Well, hello!, Home Assistant Core 0.106! We are happy to see you 😃

A great release that improves stability, reliability and a lot of helpful additions to make everything much more friendly and easier to use. So let’s dive in!

Safe Mode improvements

In Home Assistant 0.105, we introduced Safe Mode. Our goal is to make sure Home Assistant always starts and provide you an interface to work with. No matter what.

@balloob has been busy this release to improve on this feature even more, and Home Assistant is now able to overcome issues when things in the core system get into trouble and even when the Lovelace configuration isn’t readable. Besides that, the way Safe Mode is presented has changed, so you instantly know you are in Safe Mode:

Screenshot of Home Assistant running in Safe Mode.

Stepping up and down the brightness of lights

Ever tried to make an automation to brighten or dim your lights? Or tried to hook up a remote to control the brightness of a light? If you have, you probably know that doing that was pretty painful and involved some additional templating to get that going.

This release just made that a lot easier. An example device automation:

Screenshot of a device automation with dimming lights.

We have also added this functionality to the light.turn_on service. You can now change the brightness, based on the current brightness, using the brightness_step (-255, 255) and brightness_step_pct (-100, 100) parameters.

Good to know, when the brightness hits 0, it will turn off the light. If the light is already off, and you step the brightness up, it will turn on. This is awesome, because if you have a rotating dimmer button (for example, an IKEA SYMFONISK), you can rotate it to change the brightness, but also turn the light on/off by just rotating it.

Person more info dialogs improvements

Persons have a new more info dialog. They now show the location of the person on the map and if the person is not in a zone, you can create a zone with the current location of that person with one click.

Screenshot of the new more info for a person.

Entities configuration panel now shows all entities

The entities configuration panel previously only contained entities that were uniquely identifiable by Home Assistant (they have a so-called: unique ID). However, those are not provided by all integrations of Home Assistant, confusing since the entities panel did not show all of your entities.

In this version, we now include all entities in the panel, giving you a nice complete overview of all available entities in your system. You can’t edit all entities, since that requires an entity to be uniquely identifiable. If an entity doesn’t have a unique ID, the pencil icon will be striked through.

Screenshot of uneditable entities in the configuration panel.

Since all entities are now available in this panel, it does not only provide you a clear overview of all the available entities; you can also make use of the “related items” feature introduced in release 0.105 to see where they are being used!

Updates to the developer tools panels

The developer tools panel also got some nice little touches. In the “Info” tab you can now find a list of all integrations you are using and the logs are now aware of the integrations as well.

Both now include links to the documentation and our GitHub issue tracker. This allows you to dive in quickly when you run into troubles with an integration.

Screenshot of the integrations list and an example log message.

Sensor card

Our sensor card has had a style update. We initially got the design from the Lovelace Mini Graph Card and now updated to match the improved new look of that card.

Screenshot of the updated sensor card.

Other noteworthy changes

But wait… there is more! Some other smaller noteworthy changes in this release:

• In the zone editor that was introduced in the previous release, you can now change the location of your home zone. The radius of the home zone cannot be changed yet (we will work on that!), but you can drag the home zone on the map.

• Also an improvement on a feature introduced in the previous release, the state_color option is now also available for other cards, so you can override the defaults of the cards.

• New automations now default to device automations instead of state triggers and service calls. Device automations are so much easier and clearer to create from the UI. You can, of course, still use the old triggers and actions like you are used to.

• In the generated Lovelace we no longer include automations and battery entities. You can find these in the automation configuration panel and the battery in the device configuration page. If you want to have your automations and/or battery in your Lovelace UI, you can always take control and add them.

• Scripts and scenes now have the ability to set a custom icon. Previously, you would have to create a customization to do this, now, you can just set them in your configuration.

  scene:
    - name: Movies
      icon: mdi:movie-open
      entities:
        light.tv_back_light:
          state: on
          brightness: 125
        light.ceiling: off
  

Custom cards

Are you the creator of an awesome custom card for Lovelace?

We have made some changes to Lovelace that might impact your custom card, so be sure to read the blog post on the developers site about this.

New Integrations

• Add Salt Fiber Box device tracker (@bjornorri - #30986) (salt docs) (new-integration)
• Add GDACS feed integration (@exxamalte - #31235) (gdacs docs) (new-integration)
• Add Minecraft Server Integration (@elmurato - #30992) (minecraft_server docs) (new-integration)
• Add MELCloud integration (@vilppuvuorinen - #30712) (melcloud docs) (new-integration)
• Dynalite Integration (@ziv1234 - #27841) (dynalite docs) (new-integration)
• Add initial version of Vilfo Router integration (@ManneW - #31177) (vilfo docs) (new-integration)

New Platforms

• Add totalconnect zones as binary sensors (@austinmroczek - #28712) (totalconnect docs) (new-platform)
• Add Tahoma lock support (@vlebourl - #31311) (tahoma docs) (new-platform)
• Clean up Tahoma smartlock (@vlebourl - #31430) (tahoma docs) (new-platform)
• Add Tado water_heater (@michaelarnauts - #30095) (tado docs) (breaking change) (new-platform)

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.

Read on →

It’s time for the third installment of our revamped community highlights. We got some really great stuff again.

This time I (Paulus) am in charge of writing the community highlights. The reason for this is that the main item involves Frenck’s own work, and he felt weird promoting his own awesome, great, wonderful, enlighting and fabulous work on the revamped Visual Studio Code add-on.

Visual Studio Code add-on updated

Visual Studio Code is a free text editor by Microsoft that works inside your browser. It makes it very easy to manage your configuration.

The add-on used to be only available for x64 devices like intel NUC. With this update, it is now also available for ARM64 devices, including the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 (the 64-bit version).

It comes installed with all the extensions necessary for editing Home Assistant related files:

• Home Assistant Config Helper
• ESPHome VSCode
• YAML checker
• Material Design Icons support

If this is the first time you hear about the Home Assistant Config Helper, it is genius. It will set-up a realtime connection from VS Code directly to your Home Assistant installation so it can offer auto-complete suggestions when editing your configuration. This is pre-configured and works out of the box with the VS Code add-on.

To install the add-on, search for Visual Studio Code in the add-on store.

VS Code add-on part 2

But there is more in the add-on! Home Assistant contains an add-on service registry where add-ons can make their services available for other add-ons without requiring any configuration. The VS Code add-on uses this feature to offer a built-in terminal that has pre-configured tools to connect to the MariaDB add-on and the MQTT add-on.

To try it out, open VS Code, click on the menu button top left -> view -> terminal.

MQTT command-line

This requires the Mosquitto add-on to be installed and an MQTT sensor (instructions).

To publish a message to an MQTT topic:

mosquitto_pub -t home/bedroom/temperature -m 23

Or watch all messages that go through your MQTT broker:

mosquitto_sub -t \#

SQL command-line

This requires the MariaDB add-on to be installed and the recorder configured to use it (instructions).

To query the available tables:

mysql -D homeassistant -e "SELECT entity_id, state, last_updated FROM states LIMIT 0, 10"

Beta time!

Today we are releasing the first beta of Home Assistant Core 0.106. It is packed with awesome features. For a sneak peek of what is coming, check the beta release notes.

I’m personally most excited about the extended safe mode. It will guarantee that the frontend will always load, no matter how broken your configuration is.

Navigation Arrow

On Reddit user /u/Jenova70 showed a super slick navigation arrow that indicates the traffic on his daily commute. Very slick! Instructions can be found in the comments.

I built a physical "navigation arrow" that is changing color based on the estimated time of arrival at work (Waze commute data :) ) from r/homeassistant

Thanks, Jean-Loïc Pouffier & cogneato for sending in this item! 👍

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

• Twitter it! Be sure to mention @home_assistant
• Share it on our Facebook group
• Post it to our subreddit
• Tag @homeasssistant on Instagram
• Or via chat, drop us a line in the #lounge at Discord

See you next edition!

Over the last week, we’ve released some awesome new features and improvements to Home Assistant Companion for Android. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the recent things that we introduced in 1.6 and 1.7.

Actionable notifications

Now you can define action buttons to attach to a notification dynamically. When you click one of those buttons, an event is fired back to Home Assistant so you can take action based on the button chosen.

Here’s an example to check with a user if they want to close the garage door after it has been left open for 30 minutes:

automation:
  - alias: Notify apps when the garage door opens
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: cover.garage_door
      from: 'closed'
      to: 'open'
      for: ‘0:30:00’
    action:
      service: notify.mobile_app_robbies_pixel_5
      data:
        message: "The garage has been left open"
        data:
          image: https://www.home-assistant.io/images/merchandise/shirt-frontpage.png
          actions:
            - action: "close_garage" # The key you are sending for the event
              title: "Close Garage Door" # The button title

  - alias: Close the garage when notification action is tapped
    trigger:
      platform: event
      event_type: mobile_app_notification_action
      event_data:
        action: close_garage
    action:
      service: cover.close_cover
      entity_id: cover.garage_door

After adding these automations, whenever your garage door remains open for 30 minutes, your device will get a notification that looks like this:

When you press that close garage button… your garage will close!

We are planning to expand notifications over the next few versions to continue to match the existing functionality available in the iOS app. That includes things like sending text back to Home Assistant and critical alerts.

Requesting location updates via notification

You can now send a notification with just the message request_location_update and once it reaches your device, it will update its current location in Home Assistant. Be careful using this too much though, as it can drain your battery.

Sensors

New in version 1.7, we have added the first sensors to the app. For now, you will find the following new sensors:

• Battery percentage
• Battery state
• Current Wi-Fi network information

We plan to keep expanding sensors in the near future to add things like cellular status and more.

Docs

Thanks to a few dedicated volunteers and a mad dash, we have a newly refreshed docs website. It’s using the latest version of Docusaurus, which means it’s got a new coat of paint and even dark mode support. So much easier on the eyes!

In addition to the tooling updates, we’ve also begun documenting Android and iOS differences. Keep an eye out for the Android and Apple logos to denote what works where.

Over time we plan to bring Android and iOS as close together, in terms of features and the ways they interact with Home Assistant, as much as possible. To allow using both platforms in the same way, so that users who are using both platforms, or switching platforms, can use them without any modifications.

Finale

In addition to the highlights above, we’ve also killed an impressive amount of bugs. Thanks goes to JBassett, KBerstene, quthla and neopilou for their work on all of the above.

Enjoy the new release! Don’t forget to leave a rating if you like the app, it will help other users find the app.

Thank god, its Friday! For most of us, it means we can tinker with our Home Automation projects again 😃

The second edition of the Community Highlights is here to provide you a fresh source of inspiration this weekend. And, if that is not enough, upgrading to the latest release of Home Assistant Core 0.105 is definitely a recommendation for your list. It introduces tons of new shiny features for you to play with.

So, what changes did you make to your Home Assistant setup this week?

DIY Smart Candles

For starters, if you are looking for a cool DIY project, 3ATIVE shared a YouTube tutorial on how to make sweet little smart candles that work with Home Assistant.

The code for this project is shared on GitHub: Smart-Candles.

Thanks balloob, for submitting this suggestion 👍

Vanlife: Home Assistant on the Road

Creative use of Home Assistant; we’ve seen quite a few vehicles in the past being fitted with Home Assistant (including boats). Zane Claes (aka Technically Wizardry), shares his story on building a vanlife van with a touch of home automation magic.

In the past few months on the road, he built out a Home Assistant installation that’s geared to work in a car/vehicle. A full blog post explains how he integrated with On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) to read out the status of the van, implemented a dash camera (that doubles as a security camera), temperature sensors and the monitoring cellular internet usage.

View this post on Instagram

All packed up: we departed on our #vanlife adventure today

A post shared by Zane Claes (@zaneclaes) on Sep 14, 2019 at 2:53pm PDT

You can read Zane’s full blog post here:

https://www.technicallywizardry.com/iot-cars-vans-home-automation/

He also made his Home Assistant configuration publicly available on GitHub.

Thanks, Robbie Trencheny & cgtobi for sending in this item in! 👍

An auto-generating Lovelace UI theme

Dwain Scheeren shared a preview of his Lovelace theme on the Home Assistant Community Forum. The cool think about this theme, is that it automatically generates itself!

Unfortunately, the source code for this isn’t available yet, however, Dwain wrote on the forums that he is planning on releasing it soon. We are looking forward to that, Dwain!

You can follow the development of this theme on the dedicated topic for it on our Community Forum.

Visualizing everything in Grafana

Ivana Huckova had a Hack Day at Grafana (the company she works for) and decided to work on her home to visualize everything (in Grafana, of course).

Today is a Hack Day 👩‍💻 at Grafana and I have decided to hack our home 🏠. I am going to be setting up @home_assistant, exporting metrics to @PrometheusIO and visualising everything in @grafana. Everything is going to be running at @Raspberry_Pi. Follow my progress.❤️

— Ivana Huckova (@ivanahuckova) February 7, 2020

Click on the tweet above to see the full thread of all tweets she did that day.

Oh, Ivana? Did you know we have Grafana available as an add-on? You can find it in the Home Assistant add-on store.

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

• Twitter it! Be sure to mention @home_assistant
• Share it on our Facebook group
• Post it to our subreddit
• Tag @homeasssistant on Instagram
• Or via chat, drop us a line in the #lounge at Discord

See you next edition!

In case you have missed it, we decided to change the names we use here at Home Assistant, you can read all about it in this blog post.

Therefore, this is release 0.105 of the Home Assistant Core!

The old “States UI” is now deprecated

In June 2018, we released Home Assistant 0.72, which introduced Lovelace. It became our official default user interface in January 2019, with the release of Home Assistant 0.86.

This means, it is now over a year ago that Lovelace was officially introduced as a replacement for the states UI, so it is time to say goodbye to the old states UI. This release deprecates it and in version 0.107, the states UI will be removed from Home Assistant completely.

If you are not using Lovelace yet, we advise you to switch to it today. Lovelace is, by default, almost the same as old states UI with the bonus of a lot of flexibility, if you want it.

In addition to this, all configuration options for the States UI are deprecated as well. Please be sure to read the breaking changes to see if you have options that need to be removed from your configuration.

Safe mode

We are humans, and we do make typos. However, if we make a typo in our configuration, we might end up with Home Assistant being completely unreachable. That really is not helpful. You lose access to Home Assistant and have to do a deep dive via other methods to find out: Why did this happen?

This release introduces a “Safe mode” for Home Assistant. If during startup, Home Assistant has problems reading your configuration (for whatever reason), it will still continue to start using bits and pieces from the configuration of the last time it did start.

When this happens, Home Assistant will start in “Safe mode”. In this mode, nothing is loaded, but it does give you access to the Home Assistant frontend, settings and add-ons (for example, the VSCode or Configurator add-on). This gives you the possibility to correct the issue and restart Home Assistant to re-try.

Screenshot of Home Assistant started in safe mode.

Please note, that this feature isn’t perfect yet, and only works if Home Assistant was able to start successfully, after upgrading to this release, at least once.

We believe this feature makes Home Assistant more robust, easier to use and more forgiving, even if you made a mistake.

Revamped Supervisor panel

Remember we used to have a Hass.io panel? Well, with the new naming for Home Assistant, it has been renamed to the Supervisor panel.

So @ludeeus has been busy! He rewrote the entire Supervisor panel to match our current frontend technologies and added some really slick new visual elements to it.

Thanks, @ludeeus, it looks incredible!

Screenshot of the revamped Supervisor panel.

The new icons on the add-ons really make the add-on dashboard & store stand out. Also, new status indicators on the add-on cards make it easy to spot add-ons that need to be upgraded, or in case of visiting the add-on store, are installed already.

Please note, you need to be running Home Assistant Core 0.105 to see the new icons.

Configuration panel changes

In this release, we started the overhaul of the configuration panel. We have accumulated a lot of functionality in the configuration section in the last releases; now, it is time to bring it all together.

In upcoming releases, we will make changes to make things easier to find and connect the different elements with each other, making it easier to navigate around. For now, we implemented configuration sections, a new tabbed UI, as well as some visual tweaks.

Also updated, the device page to show the automations, scripts, and scenes a device is used in and added the ability to create new ones with the device easily.

Screenshot of the new device info page.

In the more info dialog of entities, we changed the settings button to open the entity settings dialog, and added a related tab as well! This allows you to can see what device, integration, area, scenes, scripts, automations, entities, and groups belong to that entity.

For scenes, scripts and automations that are created in the UI, an edit button is added, right in the more info dialog so you can easily edit it without searching for it.

Header & Footer for the entities card

Two new types are added to the entities card, a header and a footer. At this moment, we have two options for these, an image and buttons.

It allows you to create some very cool looking cards, but also provides you the option to put buttons in the bottom of the card. Very useful for buttons that activate scenes, for example.

Screenshot of the new header and footer for entities card.

Improved zones editor

A brand new zone editor! You can no longer find your zones in the integration list, but they moved to their own section in the configuration panel.

In this new editor, you can move your zones with drag and drop and even change the size of your zones by dragging the circle.

Adding, and removing zones or changing the name of a zone, is now easier than ever.

Screen recording of the zones editor.

The new editor will only work for zones that are created in the UI, zones that are set up in configuration.yaml are read-only. Additionally, if you define zones in your YAML configuration, please be aware that setting a name is now required.

As an extra added bonus, a new service was added: zone.reload. This service allows you to reload your zone configuration without restarting Home Assistant.

Icons no longer change color based on state

A change that is not really apparent at first, but you probably notice it sooner or later.

The entities card no longer changes the colors of icons based on states, except for lights.

Reasoning comes from a request, to make icons to become yellow for all types when an entity is active, and not for just a few entity types. However, this would get out of control very quickly, as shown in the screenshot below.

Yellow icon color on everything, isn't the solution either.

So, that is why we disabled it, by default, for all entity types, except lights. However, we did add a new option: state_color. Using this option, you can decide if you want to old behavior back, add it to more entity types or maybe even disable it for lights too!

Other cards will now display icons from more domains with an active color.

Other Lovelace and frontend improvements

There is a lot more done on Lovelace, more than we can mention, some other highlights:

• In generated mode, entities that start with the name of the area or group they are in will be shown without the name of the area or group. So if you have a light named “Living room lights” that is in the area “Living room” they will be shown as “lights” in a card with the header “Living room”.

• We no longer show device_tracker entities in generated mode. We advise you to bind one or more device trackers to a person that will be shown in the UI.

• We added many accessibility features to Lovelace; you can navigate almost everything with the tab key. We will continue to work on this so that people with disabilities can also enjoy Home Assistant.

For a full list of changes, see the Lovelace changelog.

Even more frontend improvements:

• Logbook panel is a lot quicker
• Maps no longer fit zones, but only entities
• ZHA panel now supports binding devices to groups
• Ability to add new areas on the device page
• Material Design Icons are updated to v4.8.95
• A lot, like a really large amount, of bug fixes!

In other news

This section is now empty, but don’t be sad! The in “In other news” section now has its own dedicated blog post, which we will put out regularly:

Want to read the first edition? Community Highlights, first edition!

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant? Send us your Community Highlight suggestion, so that we can include it in the next blog post.

New Integrations

• Add search integration (@balloob - #30511) (search docs) (new-integration)
• Add Safe Mode (@balloob - #30723) (frontend docs) (http docs) (safe_mode docs) (breaking change) (new-integration)
• Add Derivative component (@afaucogney - #26456) (derivative docs) (new-integration)
• Add sighthound integration (@robmarkcole - #28824) (sighthound docs) (new-integration)
• Add Garmin Connect integration (@cyberjunky - #30792) (garmin_connect docs) (new-integration)
• Add Gammu based local SMS notifications (@ocalvo - #31233) (sms docs) (new-integration)
• Add OPNSense device tracker (@mtreinish - #26834) (opnsense docs) (new-integration)

New Platforms

• Template alarm panel (@alistairg - #30487) (template docs) (new-platform)
• ZHA cover device support (@billyburly - #30639) (zha docs) (new-platform)

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.

Read on →

Back in 2015 and in 2016, we tried starting a series of blog posts called “Community Highlight”, a few times, a blog post appeared about the amazingly awesome stuff our community does with Home Assistant.

Recently, that idea was picked up again by adding an “In Other News” section to the release notes on each Home Assistant release. However, the development pace of Home Assistant is high! As a result, that section is always hidden all the way down somewhere in those release notes. A bit unfortunate, since there is so much cool stuff to be found!

So, today, we present you: the Community Highlights, the first edition!

Technically, not the first, but we rebooted this series, right?

We hope you enjoy this, please let us know in the comments below!
Or join us for a little chat in our #lounge at Discord

../Frenck

A different take on designing your frontend

Mattias Persson showed an interesting alternative approach to the design of his Lovelace UI. It looks fabulous; we don’t even know where to start explaining, check the video below for an impression:

Mattias created a post in the Community Forum with all the details, including more screenshots, the things he used and links to his GitHub repository. Everything you’d need if you wanted to replicate this for your own use. Thanks Mattias!

Smart toilet roll holder

Com’on, we all know what it is like to be in the restroom, taking a number two, discovering that you are out of paper.

For the-berik, on our subreddit, it was reason enough to do something about it. He converted his toilet roll holder into a smart version using an ESP8266 chip, a load cell and ESPHome, allowing Home Assistant to know how many rolls of toilet paper are left on the holder.

Click on the video below to see how it works.

Smart toiletroll holder with Esphome and Homeassistant from r/homeassistant

Smart mailbox sensor, the easy way

Another one from our subreddit, where choketube shares his pride for the mailbox sensor he created. He placed a Hue motion sensor inside his mailbox that will trigger if it is opened, really smart and simple!

He demonstrates his mailbox in the video below.

Proud of my new Automation - Hue Sensor in my Mailbox from r/homeassistant

Got a tip for the next edition?

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant?

Click here to send us your Community Highlight suggestion.

Also, don’t forget to share your creations with us via Social Media:

• Twitter it! Be sure to mention @home_assistant
• Share it on our Facebook group
• Post it to our subreddit
• Tag @homeasssistant on Instagram
• Or via chat, drop us a line in the #lounge at Discord

See you next edition!

Over the last few years, we have accumulated a wide range of projects under our umbrella. We started out as a Python application (called Home Assistant) and later added an operating system (HassOS) and management system (Hass.io Supervisor) to it, to allow users to easily manage their homes, but also to provide a system that is easy to keep up to date.

These different projects all come together in Hass.io. A system that is secure, easy to keep up to date and runs the most powerful home automation platform in the world. But having Hass.io and Home Assistant has been confusing for a lot of people, especially for newcomers to our great community.

The next step in making Home Assistant simpler is by making our naming simpler. It’s our goal to make private home automation accessible to everyone. And as part of that, people need to know how to refer to it.

Home Assistant is a home automation operating system for your home. And to make this message clear, we’re renaming Hass.io to Home Assistant, and Home Assistant to Home Assistant Core.

Note: this is only about renaming projects and does not impact any functionality of any of the projects.

If you run Home Assistant today in a Docker container or run it inside a Python virtual environment, you are running “Home Assistant Core”. Home Assistant Core will forever remain a standalone application like it is today. We promise.

This name change is a huge thing! Not just a big thing we all need to get used to, but even bigger for everything that needs to be renamed! It definitely takes a couple of weeks to get the main parts re-branded.

So bear with us while we do so.

Paulus

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant Companion for Android 1.5.0. This is a great release with some cool new features and new collaborators joining in on the fun!

Big thanks in this release goes to our Android lead @JBassett who has been squashing a ton of bugs, added support for the status bar to adopt the application theme and fixed finding existing Home Assistant instances on the network.

A cool new feature that has been added is a new home screen widget. Use it to quickly trigger your favorite scripts, scenes or any other service in Home Assistant. Thanks to @KBerstene for the initial implementation and @JBassett for polishing the configuration screen.

For all you people that want to run the Home Assistant app on a tablet on the wall, good news! Thanks to @neopilou there is now a new option to make the app full screen.

To get the most out of our apps for Android and iOS, check the Home Assistant Companion website.

Enjoy the new release! Don’t forget to leave a rating if you like the app, it will help other users find the app.

The first release of the new decade! Happy New Year!

We are starting this new year with a packed release! So let us dive in!

• Improved entity handling on startup
• Ignore discovered devices & services
• Reload all the input things & bye generated groups
• Add a device to Lovelace
• Multi-select entity management
• ZHA configuration panel improvements
• Removing your Lovelace configuration
• In other news
• New Integrations
• New Platforms
• Breaking Changes
• Beta Fixes
• All changes

Improved entity handling on startup

We are now restoring all entities, stored in the registry, on Home Assistant startup.

During the startup of Home Assistant, all your configured integrations are loaded. Each of those integrations results in one or more devices and entities. However, there was a catch!

The loading of some integrations could take a while, which caused some entities not to be available immediately. Sometimes, this affected multiple things, like missing devices in HomeKit/Google/Alexa or those big red boxes in our Lovelace UI. We are sure, at some point, we’ve all experienced that.

As of this release, all these entities, if registered in our entity registry, will be restored as “unavailable”. That allows other parts of our system to use them immediately, solving a lot of common issues during startup.

These restored entities can be differentiated from normal “unavailable” entities by an additional state attribute added to those entities: “restored”.

Screenshot of a removing an unavailable entity.

As a result, entities will no longer “disappear”, so restored and unavailable entities are removable, as shown in the screenshot above. Please note that, if an integration provides an unavailable entity, the providing integration needs to be removed first, or else, those entities can not be deleted.

Ignore discovered devices & services

Got that one device that gets discovered over and over again?

It is now possible to ignore a specific discovered device with a single click!

Screenshot of a discovered Hue bridge.

It requires the integration to be updated to support this. For this release, the Hue, Axis, deCONZ, WLED and HomeKit integrations are updated to support this new feature.

Reload all the input things & bye generated groups

All input_* integrations now have a reload service to reload your YAML configuration for these integrations, without the need to restart Home Assistant.

Furthermore, time to say bye-bye, to all generated entity groups (group.all_*). Chances are, you have never heard of those because they were hidden. However, if you rely on those groups for your automations, you need to adjust those automations. Check out the breaking changes section for more information.

Add a device to Lovelace

We added a button to the device page to add all entities of a device to Lovelace in a blip! Home Assistant suggests cards based on the type of entities the device provides so that you can add them to a view of your choice instantly.

If you are using Lovelace in YAML mode, you still can use this new feature. The generated YAML can be copied and pasted into your configuration file.

Screenshot of a card suggestion for a light device.

This same functionality is also added to the unused entities page of Lovelace.

Multi-select entity management

Entity management has never been easier; It now allows for changing multiple entities at once. Select multiple entities and remove, enable or disable them with one click.

Screenshot of the entities configuration page with multi selection.

ZHA configuration panel improvements

@dmulcahey did a lot of work on the ZHA config panel this release.

The navigation for the ZHA configuration panel has been redesigned to provide a better user experience on mobile and desktop.

As part of the redesign, full Zigbee group management has been added, allowing you to create and manage Zigbee groups right from the UI.

Screenshot of the ZHA configuration panel.

In a future releases, the ability to bind devices directly to groups, will be added as well.

Removing your Lovelace configuration

Want to start your Lovelace configuration from scratch? Or go back to the automatically generated Lovelace interface?

Now you can by clearing the Lovelace configuration in the raw configuration editor and saving it.

Screenshot of the remove Lovelace confirmation dialog.

In other news

Meanwhile, HassOS 3.8 got released!

HassOS Release-3 build 8 (Stable) released today. Changelog: https://t.co/kXOXNPldJF - Next we start the first 4.0 Beta builds include the N2 support and Linux LT 5.4

— Pascal Vizeli (@pvizeli) January 13, 2020

Besides the release of HassOS 3.8, the first beta version of HassOS 4.0 is now available as well. This beta release adds support for Hardkernel’s ODROID-N2!

The ODROID-N2 is a great and powerful alternative for the Raspberry Pi.

Custom now playing poster Lovelace card

Brad Crc made this impressive demo of setting up a custom now playing poster card in Lovelace floor plans. This allows you to show currently playing media in your floor plan!

Bas showing his Lovelace theme on his setup

Bas Nijholt kept seeing his own theme popping up on Reddit, so he decided it was time for him to show off his Lovelace dashboard, featuring this lovely theme.

I keep seeing my own theme on Reddit, so now it's my turn! [OC] from r/homeassistant

His theme is publicly available on GitHub and so is his config.

New Integrations

• Add Elgato Key Light integration (@frenck - #29592) (elgato docs) (new-integration)
• Add IntesisHome Climate Platform (@jnimmo - #25364) (intesishome docs) (new-integration)
• Add Signal Messenger integration (@bbernhard - #28537) (signalmessenger docs) (new-integration)
• Revert Tahoma removal (@balloob - #29840) (tahoma docs) (new-integration)
• Add GIOS integration (@bieniu - #28719) (gios docs) (new-integration)
• Add local_ip component (@issacg - #29973) (localip docs) (new-integration)
• Add KEF speakers integration (@basnijholt - #28959) (kef docs) (new-integration)
• Add Sentry component (@dcramer - #30422) (sentry docs) (new-integration)
• Add surepetcare component (@benleb - #24426) (surepetcare docs) (new-integration)
• Add Brother Printer integration (@bieniu - #30359) (brother docs) (new-integration)
• Add TMB sensor (@alemuro - #27964) (tmb docs) (new-integration)
• Add Stookalert integration (@fwestenberg - #30306) (stookalert docs) (new-integration)

New Platforms

• Add battery sensor to iCloud (@Quentame - #29818) (icloud docs) (new-platform)
• Add light support to Velbus integration (@brefra - #30323) (velbus docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for v1 and v2 HomeKit fans. (@Jc2k - #30503) (homekit_controller docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for homekit air quality sensors (@Jc2k - #30510) (homekit_controller docs) (new-platform)
• Add pilight dimmer as light component (@Trekky12 - #30107) (pilight docs) (new-platform)

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, that is helping us a lot!

Read on →

It’s been a busy week with a lot of announcements around IoT standards, so I thought I would do a quick round up of them, and how it might impact Home Assistant users.

New IoT standard announced

As it’s been a while, the industry has announced yet a new effort to create a new IoT standard called Project Connected Home over IP. I think that there are a few interesting bits to this standard:

The standard will be royalty-free. This is big, as it means that it will be easy for companies to build products. Take, for example, Homekit, which is a great IP-based local standard. Homekit has strict licensing and royalties, which prevented it from widespread adoption.

The new standard specification will be written in conjunction with building an open source implementation of the standard. Once it’s all finished, we’ll be able to integrate this implementation into Home Assistant.

Finally, Apple, Google and Amazon are seriously involved, even contributing their own IoT standards to help bootstrap this specification. This significantly increases the odds of them also integrating it into their products. Since their products are everywhere, it means that more companies might incorporate the standard and it can get widespread adoption.

But don’t hold your breath. Developing a standard takes time. They aim for a draft to be released at the end of 2020. And that’s just the specification. Not any of the devices built with it. If (and that’s a big IF) everything works out, expect this standard to get into your home in 2022.

Read on →