Blog
Video: How To Configure Home Assistant
Ben from BRUH Automation
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0.19: Empowering scripts and Alexa
This release is big. Until now, our automations and scripts have been very static. Starting today it should all be a bit more dynamic.
Scripts are now available in automations and when responding to Alexa/Amazon Echo. Both of these components will now expose data to be used in script templates (including from_state
!). Passing data to script entities is available by passing the data to the script services.
automation:
trigger:
platform: mqtt
topic: some/notify/topic
action:
service: notify.notify
data:
message:
automation 2:
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: light.hue
action:
service: notify.notify
data:
message: is now
Entity Namespaces allow you to influence the entity ids for a specific platform. For example you can turn light.living_room
into light.holiday_home_living_room
with the following config:
light:
platform: hue
entity_namespace: holiday_home
- Automation: allow script syntax for action (@balloob
) - Automation: expose
trigger
variable to script templates (@balloob) - Script: allow passing variables for script templates in the script service calls (@balloob
) - Alexa/Amazon Echo: allow script syntax for action (@balloob
) - Alexa/Amazon Echo: expose intent variables to script templates (@balloob
) - Script syntax: conditions now supported to interrupt execution (@balloob
) - Automation: use new condition syntax (@balloob
) - Script syntax: two new conditions
and
andor
to combine conditions (@balloob) - Any platform: Allow setting entity namespace to prefix entity_ids. (@balloob
) - Switch: Raspberry Pi generic 433 Mhz GPIO adapters now supported (@milaq
) - Z-Wave: use more sane defaults (@danieljkemp
) - Media Player: Snapcast now supports picking a source (@happyleavesaoc
) - MySensors: major cleanup (@MartinHjelmare
) - Binary Sensor: Command line sensor now supports classes (@fabaff
) - MQTT: allow client key authentication (@timharton
) - Sensor: Forecast.io now supports minutely, hourly and daily summaries (@aceat64
) - Media Player: Pioneer AVR now supported (@kylehendricks
) - Switch: Acer Projectors now supported (@deisi
) - New HVAC component added with Z-Wave support (@turbokongen
) - Support added for OctoPrint (@w1ll1am23
) - Configuration.yaml can now refer to environment variables using
!env_var
(@bah2830) - Lock: Z-Wave now supported (@devdelay
) - New Dweet component to export data (@fabaff
) - Media Player now supports stop command + initial kodi support (@hmronline
) - Zigbee: push updates now supported (@flyte
) - Wink devices with battery level will now show these (@w1ll1am23
) - Templates: new
as_timestamp
method now available (@srcLurker) - API: Add [
/api/discovery_info
] with basic instance info (@robbiet480) - Sensor: Google Maps travel time added (@Danielhiversen
) - HTTP: Allow adding CORS headers (@robbiet480
) - Sensor: Fitbit support added (@robbiet480
) - Bug fixes and tweaks by @turbokongen
, @danieljkemp , @Danielhiversen , @TheRealLink , @persandstrom , @sander76 , @fabaff , @ishults , @Bart274 , @robbiet480 , @Cinntax , @blackdog70 , @gwendalg , @JshWright , @kylehendricks , @bradsk88 , @shaftoe , @molobrakos , @bah2830 , @nkgilley
Deprecations
- Conditions in automations should now specify which condition to use with
condition:
instead ofplatform:
. For examplecondition: state
. - RFXtrx has a new config format.
Old RFXtrx config format:
devices:
123efab1:
name: My DI.0 light device
packetid: 1b2200000890efab1213f60
New RFXtrx config format:
devices:
1b2200000890efab1213f60:
name: My DI.0 light device
Talk: Automating your home with Home Assistant (OpenIoT Summit)
At the beginning of April I gave a talk about Home Assistant at the OpenIoT summit in San Diego. I talk about the Home Assistant architecture and explain how to get started integrating your devices. Big thanks to my employer AppFolio (we’re hiring!
iBeacons: Making presence detection work better (part I)
This post is by Home Assistant contributor Greg Dowling
In 2013 Apple introduced iBeacons: a class of Bluetooth low energy (LE) devices that broadcast their identifier to nearby devices, including most smartphones. At first glance it’s hard to imagine why they might be useful. In this two part blog I’ll try and explain why they are useful and how you can use them with Home Assistant.
The reason I started using iBeacons was to improve presence detection (and I think that’s the case with most people) so that’s what I’ll discuss in part 1. In part 2 I’ll talk about using iBeacons to track devices that can’t track themselves.
Using beacons to improve OwnTracks location data
When you use OwnTracks in standard major move mode (which is kind to your phone battery) it sometimes fails to update when you’d like it to. In my case I found that it would often send a location update as I was on my way home, but then not update when I got home. The result would be that Home Assistant would think I was 500M away from home, and take quite a while to notice I was home. It would also mean that the automation that should turn on my lights when I got home didn’t work very well! There were a few times when my phone location updated at 2am and turned the lights on for me. Fortunately my wife is very patient!
Luckily, OwnTracks supports iBeacons so I could use them to make presence detection more reliable. When OwnTracks sees a beacon it recognizes, it will send an update. This means that if you put a beacon at your front door - OwnTracks will see it within a few seconds of you arriving home - and send an update saying it has seen this iBeacon.
Read on →0.18: Bluetooth, LG WebOS TVs and Roombas.
It’s time for 0.18. This release cycle is 2 days shorter than usual as I’ll be traveling to Europe. This also means that it can take some more time before you get feedback on PRs.
Since the last release we have moved all Home Assistant source code etc into its own organization on GitHub
- Media Player: redesign in the UI! (@DesignFirst
, @balloob ) - New component: Zeroconf for Home Assistant discovery (@robbiet480
) - Garage door: MQTT now supported (@joelash
) - Thermostat: Homematic platform now supports Max! devices (@bimbar
) - New component Thinkingcleaner (switch/sensor) to integrate your Roomba into Home Assistant (@TheRealLink
) - New component: upnp to automatically open a upnp port on your router for Home Assistant (@robbiet480
) - Thermostat: EQ3 Bluetooth Smart Thermostats now supported (@bimbar
) - New component Feedreader will track RSS feeds (@shaftoe
) - Device Tracker: Bluetooth tracking platform added (@vmulpuru
) - Media Player: LG WebOS TVs now supported (@TheRealLink
) - Notify: LG WebOS TVs now supported (@TheRealLink
) - HTTP: Use constant time comparison for auth (@JshWright
) - Config and service validations (@jaharkes
, @Danielhiversen ) - MySensors: Entity IDs will more clearly differentiate between node ID and child ID (@oeysteinhansen
) - MySensors: Add support for ethernet gateway (@MartinHjelmare
) - Media player: Plex will now monitor the server and add clients as they pop up (@infamy
) - Core: We now use iso8601 for datetimes (@balloob
). - Media Player: MPD now supports service to play playlists (@Cinntax
) - Z-Wave should be a little bit more stable (@Turbokongen
) - Media Player: Sonos will now only add visible devices (@jpmossin
) - Light: Wink will now allow controlling the colors (@bradsk88
)
Backward-incompatible changes
- We have migrated our datetime format to be iso8601. This will only impact you if you are consuming the date times from the API directly. You can ignore this if you are just using Home Assistant via configuration and the frontend.
- The constant
TEMP_CELCIUS
is now correctly calledTEMP_CELSIUS
. Old one is deprecated and will eventually be removed. - The location of the Docker image has changed. There was no possibility for us to keep maintaining the old image (as it was bound to the GitHub repo under my name) or to make a redirect. So if you are using the Home Assistant Docker image, change it to run
homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
for the latest release andhomeassistant/home-assistant:dev
for the latest dev version. - MySensors received two big changes that will cause you to update your configs. See component page for new example config.
- All MySensors entity IDs are different! There was an error in the naming that caused MySensors to append node ID and child ID instead of separating them with an underscore. This has been fixed but will cause all your MySensors entity IDs to change. This is a one time breaking change.
- The second change is that we now support the TCP ethernet gateway. This is causing a slight change to the config format: you have to change
port:
undergateways
todevice:
.
To Infinity and Beyond 🚀
After 2.5 years I think we can proudly say: Home Assistant is a success. I write we because Home Assistant is no longer a one-person side project. It has become the side project of many people who spend countless hours on making Home Assistant the best home automation software out there. To acknowledge this we migrated the repositories from being under my name to be under our own organization on GitHub
On our journey we’ve reached many noteworthy milestones:
- #1 on HackerNews
- Featured on ProductHunt
- Trending repository on GitHub
- 3000 stars on GitHub
- 1.5 million page views on our website
- Speaker at OpenIoT Summit 2016
All these accomplishments are a nice pat on the back but our journey is far from over. There are a lot of challenges ahead if we want to become the go to solution for home automation for everyone.
Until now the focus has been on making a platform that developers love to use. A platform that is simple but customizable. A platform that is both powerful and reliable. But most important: a platform that is local and open. Home Assistant does a great job at all these things.
There will be some major challenges ahead of us to target groups other than developers. Easy installation and easy configuration being the #1. I’m sure that we’ll be able to eventually achieve these goals. I can’t say yet how or when. As with everything Home Assistant, we’ll take tiny steps, gathering feedback along the way to make sure we’re solving the right problems.
I am confident that we will get there because we are set up for success: we have a robust architecture, high test coverage and an active community of world class developers and users. On top of that, we use Python which allows us to move fast and tackle complex problems in elegant ways. It is so easy to learn that it allows any programmer, experienced or not, to contribute support for devices and services. It’s as simple as filling in the blanks.
I would like to put out a big thank you to all our contributors who make Home Assistant what it is today. It doesn’t matter if it is form of code, documentation or giving support in our chat room
Cheers to the future!
Paulus
Updated documentation
One of the main complaints that we receive is something along the lines “I read that X is possible yet I am unable to find it on the website.”. This post is to announce that we have taken the first steps to improve it by revamping the getting started and developers sections. It’s still a work in progress but we now have a solid foundation to build on for the future 👍.
Our documentation has been going through various phases. Initially it was just the README in our GitHub repository. I discovered Jekyll and GitHub pages in December 2014 and created home-assistant.io. I more or less broke the README in 5 pages and called it a website. Back then we had a whopping 11 components!
As Home Assistant grew, so did our documentation. Fabian Affolter
Today it has been almost 1.5 years since we started the website. We now have 264 components and platforms under our belt and have been honored with 1.5 million page views ✨. And hopefully we now also have documentation that our community deserves.
Finally, if you see some content that could use more clarifcation or is outdated, don’t hesitate to use the ‘Edit in GitHub’ link that is present on each page.
0.17: Onkyo, Panasonic, GTFS and config validation
Another awesome release ready to hit your homes. YAML can be hard for beginners and more experienced automators. So to help catch those pesky errors that sneak into your files we’ve been hard at work to introduce config validation! Especially huge thanks to @jaharkes
When we encounter an invalid config we will now write a warning to your logs. You can see those in the frontend by clicking on the last developer tool. We’re looking into options to make it more clear - it is a work in progress.
Another big thing is the addition of GTFS support. You probably don’t know it, but GTFS is the standard that public transit companies all over the world use to distribute their schedule. This means that you can now have the time of the next bus/train/etc right in your frontend.
- Config validation (@balloob
, @jaharkes ) - Sensor: GTFS support (public transit open standard) (@robbiet480
) - Camera: Raspberry PI support added (@LucaSoldi
) - Z-Wave: improved startup reliability (@srcLurker
) - Media Player: Onkyo receiver now supported (@danieljkemp
) - Sensor: Loop Energy now supported (@pavoni
) - Thermostat: Z-Wave now supported (@coteyr
, @turbokongen , @luxus ) - Sensor: NZBGet now supported (@justyns
) - Media Player: Panasonic Viera TV now supported (@florianholzapfel
) - Thermostats: Use whole degrees if user uses Fahrenheit (@JshWright
) - Frontend: more material love (@balloob
)
Backward-incompatible changes
As of now we are not aware of any backward-incompatible changes. However, it might be that Home Assistant will not start for you because of an invalid configuration. A common mistake that people are making is that they are still referring to execute_service
in their script configs. This should be service
.
Static website
The frontend of Home Assistant is served with the help of a local web server. If you have customized your installation you already use this functionality. The content of your folder www
in your Home Assistant configuration directory (.homeassistant
) is available under /local
(eg. https://localhost:8123/local/index.html
for an index.html
file).
But there is more you can do! You can not only host images for customization there but HTML files or even web applications including CSS and Javascript.
Read on →
Your hub should be local and open
Today the news spread that Google will be shutting down the Revolv hubs
I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it again:
The cloud should be treated as an extension to your smart home instead of running it.
Your hub should not be affected when your internet breaks down or the company that sold you your hub goes out of business. It should work locally so that it can continue to work even long after the vendor goes out of business or decides to kill it. Preferably, your hub should also be open so that the community can take over development after the vendor stops caring.
Unless you can afford losing a product here and there, be cautious when buying IoT products that depend on the cloud from companies that are not well established. The chances are high that they go bankrupt or get acquired and closed. This however is easier said than done as Gartner