Another special, themed, release inbound!
It seems like @bdraco is unstoppable; he just keeps going on improving
the performance of the Core. I truly admire him for the work he has been
delivering the past months, however, that is not the point of this release.
Sorry, @bdraco!
This release is about: Automations & Scripts! Yes!!!
A long, long time bug with automation triggering has been resolved, but not
only that, @pnbruckner went all-in by extending the automation/script engine
even more.
Adding repeat, a chooser and running modes (with cool down possibilities as a side-effect).
I’ve been playing with these features on my home already and I’ve
changed/improved quite a few things. For real, @pnbruckner, thank you!
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
Ludeeus joins Nabu Casa
Today we’re happy to announce that @ludeeus is joining Nabu Casa to work
full-time on Home Assistant!
Ludeeus has been a core contributor for a long time working on the Supervisor
panel and different bits of the frontend. He is, however, mainly known as the
creator of the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS).
We’re looking forward to seeing what he can do now that he is able to focus
full-time on Home Assistant.
Welcome @ludeeus!
Automations & Scripts
This release brings changes to our automations and scripts. Before we start with
this all, please note, that the action part of an automation is a script
sequence.
So, all discussed below, apply to both scripts and automations.
Before diving in: All automation and script changes, have been driven by
@pnbruckner! It is awesome! Thanks!
Automations & Scripts: Bug fix
There has been an issue with our automations for a long time already, which
you actually might have never noticed. It is kinda hard to explain, so this
needs an example.
Consider the following automation:
automation:
- alias: "Example"
description: "On button press, turn on the light bulb for 10 seconds."
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.button
to: "on"
action:
- service: light.turn_on
entity_id: light.bulb
- delay:
seconds: 10
- service: light.turn_off
entity_id: light.bulb
This automation turns on a light bulb when the button is pressed, and after
10 seconds, it turns off the light bulb again. A fairly basic automation, which
does exactly what one would expect, except when a button is pressed twice.
So it takes 10 seconds for the bulb to turn off, what if you press the button
again after 5 seconds?
Please, think about this for a moment…
What actually happened before 0.113, is that the light bulb would turn off
immediately! Chances are, you didn’t expect that.
Let’s explain this: So the first button push, turns on the light, and the delay
is active for 10 seconds. The second button push, done after 5 seconds, is
actually not handled, however, it does cause the delay of the first run to
cancel itself and continues to run the rest of the actions/sequence,
causing the light to turn off immediately!
That bug, has been fixed. As of this release, the second button press wouldn’t
do anything and the light will now turn off after 10 seconds, which the first
button push has triggered.
Automations & Scripts: Running modes
With the above-mentioned bug fix, it now becomes possible to introduce new
running modes for both scripts and automations. It allows you to control
what happens if actions of a previous trigger are still running.
Considering the light bulb example in the bug fix paraph above, it shows
the default mode: single, which means: Do not run and ignore the trigger
if a previous action of the same automation is still running.
Besides the default single mode, the following modes are now available:
| Mode |
Description |
single |
Do not start a new run, if running already. |
restart |
Start a new run, after stopping the previous run. |
queued |
Start a new run after all previous runs complete. |
parallel |
Start a new, independent, run in parallel with previous runs. |
Automation/script running modes visual explained.
For the queued and parallel modes, an additional parameter max is available
to control the maximum number of runs that are awaiting each other. When
omitting this setting, it would default to 10.
To clarify a little more, remember the first example in the bug fix paragraph
where the light bulb would turn on for 10 seconds after a button press?
This would make every button press within the 10 seconds, restart the countdown
again:
automation:
- trigger:
- ...
mode: restart
action:
- ...
And this example, would turn on/off the light, for 10 seconds twice, if the
button was pressed after 5 seconds.
automation:
- trigger:
- ...
mode: queued
action:
- ...
The modes are also available for automations and scripts in the frontend UI:
Screenshot of running modes in the frontend.
This is a powerful feature, which allows you to control how automations
and scripts are run in ways you could not do before.
More information about the running mode can be found in the automations
and scripts documentation.
Automations & Scripts: Repeats
A brand new action is made to allow for repeating (also called loops)
part of your automations or scripts.
The new repeat feature can be used in three different ways:
-
Counted repeat: Control how many times to repeat a sequence.
-
While loop: Keep repeating as long the condition(s) is/are met.
-
Repeat until: Runs at least once, and decides after that to repeat until the condition(s) is/are met.
For example, this would spam your phone with the same message 10 times:
# Send notification spam to phone
script:
phone_spam:
sequence:
repeat:
count: 10
sequence:
- service: notify.frenck
data:
message: Ding dong! Someone is at the door!
More information about repeats can be found in the documentation.
Automations & Scripts: Chooser
Got multiple automations for that single light to turn it on/off? Or multiple
automations/scripts to handle the different buttons on some remote?
You can now combine them using a chooser. The chooser is able to pick the
first sequence that matches a condition, or if none match, run a default
sequence.
This means each individual sequence in the chooser is paired with its own set
of conditions.
automation:
- alias: "Example"
description: "On button press, choose the right thing to run."
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id:
- binary_sensor.button1
- binary_sensor.button2
- binary_sensor.button3
action:
- choose:
- conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.button1
state: "on"
sequence:
- service: light.turn_on
entity_id: light.bulb
- conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.button2
state: "on"
sequence:
- service: light.turn_off
entity_id: light.bulb
default:
- service: notify.frenck
data:
message: Some other unknown button was pressed!
In the above example, pushing button1, turns on the bulb; while button2 turns
it off again. The third button isn’t handled by any of the conditions in
the chooser and the (optional) default is run instead.
The chooser can be used as an if/else statement, where the default acts as
the else. Or even as if/else if/else statement as shown in the YAML
example above.
More information about the chooser can be found in the documentation.
Automations & Scripts: Sub-second precision
Thanks to a bunch of optimizations done this release, which is discussed later
in this blog post, we now have sub-second precision available to our delays.
This precision is helpful in case you want a delay that is less than a second,
for example, 500 milliseconds.
An example script that toggles the light every 500 milliseconds 10 times.
script:
blink_light:
sequence:
repeat:
count: 10
sequence:
- service: light.toggle
entity_id: light.bulb
- delay:
milliseconds: 500
Automations & Scripts: Bonus! Cool down
An often requested feature is to allow for a cool down time on an automation.
What that entails is setting a limit on the run of an automation or script
to a certain time frame.
While this is not a feature specifically added or build, it can be achieved
now using the new run modes.
automation:
- alias: "Doorbell cool down"
description: "Prevent multiple message being send when spamming the doorbell."
mode: single # Which is the default
trigger:
- platform: state
state: binary_sensor.doorbell
to: "on"
action:
- service: notify.frenck
data:
message: Ding dong! Someone is at the door!
- delay:
seconds: 10
The single run mode of this automation, combined with the last delay of 10
seconds, prevents this automation from being ran more often than only once
every 10 seconds. This is ideal for things like a doorbell.
MDI icons updated
It has taken some time for us to upgrade to the newest version of
Material Design Icons, 5.3.45, there was a reason for that,
version 5.0.45 contains a lot of breaking changes.
We wanted to handle these well, so it took some time.
A lot of icons are renamed, and some are removed. In this release, we included
all new, and all removed icons and we made sure the new and the old name work.
If you use an icon that is renamed or removed we will show a warning in the log,
in version 0.115, this conversion path will be removed and removed icons and
old names will no longer work.
So make sure to check your logs if you need to adjust any of your used MDI
icons.
Most of the removed MDI icons can be found in Simple icons,
which is available as a custom integration.
Please note: It is possible that custom integrations (also known as
custom components) use deprecated icons. These can throw warnings that need
to be addressed in the custom integration.
Script and Scene editor updates
The UI to edit or create a script has been updated, besides support for the
new running mode, you can now give your scripts a custom icon and ID from the UI.
Especially the ID is helpful, you no longer have to search your states for
a long numeric entity id that matches your script.
Screenshot of a script ID, icon and run mode.
The support for setting a custom icon, is also added to the scenes editor.
More speed optimizations
After, the well-received, speed optimization done in the 0.111 & 0.112 releases,
the saga towards improving resource usage and responsiveness of the platform
continues.
This time we have both @bdraco and @pvizeli to thank for some great
optimizations that will reduce the CPU usage of Home Assistant.
First of all, if you are running a Home Assistant OS, Container or
Supervised installation, then your Home Assistant instance will run on
Python 3.8. No action from your end is needed for this.
It is not just a normal Python version, but @pvizeli has worked on a highly
optimized Python version for Home Assistant, hitting performance improvements
that can reach up to 40%! He wrote a more technical article about this on
our developers blog.
Then @bdraco did his part on adding some improvements to the Core. He
changed a lot of handling around event & state listeners, in such a way
less things trigger unneeded, which reduces processing when states change.
This lowers CPU usage and improves response speed when you have many state
changes happening in a short time span, or when having a lot of automations.
Also, all time listeners now have microsecond precision as they are scheduled
on the internal event loop, instead of the previous situation when it relied on
the internal clock that triggered every second.
This release should drastically lower the CPU usage of Home Assistant for
most installations.
Other noteworthy changes
- Philips Hue groups can now be turned on/off in the integration options via the UI.
- The OpenZWave (beta) got 3 new services. Two of those are for
setting user codes on locks. The other allows for setting device-specific
configuration parameters.
- After a moment of absence, @yosilevy is back!
He has been the one fixing all kinds of RTL issues we had in Home Assistant,
with his return, this release is full of RTL tweaks again!
New Integrations
Three new integration added this release:
New Platforms
The following integration got support for a new platform:
-
OpenZWave has now support for window covers, added by [@Michsior14]
Integrations now available to set up from the UI
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
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 →
Screenshot of the Foreground Service.
Screenshot of Doze Mode.
Screenshot of the Manage Sensors.
Screenshot of Sensor Management.
Screenshot of NFC.
Screenshot of the Template Widget.
Screenshot of App Theme selection.
So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?
Screenshot of the new dark mode and theme settings.
Screenshot of the new automation features available in the UI.
Screenshot of Z-Wave device information available in the UI.
Screenshot of the Geocoded Sensor.
Screenshot of Biometric Unlock.
Screenshot of example triggers and service calls for notifications.
Screenshot of the new date/time picker.
Screenshot of the logbook showing who made the change.
Screenshot of the MQTT configure button.
Screenshot of a ZHA device.
Screenshot of the new home for logs & information.
