Home Assistant

Activating Tasker tasks from Home Assistant using command line switches

Rowan Hine
In this tutorial I will explain how you can activate Tasker tasks from Home Assistant command line switches. We are going to set up a switch that when toggled will make your Android device say either "On" or "Off".

You could also do this with the automation component instead so whenever you put your house to sleep mode for example your Android device will open up Google Play Books or the Kindle app ready for you to read as well as dimming your lights, but this tutorial is all about the switches.

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InfluxDB and Grafana

Fabian Affolter

The InfluxDB database is a so-called time series database primarily designed to store sensor data and real-time analytics.

The influxdb component makes it possible to transfer all state changes from Home Assistant to an external InfluxDB database.

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0.9: Rollershutters, locks, binary sensors and InfluxDB

Paulus Schoutsen

It’s been a few weeks but we managed to polish a nice new release of Home Assistant for y’all!

To update, run pip3 install --upgrade homeassistant.

Community Highlights

Paulus Schoutsen

From time to time we come along things that are worth sharing with fellow Home Assisters. Here a list of some cool stuff from last week:

First is the public beta of Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that is free, automated and open. This means that it will now be very easy to secure your connection to Home Assistant while you are away from home. W1ll1am23 has written up a guide how to get started.

The next thing is a show-off of some of the cool stuff people do with Home Assistant. This is miniconfig talking to Home Assistant using the Amazon Echo!

And last but not least, Midwestern Mac did a microSD card performance comparison for the Raspberry Pi. If you’re using a Pi, make sure to check it out!

Survey November 2015

Fabian Affolter

Around a week ago we started with the first survey. Now 30 people have participated. Thank you very much if you did. We think that’s enough time to have some “only partially representative” data. It’s hard to tell how many Home Assistant users are out there. Currently there are 215 members on our Discord chat server and last week PyPI counted 5063 downloads.

The idea was to anonymously collect some details about the usage of the different parts of Home Assistant and a little bit about the environment its running in.

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0.8: Honeywell Thermostats, Orvibo switches and Z-Wave switches and lights

Paulus Schoutsen

We have all been hard at work to get this latest release ready. One of the big highlights in this release is the introduction of an extended iconset to be used in the frontend (credits to @happyleavesaoc for idea and prototype). To get started with customizing, pick any icon from Material Design Icons, prefix the name with mdi: and stick it into your customize section in configuration.yaml:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    switch.ac:
      icon: "mdi:air-conditioner"

Backward-incompatible changes

  • Any existing zone icon will have to be replaced with one from Material Design Icons.
  • LimitlessLED light services require colors to be specified in RGB instead of XY.

Changes

0.7.6: Amazon FireTV, Radiotherm thermostats

Paulus Schoutsen

After two weeks of hard work I’m proud to announce the release of Home Assistant v0.7.6. For this release the main focus was bugs, test coverage and documentation. And we exceeded expectations on all three fronts. Bugs have been squashed, test coverage increased to 85% and thanks to the hard work by @fabaff and myself the component section on the website has gotten a complete revamp.

Changes

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Report the temperature with ESP8266 to MQTT

Paulus Schoutsen

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I recently learned about the ESP8266, a $5 chip that includes WiFi and is Arduino compatible. This means that all your DIY projects can now be done for a fraction of the price.

For this tutorial, I’ll walk through how to get going with ESP8266, get the temperature and humidity and report it to MQTT where Home Assistant can pick it up.

Picture of the final setup (+ 2 LED for decoration)

Home Assistant will keep track of historical values and allow you to integrate it into automation.

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0.7.5: Blinkstick, SNMP, Telegram

Paulus Schoutsen

We discovered two issues annoying enough to warrant the release of 0.7.5:

  • Home Assistant package did not include the CloudMQTT certificate.
  • A bug in the core caused issues when some platforms are loaded twice.

This release also includes some new platforms (because they keep coming!):

Also, the media player was extended by @maddox to support the play media command. This has been implemented for the iTunes platform.

Home Assistant goes geo with OwnTracks

Paulus Schoutsen

A few weeks have past and it is time again for another release: version 0.7.4. This time we’re very glad to be able to introduce brand new integration with OwnTracks to allow tracking of people on a map. The geo support consists of three different parts:

We have added a new getting started section to get up and running.

Map in Home Assistant showing two people and three zones (home, school, work)

Ofcourse more things happened in the last three weeks. I’m moving away from my usual long post to a short summary of highlights: