Home Assistant Core 2023.9! 🎉

Frenck is enjoying a well earned holiday, so I’m taking care of the release this month.

This month, on the 17th, it has been 10 years since Home Assistant started. We’ll be preparing a special event on the Home Assistant YouTube channel to celebrate, reflect and look ahead. We will have some cool announcements too! We hope you can join us on the 17th @ 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CET!

This release is pretty packed! With some very nice updates to the UI with new entity dialogs for climate entities, and lots of tile card features. Template sensors can be created from the UI now, and for the more advanced template sensors, the ability to get data from services! A new service to get the weather forecast, and better options to display different forecasts.

And something you will probably not see when you are already using Home Assistant: the onboarding flow is completely redesigned!

I absolutely love it!

Enjoy the release!

Bram

Read on →

Home Assistant Core 2023.8! 🎉

Another month, another fine release of Home Assistant! This release is a bit more conservative after two absolutely packed releases in June and July. Many of us are enjoying summer holidays 🏖️.

Pretty much all features in this release are absolutely amazing, and it is hard to pick a favorite. Great translation improvements that help with the user experience, a new entity to capture events from things like remotes, and the new Assist features are, again, mind-blowing!

Talking about Assist, have you seen the blog on Year of the Voice - Chapter 3? Or, check the live stream recording on YouTube, where the new features have been demonstrated.

Some new integrations have been added too. Most notably Opower! This integration can pull in energy usage data from many utility companies in the United States. For example, it supports PG&E, ComEd, BGE, and many more! ⚡️ Very good news for all our American friends!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Read on →

This year is Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice. It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Today we’re presenting our third milestone for the year: Chapter 3.

In Chapter 1, we focused on intents – what the user wants to do. The Home Assistant community has now translated common smart home commands and responses into 50 languages, coming even closer to the 62 languages that Home Assistant supports.

In Chapter 2, we introduced speech-to-text and text-to-speech. This allows users to talk and listen to their smart homes through the browser, ESPHome, and even analog phones.

For Chapter 3, we bring the full power of Assist to the million active Android devices running the Home Assistant Companion app. Got an Android phone, tablet, or watch? Set Assist as your default digital assistant and talk to your Home Assistant with one push!

To watch the video presentation of this blog post, including live demos, check the recording of our live stream.

Read on →

Home Assistant Core 2023.7! 🎉

The previous release was a big one, and this one is no different!

This release brings in a change to Home Assistant, which we consider to be one of the biggest game changers of the past years: Services can now respond with data! 🤯

It is such a fundamental change, which will allow for many new use cases and opens the gates for endless possibilities. I’m so excited about this one!

But that is not all; there is a lot more in store for you! Some of my favorites: The Bluetooth proxies are now lightning fast, copy ’n paste in dashboards, a new sentence trigger, and I love that a broken automation no longer disappears into thin air but now shows up in the UI marked as problematic.

All-in-all, a great release packed with many new features and a lot of quality-of-life improvements.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Read on →

We’re excited to announce that the KNX Association has officially endorsed the KNX integration in Home Assistant. The KNX Association will collaborate with the KNX team at Home Assistant to help with the maintenance of the KNX integration and further streamline the user experience.

KNX is a home automation standard for commercial and residential building automation that works locally. It is mainly, but not exclusively, based on a central data cable which is generally installed when the house is being built. KNX also has extensions to work over radio frequencies or via IP infrastructure. KNX partners with hundreds of smart home manufacturers and thousands of installers.

The KNX integration in Home Assistant allows users to use the power of Home Assistant to unify their KNX devices with other smart home devices and experience a beautiful user interface, powerful automations, and local voice control. Users can also configure Home Assistant to expose non-KNX devices back to the KNX network.

Home Assistant introduced the KNX integration in Home Assistant 0.24 in July 2016. Since its introduction 7 years ago, the community has continued to evolve it. The development is currently led by marvin-w and farmio, who brought the integration to a platinum quality level.

It’s a thrilling time with organizations like KNX prioritizing seamless Home Assistant integration and working directly with integration developers. We couldn’t be more happy with where things are heading.

Home Assistant Core 2023.6! 🎉

Get ready for a classic, old-fashioned, jam-packed release! 🤯

I am excited about so many things being shipped in this release that it is hard to pick a favorite 😅 This release has it all.

Being able to directly use and back up my Home Assistant configuration to my network storage is absolutely incredible! But I also really enjoy the new and clean integrations dashboard and pages.

The feature that greatly improved the Home Approval Factor in my household is definitely the addition of the new favorite colors in the light dialogs 🎨

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Read on →

Home Assistant Core 2023.5! 🎉

What an exciting release we have for you this month! This release is all about voice (well, almost fully), and I’m super excited we can ship you all this truly amazing stuff!

I’ve been following the progress of this all being built this month, and really, I’ve been mindblown multiple times a week. So what is in here? Well, you can now actually talk to Home Assistant! 🤯

I really appreciate that all these voice elements have been built the Home Assistant way: to be fully configurable and extendable. Giving you choices, including entirely local options for your own voice assistant.

This release is packed! And we are not even halfway through Home Assistant’s Year of the voice yet…

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Read on →

This year is Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice. It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Today we’re presenting Chapter 2, our second milestone in building towards this goal.

In Chapter 1, we focused on intents – what the user wants to do. Today, the Home Assistant community has translated common smart home commands and responses into 45 languages, closing in on the 62 languages that Home Assistant supports.

For Chapter 2, we’ve expanded beyond text to now include audio; specifically, turning audio (speech) into text, and text back into speech. With this functionality, Home Assistant’s Assist feature is now able to provide a full voice interface for users to interact with.

A voice assistant also needs hardware, so today we’re launching ESPHome support for Assist and; to top it off: we’re launching the World’s Most Private Voice Assistant. Keep reading to see what that entails.

To watch the video presentation of this blog post, including live demos, check the recording of our live stream.

Read on →

Highlights:

• Support for Hardkernel ODROID-M1
• Improved data disk feature:
  • Improved reliability
  • Move from one data disk to a new data disk is now supported
• Improved memory management to improve overall device performance, especially in low memory situations
• Updated software packages: Linux, Docker, BlueZ, NetworkManager

For existing installations, no manual intervention is needed! You can safely update without reading these rather technical release notes.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• New board support: Hardkernel ODROID-M1
• Improved data disk feature
• Advanced memory management
• Updated software packages

New board support: Hardkernel ODROID-M1

Home Assistant OS 10 supports the Hardkernel ODROID-M1 single board computer! Most notably, the ODROID-M1 supports NVMe SSD storage natively, which makes it another great choice to run Home Assistant on. With its quad-core CPU with up to 2 GHz and up to 8 GB of memory it is suitable even for demanding Home Assistant installations.

Currently, Home Assistant can be booted off an SD-card or an eMMC. Note however that a new boot firmware (Petitboot) is required to boot from eMMC (see the board-specific documentation). NVMe SSD boot is currently not supported by the boot firmware. However, an NVMe SSD can be used through the data disk feature.

Buy ODROID-M1 at Ameridroid or directly at Hardkernel

Improved data disk feature

The data disk feature allows extending storage by adding an external disk. When using the data disk feature, all commonly read and written data is moved to that storage, just Home Assistant OS itself remains on the existing storage (for example, SD-card or eMMC). Home Assistant OS is a read-only operating system — the OS partitions are only written to when updating the operating system. This makes sure that there is minimal wear on the existing storage.

In this OS release, together with the latest version of the Supervisor, the data disk feature gets more user-friendly: The data disk choice now lists the model of available data disks. Disk will now be reliably detected and available as the new data disk in certain edge cases were they previously weren’t.

It is also possible to move from one data disk to another: Simply connect another disk, and go to the Move data disk dialog again. On reboot, the data will be moved and the old data disk can be detached. You can find the move data disk feature under Settings > System > Storage in the top right overflow menu.

Advanced memory management

With Home Assistant OS 10 low memory, devices will generally perform better. Firstly, we moved from zram to zswap, which allows us to use the storage as an actual swap space. We’ve tuned the memory management to minimize the number of writes to storage (to prevent unnecessary wear on SD-cards and other flash memory-based storage).

We’ve also improved reliability and responsiveness in low-memory situations: Home Assistant OS uses a new memory management mechanism named Multi-Gen LRU along with thrashing prevention. This makes Home Assistant OS recover quickly from a low-memory situation and remain responsive.

In general, we recommend using a board with at least 1 GB of memory and make sure to stay well below 80% memory utilization. You can monitor the overall memory utilization under Settings > System > Hardware.

Updated software packages

Home Assistant OS is built using the latest release of Buildroot 2023.02. It comes with the latest Linux kernel with long-term support (6.1). This means updated drivers and better device support. It uses the latest version of Docker 23.0.3, our container engine powering the Supervisor and our add-ons. The latest version of the Bluetooth package BlueZ 5.66 comes with various bug fixes for improved communication with Bluetooth devices. Network Manager 1.40.16 has proven to work more reliably with third party Thread border routers, specifically with Apple border routers. We also improved the IPv6 Neighbor Discovery support on Home Assistant OS specifically for Thread: Home Assistant OS will now quickly discover when border routers disappear from the network and use alternative border routers, if available.

We hope you enjoy Home Assistant OS 10.0! If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.

Some product links are affiliate links and we earn a small commission when products are bought.

HomeSeer is now a member of the Works with Home Assistant partner program and they are committed to ensuring that their Z-Wave smart products are up to date and ready to use in Home Assistant.

HomeSeer products are all Z-Wave Plus certified. Their smart dimmer/switches offer convenient RGB LEDs that may be programmed with automations to glow or blink 7 different colors when things happen in your home. The switches also support multi-tap actions for triggering automations and scenes.

HomeSeer offers an AC powered Z-Wave multi-sensor that also includes an RGB LED for status updates. Additional Z-Wave products include a motion sensor, leak sensor, door/window sensor, floodlight sensor, and motorized water valve.

HomeSeer Z-Wave devices work locally and integrate seamlessly with the Z-Wave integration in Home Assistant (Z-Wave interface required). As all connectivity is happening locally, status updates and control of your devices happen instantly in Home Assistant.

With automatic firmware updates via Home Assistant we will continue to provide the best user experience for their devices.

To learn more about HomeSeer products, have a look at their website.

PS: We’re actively working on easing the integration of the HomeSeer Z-NET G3 into Home Assistant

Learn more about the Works with Home Assistant partner program.