Home Assistant

Cloud Update

Paulus Schoutsen

We’re happy to announce that the Home Assistant skill is now available in Canada, UK, Germany, India and Australia! Check it out in the Amazon Alexa Skill store.

In the meanwhile, we have also been working on the Google Assistant integration. We passed the first verification and are now working with Google to do the final verification. Stay tuned!

In less than 2 weeks the open beta is about to expire. We’re still working on setting up the company and payment system so we can start accepting payments. Until we do, Home Assistant Cloud will remain free.

0.63: Entity Registry, SQL Sensor, Mercedes cars

Paulus Schoutsen

Date set for dropping Python 3.4 support

As announced in October, we’re going to drop Python 3.4 support in 2018. We’ve now decided that in two releases, 0.65, the minimum Python version that will be supported is bumped to 3.5.3. This won’t impact most users. You are already fine if you’re using Hass.io, the latest Debian stable (Stretch) or a derivative of that (Raspbian, Ubuntu).

Entity Registry

This release introduces the entity registry. The entity registry allows integrations to reserve entity IDs. This means that we’ll automatically grant an entity ID to a device. It’s reserved so that no other device will ever get that entity ID. It also means that as a user, you will be able to customize the entity IDs for these devices.

For an integration to leverage the entity registry, it needs to define a unique ID for each of their entities. A unique ID is something that we can uniquely identify the device and that is not configurable. So a serial number and mac address are ok, IP addresses or names are not.

Examples of integrations that have unique IDs defined in this release are Z-Wave, Hue, Nest, LIFX, Sonos, Apple TV.

To update the entity ID that will be assigned to your device, update <config>/entity_registry.yaml and restart Home Assistant (reloading on the fly is planned for a future release).

The entity registry will assign an entity ID the first time that a device is seen. This should be the same entity ID as it always was before. If this is not the case, update the registration entity to change it back to the old entity ID.

We’re planning a lot of cool stuff around the entity registry. Stay tuned!

New Platforms

Release 0.63.1 - February 12

Release 0.63.2 - February 14

Release 0.63.3 - February 17

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.

Read on →

Disabling Disqus comments

Paulus Schoutsen

Last week, starting with the release of Home Assistant 0.62, we switched to using our community forums for comments on our blog posts. By doing so, people are able to use their existing Home Assistant community accounts to comment on our blog posts and engage with one another. It has been easier for our users to stay in the loop with one less channel to keep track off.

Previously, we were using the free version of Disqus to power comments on our blog. After the switch, to preserve the old comments, we decided to keep Disqus active on the older blog post pages. However, today we decided to turn them off.

Today Disqus changed their advertisement strategy and turned on irrelevant graphical advertisement above and below the comment thread (screenshot). On a phone, it took so much screen real estate that it filled the whole page with an advertisement for weight loss milk. Previously, Disqus had advertisements in an unobtrusive way: showing suggested content a visitor might also be interesed in.

Today we have switched all blog posts to the new commenting system and are no longer serving Disqus comments. We are exploring ways to restore the old comments.

0.62: MyChevy, Iota and Venstar Thermostat

Paulus Schoutsen

Second release of the year and it’s buzzing on GitHub. This release we had 70 people contribute code. We’ve also managed to finally get our PR count below a 100 open PRs again. A lot of cool stuff still waiting to make it to a future Home Assistant release.

I want to give a shout out to @martinhjelmare and @frenck. Martin is doing an amazing job at code reviews and Franck has been kicking ass with Hass.io add-ons and keeping track of our documentation PRs. Thanks for this amazing work!

MyChevy

With this new integration by @sdague you are able to keep an eye on your Chevy Bolt EV. Keep track if your car is plugged in, the battery stats and the range it is currently capable of driving. Hip!

New Platforms

Release 0.62.1 - January 30

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.

Read on →

Clarification about Emulated Hue

Paulus Schoutsen

There are some misconceptions floating around about the future of the Emulated Hue component and I would like to set the record straight. The Emulated Hue component is not going to be removed nor will we ever remove any functionality from Home Assistant to push you to support the Home Assistant project by subscribing to the Community Support Package.

The reason people are concerned about the future of the Emulated Hue component is because of a poor choice of words in a deprecation message. This message was introduced a year ago when we deprecated the config option type: alexa for the Emulated Hue component:

Alexa type is deprecated and will be removed in a future version

That config option should never have been called type: alexa but instead have been called mode: legacy. If you think about it, why would emulating something even have different modes it emulates based on the consumer? That means that one of the two emulation modes is incorrect.

The old implementation was not 100% correct. It was correct enough to work with Alexa (the original target) but not with Google Home. When fixing Emulated Hue we added type: alexa to re-enable the old implementation so that people did not have to go through the trouble to re-add their Alexa devices. The option was deprecated to indicate that we would remove the incorrect emulation in the future. However, we forgot about actually following through with that.

The mistake we made was calling the correct mode google_home although it had nothing to do with Google Home. It confused people and they kept adding type: alexa to their configuration, triggering the deprecation warning.

The warning will be updated starting Home Assistant 0.62 and will also include a link to this blog post.

More info:

0.61: Coinbase, Discogs, iGlo, Sochain

Fabian Affolter

Almost a 100 contributors to this release 🎉 That’s what you get when you skip a release. It’s a little late but “Happy New Year” and welcome to 0.61 the first release 2018.

This release contain some backward-incompatible changes. Please make sure that you check the section below if you are running into trouble.

Assistant configs

We made a mistake in the foundation of both the Google Assistant and Alexa integrations: they were storing their config inside customize. This is not the right place and we moved them to be under the components itself. See the backward-incompatible changes section on how to migrate.

Hass.io updates

@pvizeli has made it easier to create and restore snapshots for Hass.io by calling the new services. This way it will be easy to automate the creation of a snapshot at night. The updater has also been fixed and will now report on new versions of Hass.io that are available.

Improved loading speed

@amelchio has made startup of Home Assistant even faster. All service descriptions are now loaded only when needed by the frontend instead of during startup. This did mean that we had to enforce our service convention. We found a few platforms that didn’t follow this and they have been updated:

todoist.new_task -> calendar.todoist_new_task

snapcast.snapcast_snapshot -> media_player.snapcast_snapshot
snapcast.snapcast_restore -> media_player.snapcast_restore

mopar.remote_command -> sensor.mopar_remote_command

broadlink.learn_command_192_168_0_107 -> switch.broadlink_learn_command_192_168_0_107
broadlink.send_packet_192_168_0_107 -> switch.broadlink_send_packet_192_168_0_107

New Platforms

Release 0.61.1 - January 16

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.

Read on →

Thank You

Fabian affolter

2017 is almost over and this means it’s time to do a little recap of our 2017. This was a great year for Home Assistant. Again, we were able to stick to our bi-weekly release cycle. There were 25 releases over the year and each release included the work of around 60 contributors.

We got 10.000 stars on GitHub, reached 10.000 commits in the main repo (over 4300 were made in 2017), got a Thomas-Krenn award, participated in Hacktoberfest, we have now almost 1000 integrations (the exact number is 938), we moved to Discord and we are up to over 2 million pageviews per month on our forum. Beside that we announced the Home Assistant cloud and have regular Home Assistant Podcasts.

We also do not want to forget to mention Hass.io and all the great Hass.io add-ons.

Uff, what a year…Thank you, dear community for being so helpful, supportive and awesome 🙇.

A very big thanks goes out to the developers of the Python language and all the open source libraries and tools that Home Assistant depends on. You are the foundation for our success and all of you can be proud of yourself.

We would also like to thanks all the companies that offer their services for free to open source projects. Without these we would not be able to operate at our speed or scale. Thank you GitHub, TravisCI, CloudFlare, Discord and Discourse!

Some of us are taking a break and spending some quality time with family and loved ones.

Stay tuned for more Home Assistant awesomeness in 2018. We will keep the pace but first: Happy New Year!

– Home Assistant Organization

Introducing Home Assistant Cloud

Paulus Schoutsen

Today we’re introducing the next step in the Home Assistant saga: the Home Assistant Cloud. The goal of the Home Assistant Cloud is to bridge the gap between your local Home Assistant instance and services in the cloud while delivering the maximum possible security and privacy.

The first service that is supported via the Home Assistant Cloud is the Amazon Alexa Smart Home skill. This integration will allow you to control all your devices in Home Assistant via Amazon Alexa. You will be able to say “Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights” and your local Home Assistant will turn on the lights. Because Alexa talks to Home Assistant, it doesn’t matter what kind of lights they are! Anything that is linked to Home Assistant will work. IKEA lights, a 10 year old X10 switch or something you’ve made yourself. As long as Home Assistant can control it, you can control it via Alexa.

We have designed the Home Assistant Cloud with security in mind. When you activate the new Cloud component, your instance will create a secure connection to the Home Assistant Cloud. There is no need for any further configuration or to expose your instance to the internet.

Integrations like Alexa will deliver messages to our cloud which we will forward to your local instance for processing. We just forward the response back to Alexa. This means that we do not have to store the state of your house in our cloud, we’re just the messenger!

We are making the beta of the Home Assistant Cloud publicly available today. During the beta period the Home Assistant Cloud will be free to use. We are currently planning to run a beta till March 1, 2018 0:00 UTC. Once the beta ends, the Home Assistant Cloud will be part of our Community Support package which will run at $5 USD/month.

By subscribing to the Community Support package you will show your support for the Home Assistant organization, its projects and its community. It will help fund development, cover our operating costs and gives you access to use Home Assistant Cloud.

So if you ever felt like donating money to support the development of Home Assistant and Hass.io: sign up for the Home Assistant Cloud!

Why not take donations?

With donations you have to convince people to keep donating and it will be hard to plan around the amount of available money. The biggest concern is what do you do when there is not enough money. We could shut down the servers or again depend on the wallets of our developers. We could run Wikipedia style advertisements for donating, but those are even more annoying than running advertisements.

Getting started

Upgrade Home Assistant to 0.60 and enable the cloud and config components:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
cloud:
config:

Now restart Home Assistant and navigate to the configuration panel. It will offer a new cloud section. Here you can create an account and login. Once logged in, your instance will connect to the cloud.

The next step is to configure Alexa. This can be done by enabling the Home Assistant skill for Alexa and link your Home Assistant cloud account.

Once you’re done, ask Alexa to discover devices (“Alexa, discover devices”) and you are all set to control them: “Alexa, turn on <device name>”.

See the Cloud component configuration to learn how to filter which devices get exposed to Alexa.

FAQ

Last updated: February 22, 2018

I thought the Home Assistant crew didn’t like the cloud?

You are right, we don’t! The Home Assistant Cloud is not an alternative to running your local Home Assistant instance. All control and automations are still running locally.

Instead, the Home Assistant Cloud is an extension of your local instance. It allows to communicate with companies that force us to communicate via a public available cloud endpoint like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Home Assistant Cloud is only used to route the messages to your local Home Assistant instance. All messages are processed locally.

(Some people have suggested we rename to Home Assistant Bridge to avoid this confusion)

Will Home Assistant and Hass.io remain open source?

Yes. Yes. Yes! Home Assistant is the work of hundreds of developers all working together in creating something amazing. The only thing that will require a subscription is the optional cloud functionality.

Where is the source code for the Alexa skill?

All messages are processed locally and so the Alexa skill code is part of the Home Assistant code. The Home Assistant Cloud only routes the messages to your local Home Assistant instance. This means that you can audit the source code to check all the things that the cloud can do:

What other features will come to the cloud?

We have a lot of ideas! We are not going to make any promises but here are some things that we’re looking into:

  • Google Home / Google Assistant Smart Home skill
  • Allow easy linking of other cloud services to Home Assistant. No more local juggling with OAuth flows. For example, link your Fitbit account and the Fitbit component will show up in Home Assistant.
  • Encrypted backups of your Hass.io data
  • Text-to-speech powered by AWS Polly
  • Generic HTTP cloud endpoint for people to send messages to their local instance. This will allow people to build applications on top of the Home Assistant cloud.
  • IFTTT integration
  • Alexa shopping list integration

What countries are supported at launch?

As of February 2018, we are live in all countries that have Alexa except for Japan (which is under certification).

How is the connection made to the cloud?

The connection is made using a WebSocket connection over HTTPS. See the source here.

I think that the price is too high for what I get.

The Home Assistant Cloud functionality is a perk for becoming a supporter of the Home Assistant project. As a supporter you will help fund development, cover our operating costs and gives you access to use Home Assistant Cloud. You are not paying to just maintain the cloud servers.

The perks offered for being a supporter will also extend over time, as noted in this answer.

What will the Home Assistant organization do with the funds ?

The plan is to hire developers to work fulltime on Home Assistant. We have grown a lot in the last 4 years and the work load is pushing the limits of what our core developers can do. Open source burn out is very common (1, 2) and we want to avoid this by moving most organization and release chores to a paid position.

For more background on these topics, check out HASS Podcast 15.

0.60: Beckhoff/TwinCAT, WebDav, Gearbest, iAlarm

Fabian Affolter

The biggest change for 0.60 will be covered in a separate blog post. Thus, we will keep it short here. Just one thing: This is the last release in 2017. We will be back to our bi-weekly release cycle in 2018.

A big “Thank you” to all people who supported us to make this release possible.

TwinCAT

With the brand-new ADS (automation device specification) component by @stlehmann allows you to hook Home Assistant into this fieldbus independent interface which is often used between Beckhoff devices running with TwinCAT.

WebDav calendar

Thanks to @maxlaverse Home Assistant support now WebDav calendars.

Tracking prices

With the new gearbest sensor there is now an additional sensor available to track the price of a product.

Financial details

Yahoo! has discontinued their financial service. To fill this gap we have now the alpha_vantage sensor which is intruded in this release and allows you to monitor the stock market.

New Platforms

Release 0.60.1 - January 6

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.

Read on →

0.59: Order pizza, Entity Picker, Color Wheel

Fabian Affolter

We are proud to announce the availability of Home Assistant 0.59. To keep you in the loop: This is the second last release in 2017. We have stuck to our bi-weekly release cycle for another year but we decided that we will take a little break between Christmas and New Year.

Dominos Pizza platform

With the Dominos Pizza integration made by @craigjmidwinter your home is now taking care that you don’t starve. In combination with a Skybell or a DoorBird you will know exactly when the pizza is in front of your door.

Color picker

@NovapaX created a new color picker. While dragging the color badge with your finger, a badge will appear above your finger so you can see the current color.

Screenshot of the color wheel. Screenshot of the color wheel.

Shopping list tweaks

@balloob has refreshed the shopping list UI to make it more usable. It’s now possible to add items by typing, instead of just voice. Also editing has been made easier.

Entity picker

@balloob improved the way if you want to pick an entity. In the automation editor, the script editor and the service section of the Developer Tools it’s much easier to identify the right one! The automation editor will only suggest relevant entities.

Screenshot of the Entity Picker. Screenshot of the of the Entity Picker.

Hass.io Add-ons

If you follow our twitter feed then you may already know that @frenck spent some time to bring new stuff to the Community Hass.io Add-ons repository.

New Platforms

Release 0.59.1 - December 4

Release 0.59.2 - December 6

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.

Read on →