, ideal for those services where you have low API limit.
  • Template sensors will no longer auto update if we can’t find relevant entities in the template. You’ll want to review your template sensors and consider adding relevant entity_id entries or use the new homeassistant.update_entity service.
  • Water heaters get their own platform separate from climate, because you’re not a fish living inside the hot water tank

New Platforms

New Features

Release 0.81.1 - October 27

Release 0.81.2 - October 29

0.81.3 was skipped because it broke LL.

Release 0.81.4 - November 2

Release 0.81.5 - November 3

  • Fix lovelace
  • Remove FFmpeg input tests (@jjlawren - #18131)

Release 0.81.6 - November 4

  • Bugfix discovery (delete/mqtt) call for Hass.io #18159

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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0.80: Lovelace updates, webhooks, TRÅDFRI switches

Paulus Schoutsen 23 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
 Comments

October 12, 2018. 12 days into Hacktoberfest and it’s been busier than ever on the repositories. On the main repo, 43 open, 104 closed. How the documentation team is still alive, I don’t know: 26 open, 234 closed. If you’ve opened a contribution that is pending a response, that’s probably because we’re busy elsewhere or are taking some well deserved rest.

Alright, new release, we got some cool stuff! Let’s start with our Lovelace UI. We have integrated into Lovelace UI some of the custom cards that our amazing community have built, making them easily accessible to all users. The cards are Gauge and Sensor:

Screenshot of new Gauge and Sensor cards

Next up is a new way to get data into Home Assistant: webhooks. With the introduction of auth and with the introduction of long-lived access tokens, we realized that it’s still annoying to have to give full HA access to an app just to get a piece of information in Home Assistant. So with webhooks we can generate unique URLs that are inprobable to guess, and data delivered to the webhook will only go to the designated automation or component. This feature is available for component developers to integrate, or for users via the new automation webhook trigger.

Screenshot of configuring IFTTT Configuring IFTTT via th integrations panel.

On the devices side, we got basic support for the new IKEA TRÅDFRI switches, Honeywell evohome controllers (EU-based) and if you want to control your pool, you can now do that with the new AquaLogic integration.

New Platforms

Release 0.80.1 - October 15

Release 0.80.2 - October 17

Release 0.80.3 - October 18

New Features

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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Participating in Hacktoberfest

Fabian Affolter four minutes reading time
  • Community
 Comments

In October there will the Hacktoberfest. To celebrate and support Open Source, DigitalOcean, Twilio and GitHub are again organizing this event. Home Assistant will be part of it like in the last two years.

We would like to focus on those repositories. Browse through the bugs and fix one. This will get you started with contributing to an Open Source project in an easy way:

We collected a bunch of entry-level bugs, features and documentation enhancements for two other repositories. Please stick to the open issues for now. We will add more during October:

If you submit five (5) Pull Requests during October, you will have earned yourself a limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt and a place on our credits list if you submit your Pull Requests for Home Assistant! Don’t worry you will be listed there no matter how many Pull Requests you’ve made.

We want to focus on new contributors and people who want to get started on working on an Open Source project.

Are you ready? Sign up for Hacktoberfest!

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0.79: Device Registry, Logi Circle, Huawei LTE routers, GeoJSON

Paulus Schoutsen 16 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
 Comments

In case you missed it two weeks ago, check our plans for the future.

It’s time for another great release and we’re introducing a brand new feature: device registry. Thanks to @Kane610 for driving this effort. This allows integrations to tell Home Assistant not only about entities, but also which devices the entities represent. It also allows integrations to tell Home Assistant how a device is connected to Home Assistant. For example, a Hue light bulb is connected to Home Assistant via the Hue hub.

Screenshot showing several configured integrations Screenshot showing several configured integrations in the configuration panel.

Adding devices to the mix allows us to do a lot of cool things. It allows us to group entities and show how they relate to one another. It will also allow us to inform the user if data leaves the home network and shows the firmware version that the device is running on.

Screenshot showing the devices of a config entry Screenshot showing the devices of the iOS integration.

Devices can only be added by integrations that are configured via the integrations panel in the config panel. So we’ve also been expanding the integrations that support that. This release brings support to iOS, MQTT and Tradfri.

Screenshot showing how to configure MQTT via UI Screenshot showing how to configure MQTT via UI

And this is not all! There is so much more. In an effort to make the quality of an integration more clear, we’ve added an Integration Quality Scale. With this scale we’ll be able to clearly communicate to the user how good an integration is and it gives developers a list on how to improve it. Expect these levels to pop up in the integration list soon.

And did you think we forgot about auth? We did not. @awarecan has added a new multi-factor auth module that will send you a one-time authentication code to finish your login, with a notification service of your choice. PushBullet, Hangouts, iOS app, some obscure custom notification service using a shell script? It’s possible.

Oh, and yes, there is also some cool new integrations. Support has been added for Logi Circle camera’s, GeoJSON events and even a bank. More below 👇

New Platforms

Release 0.79.1 - September 30

Release 0.79.2 - October 1

Release 0.79.3 - October 2

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

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

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