Not much time to write a great intro this time as we’re hanging out at PyCon! Some fixes for the Hue and Wink colors thanks to @amelchio. Initial foundation for users has landed, it’s not anywhere near usable. We’ll keep hacking on it. Google Assistant for Home Assistant Cloud now supports room hints. This will cause Google Assistant put the devices in the right groups when you link your account.

New Platforms

• Support Xiaomi Mijia Bluetooth Wireless Temperature and Humidity Sensor (@ratcashdev - #13955) (sensor.mitemp_bt docs) (new-platform)
• Move RainMachine to component/hub model (@bachya - #14085) (rainmachine docs) (switch.rainmachine docs) (breaking change) (new-platform)
• Add Social Blade Sensor (@meauxt - #14060) (sensor.socialblade docs) (sensor.uscis docs) (new-platform)
• Add PostNL sensor (Dutch Postal Services) (@iMicknl - #12366) (new-platform)
• Issue/add template fans (@giangvo - #12027) (fan.template docs) (new-platform)
• Matrix Chatbot (@tinloaf - #13355) (matrix docs) (notify docs) (breaking change) (new-platform)

Release 0.69.1 - May 12

• Fix loading of Matrix chatbot (@tinloaf - [#14346]) (matrix docs)

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.

Weekend is around the corner and that means that it’s time for the next release of Home Assistant. 0.68 brings a ton of great goodies and bug fixes.

One of the coolest features this release is by @mjg59: you are now able to control HomeKit devices. Previously, it was possible to control Home Assistant from iOS devices using the HomeKit protocol. With this release, Home Assistant is able to become the controller and use HomeKit to control lights and switches directly. Since HomeKit is vendor agnostic, it means that any HomeKit light or switch will now be compatible with Home Assistant. Very cool.

Another cool new platform, also by @mjg59, is support for Eufy devices. Eufy is the Home Automation brand of Anker and they have been producing reasonably priced devices which can now be controlled by Home Assistant too. Thanks for all your contributions @mjg59 ❤️.

New Platforms

• Add support for Eufy bulbs and switches (@mjg59 - #13773) (eufy docs) (light.eufy docs) (switch.eufy docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for controlling homekit lights and switches (@mjg59 - #13346) (homekit_controller docs) (light.homekit_controller docs) (new-platform)
• Adding USCIS component (@meauxt - #13764) (sensor.uscis docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for new platform: climate.modbus (@Kirchoff - #12224) (climate.modbus docs) (new-platform)
• Add AVM fritzbox smarthome component (@hthiery - #10688) (fritzbox docs) (climate.fritzbox docs) (switch.fritzbox docs) (new-platform)
• Adds SigFox sensor (@robmarkcole - #13731) (sensor.sigfox docs) (new-platform)
• Add blackbird media player component (@koolsb - #13549) (media_player.blackbird docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for Sensirion SHT31 temperature/humidity sensor (@viorels - #12952) (sensor.sht31 docs) (new-platform)
• Qwikswitch binary sensors (@kellerza - #14008) (qwikswitch docs) (binary_sensor.qwikswitch docs) (sensor.qwikswitch docs) (beta fix) (new-platform)

New Features

• Support binary_sensor and device_tracker in HomeKit (@Yonsm - #13735) (homekit docs) (new-feature)
• Add Homekit locks support (@philk - #13625) (homekit docs) (new-feature)
• Support CO2/PM2.5/Light sensors in HomeKit (@Yonsm - #13804) (homekit docs) (new-feature)
• Support Garage Doors in HomeKit (@marthoc - #13796) (homekit docs) (new-feature)
• Support basic covers with open/close/stop services HomeKit (@nickw444 - #13819) (homekit docs) (new-feature)

Release 0.68.1 - April 30

• Fix color setting of tplink lights (@amelchio - #14108) (light.tplink docs)
• Improve precision of Hue color state (@amelchio - #14113) (light.hue docs)
• Revert Hue color state to be xy-based (@amelchio - #14154)
• Fix Python 3.6 compatibility for HomeKit controller (@mjg59 - #14160) (homekit_controller docs)
• Added CONF_IP_ADDRESS to HomeKit (@cdce8p - #14163) (homekit docs)
• Do not sync entities with an empty name (@balloob - #14181) (google_assistant docs)
• Improve chromecast disconnection logic (@OttoWinter - #14190) (media_player.cast docs)
• Fix poorly formatted automations (@balloob - #14196)
• Disable eliqonline requirement (@balloob - #14156)

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.

When we launched the website in December 2014, we’ve only had a handful of components and usage instructions. Since then the website has grown to over a 1000 pages touching a wide range of topics. The growth, while great, also has put a lot of strain on how the docs are organised. One of the places that was especially suffering under the growth was the developer section. It was living under a single top menu item and had to contain everything in a single sidebar.

To fix this, we’re releasing a new website: developers.home-assistant.io. The website is aimed at people that are developing Home Assistant. It will contain resources how to setup your development environment, how to fix bugs, help with translations or improve the frontend. The main website will now solely be focused on Home Assistant users.

Go check it out and let us know what you think: developers.home-assistant.io.

Guess what? Yep, our Google Assistant Smart Home skill is live! It’s a mouthful but it means that you can now control your Home Assistant devices via any Google Assistant enabled device by simply saying things like “Ok Google, turn on the lights”.

To get started:

• Enable Home Assistant Cloud
• Install our skill for Google Assistant. As of this writing, the link is not live yet: you can find it by opening the Google Home app -> Home Control, tap on the blue + at the bottom right and find Hass.io in the list.
• Optional: Tweak the devices that are getting exposed to Google Assistant.

Things to note:

• The skill is called Hass.io, but will work with normal Home Assistant too. The name was necessary to avoid confusion between Home Assistant, Google Assistant and Google Home.
• Works with Home Assistant 0.65.6 or later.
• All message handling is done local and is open source.
• If you have an Android device with Google Assistant, you can control your devices too.
• Home Assistant 0.68 will introduce a button to the Cloud config panel to trigger a sync of available devices.

Home Assistant Cloud is still in open beta and free to use. Open beta period has been extended to June 1. Many thanks to Quadflight for providing the Raspberry Pis that Google used for physical testing and thanks to Arsaboo for helping with testing.

We noticed that there is some confusion in the community about how Hass.io relates to Home Assistant and what impact the upcoming Hass.io changes will have. We will try to clarify it all in this blog post.

What is Hass.io

Hass.io is a complete solution to run Home Assistant, by the authors of Home Assistant. The goal of Hass.io is to provide an easy to use and secure system, entirely managed from within the Home Assistant user interface.

Hass.io is a complete solution, which means that it comes with its own highly secure and optimized operating system, a supervisor application to maintain and configure that system, and of course Home Assistant itself.

When using Hass.io, you’ll see a new Hass.io panel inside the Home Assistant UI. From here users can configure the system and install Home Assistant updates with a simple click of a button. Users are also able to make snapshots of their system, making it easy to migrate all their configuration to a new system or restore their system to a previous state.

We wanted to be able to provide the convenience of seamless updates and configuration via the UI to other applications too, and so we introduced Hass.io add-ons. Any application can be packaged up as a Hass.io add-on, allowing any user to install and manage it easily. Since the introduction, we’ve seen an amazing growth in users sharing their add-ons with the community. It’s now possible to install an adblocker for your network, an MQTT broker or Tor with a single click.

Upcoming changes to Hass.io

We’ve introduced Hass.io last July. Since then, we’ve noticed some room for improvements in making Hass.io easier to use, lighter to maintain and easier to integrate with other host systems.

Note that the descriptions of upcoming improvements can get quite technical. Feel free to jump to the conclusion.

Automatic add-on configuration

Home Assistant has recently introduced configuration entries. We’re going to hook into this new functionality and allow add-ons to configure their related integration in Home Assistant automatically. For example, if a user installs the MQTT broker add-on, we will automatically set up Home Assistant to connect to it.

Host management

To control the host system, we currently use a custom service called HostControl. This allows the user to manage here host and restart/shutdown the computer from within Home Assistant. Instead of relying on our own system, we’re going to change to use D-Bus. D-Bus is a standardized mechanism for services and applications to communicate. Using a defined standard means that all parts of the host can now be remotely configured: sound, network, etc, etc. We will be extending the Hass.io panel in Home Assistant with controls to configure various parts of the host.

Hass.io OS

Hass.io is currently using a forked version of ResinOS as our operating system. ResinOS has been designed to run a minimal environment for Docker, simple over the air updates and connect to the ResinIO cloud. Our fork removed the ResinIO logic. Over time, ResinOS has been evolving but not in a direction that is aligned with our goals, resulting in the maintenance of our fork to take up a lot of time.

The ResinOS build system is based on the Yocto Project. This is a very powerful system, but also requires specific support for each hardware platform need to be specifically added and maintained (like each version of Raspberry Pi), which caused long build and development times for Hass.io.

All these factors made us decide to build our own, custom, operating system. We’re obviously not starting from scratch, but instead, are basing it off Buildroot as the foundation and use RAUC for over the air updates.

Some things that the new operating system will be able to do:

• Easier to add support for new hardware.
• Updating will be atomic and has a Fail-safe. If a system fails to boot after an OS upgrade, it will fallback, by booting the previous working version.
• Updates are required to be securely signed by the Home Assistant team, adding a whole new level of security.
• Compressing the root file system, making it faster on SD cards and slow IO-Interfaces.
• Compressing parts of the memory so that we can store more information.

What Hass.io users should do to prepare for these updates

At this moment: Nothing.

The new Hass.io supervisor still supports the old ResinOS builds (our official downloads for Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC) and generic Linux installations. If you’re using a generic Linux installation on SUSE Linux or Ubuntu, you have to update your local AppArmor profile if you want to use the new functionality (instructions will be provided upon release).

Once our new installation images with HassioOS are released, you have to reflash your device once. You can do this without losing any configuration by using our Snapshot feature:

• Create a snapshot of your current installation and download it to your PC.
• Flash the SD card with the new Hass.io OS image.
• Restore your snapshot.
• Enjoy a new and improved Hass.io

Release 0.67 is here! In case you missed the announcement from yesterday, Ubiquiti is paying me to write these release notes. Ooooooh yeah. With more time on my hands I’m going to be focusing on major improvements that we have been postponing for a while, first up will be a user system.

This release includes a security fix. The error log was accessible via the API without requiring authentication in previous releases. Although not a leak on its own, combined with a faulty component that would log sensitive information to the error log could lead to that being exposed (we don’t know of any component that does this). Thanks to Matt Hamilton for disclosing this issue to us.

New Platforms

• Adds folder_watcher component (@robmarkcole - #12918) (folder_watcher docs) (new-platform)
• Add FreeDNS component (@bdurrer - #13526) (freedns docs) (new-platform)
• Google Maps location sharing device tracker (@michaelarnauts - #12301) (device_tracker.google_maps docs) (new-platform)
• Added Waze travel time sensor (@Myrddyn1 - #12387) (sensor.waze_travel_time docs) (new-platform)
• Added switch component to Amcrest IP Camera. (@adpriebe - #12992) (amcrest docs) (switch.amcrest docs) (new-platform)
• Add mastodon (@fabaff - #13441) (notify docs) (new-platform)
• Tahoma switches (@ikucuze - #13636) (tahoma docs) (switch.tahoma docs) (new-platform)
• Add support for Nanoleaf Aurora Light Panels (@Oro - #13456) (light.nanoleaf_aurora docs) (new-platform)

Release 0.67.1 - April 17

• Fix Gogogate2 ‘available’ attribute (@dlbroadfoot - #13728)
• Fix so it is possible to ignore discovered config entry handlers (@Kane610 - #13741)
• Prevent vesync doing I/O in event loop (@balloob - #13862) (switch.vesync docs)
• Fix #13846 Double underscore in bluetooth address (@aav7fl - #13884) (device_tracker docs)
• Fix race condition for component loaded before listening (@balloob - #13887) (config docs)
• Missing property decorator added (@syssi - #13889) (fan.xiaomi_miio docs)
• Fix call to parent broadlink switch (@Danielhiversen - #13906) (switch.broadlink docs)
• Import operation modes from air humidifier (@syssi - #13908) (fan.xiaomi_miio docs)
• Upgrade pyqwikswitch to 0.71 (@kellerza - #13920) (qwikswitch docs)
• Upgrade somecomfort to 0.5.2 (@balloob - #13940) (climate.honeywell docs)
• Update pyhydroquebec to 2.2.2 (@titilambert - #13946)
• Update pyfido to 2.1.1 (@titilambert - #13947) (sensor.fido docs)
• Bumped pypollencom to 1.1.2 (@bachya - #13959) (sensor.pollen docs)
• Revert “Upgrade pyqwikswitch to 0.71 (@balloob - #13920) (qwikswitch docs)

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.

TL;DR: Ubiquiti Networks has hired Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, to support Home Assistant’s goals of making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Home Assistant is an open source project that thus far has been run by people in their spare time. In the last four and a half years it has grown from just me building a tiny framework with a handful of integrations to having our own operating system, over a 1000 integrations, superb performance, contributions by over 900 people, and our main Docker image has been pulled over 10 million times!

Observing this growth and passionate community, Ubiquiti Networks approached us.

Ubiquiti Networks currently focuses on 3 main technologies: high-capacity distributed Internet access, unified information technology, and next-gen consumer electronics for home and personal use. Their enterprise quality combined with their affordability has made them very popular among our users. They also share another passion of ours: trying to avoid clouds. Take for example their UniFi Video IP surveillance solution: it is a completely local hosted solution.

They recognize great potential in Home Assistant becoming the defacto platform for the home: fast, open source and local. They also want to deepen the integration of Ubiquiti Networks products in Home Assistant and may even support hosting Home Assistant instances on their hardware.

And so we have agreed that I (Paulus, founder Home Assistant) will join Ubiquiti Networks as a full time employee to focus on growing Home Assistant. I’ll now be able to devote my full energy to making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Ubiquiti Networks will not acquire any ownership of Home Assistant. We will remain an independent and open source project, just improving faster than ever with the support of Ubiquiti Networks.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and 2018 will be a really really great year for Home Assistant!

Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, at the NYC Ubiquiti office.

This is the first release with our new release schedule. During the extra week we had a total of 4 beta releases with a total of 26 fixes. So this should be the most stable release yet!

It’s also a release that is full of goodies. 80 people contributed over 223 fixes, improvements and new integrations during the last 2 weeks of this release 😎 I want to highlight the work of two people who are doing an amazing job: @NovapaX has been doing a great job triaging and fixing weird quirks and bugs in the frontend. And I want to give a shout out to @armills who has enabled backend translations. This means that a bunch of things that did not have translations yet, will now soon be translatable. We’re planning some cool things with this!

A quick note if you are using Philips Hue and a Hue custom component: it will no longer work due to the internal changes to the Hue platform. Remove the custom component to ensure that your Hue lights keep working.

New Platforms

• Add new platform for VeSync switches (@markperdue - #13000) (switch.vesync docs) (new-platform)
• HomeKit Restructure (new config options) (@cdce8p - #12997) (homekit docs) (breaking change) (new-platform)
• Added cover.group platform (replaces #12303) (@cdce8p - #12692) (cover.group docs) (new-platform)
• Add extra sensors for BMW ConnectedDrive (@gerard33 - #12591) (bmw_connected_drive docs) (binary_sensor.bmw_connected_drive docs) (lock.bmw_connected_drive docs) (sensor.bmw_connected_drive docs) (new-platform)
• Homekit: New supported devices (@cdce8p - #13244) (homekit docs) (new-platform)
• Adding Foobot device sensor (@reefab - #12417) (sensor.foobot docs) (new-platform)
• Added Stride notification component (@BioSehnsucht - #13221) (notify docs) (new-platform)
• Xiaomi MiIO Sensor: Xiaomi Air Quality Monitor (PM2.5) integration (@syssi - #13264) (sensor.xiaomi_miio docs) (new-platform)
• Add initial support fo HomematicIP components (@mxworm - #12761) (new-platform)
• Support for security systems controlled by IFTTT (@maxclaey - #12975) (alarm_control_panel.ifttt docs) (new-platform)
• Zigbee fan (@igorbernstein2 - #12289) (zha docs) (fan.zha docs) (new-platform)
• Adding a discoverable Samsung Syncthru Printer sensor platform (@nielstron - #13134) (sensor.syncthru docs) (new-platform)
• Add trafikverket_weatherstation sensor platform (@Qxlkdr - #12115) (sensor.trafikverket_weatherstation docs) (new-platform)
• Security fix & lock for HomeMatic (@PH89 - #11980) (homematic docs) (lock docs) (lock.homematic docs) (breaking change) (new-platform)

Release 0.66.1 - April 1

• Update frontend to fix climate and chart issues (@NovapaX & @c727)
• Fix mqtt_json color commands (@armills - #13617) (light.mqtt_json docs)
• Add pincode fallback (@cdce8p - #13587) (homekit docs)
• Fix mysensors sensor type lookup (@MartinHjelmare - #13574) (sensor.mysensors docs)

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.

The Hackerspace Eastermundigen is often my real-world playground for Home Assistant-related topics which sometimes more belong in the industrial automation area than in a home. Also, it gives me access to devices which I don’t have like 3D printers, laser cutters, connected power strips and a like. In the past the local Home Assistant instance there was running on an old CubieBoard2 with Fedora ARM. It was one of several systems which were running 24/7. To reduce the electricity costs we decided to consolidate the physical systems to only two. One for storage and one for all other services.

So this weekend we’re going to shake things a little up. Instead of releasing a new version today, we’ve released a beta version of the new version: 0.66.0.beta0. After a week of being in beta, the version will be promoted to be the new stable release. While the beta is live, we will accept contributions on the dev branch for the next version as usual.

Diagram of the new release schedule

The goal is to create a more stable first release without the need for a quick follow up hot fix. So if you want to be able to access the new features faster but don’t mind the risk of running into the occasional bug, get yourself on the beta channel today:

• Hass.io users will be able to enable the dev channel in the system settings.
• For Docker users, the beta’s will be published under the rc tag.
• Beta’s are also published to PyPi. Because it is a beta release, it will not be installed by Pip unless explictely specified in the install command: pip3 install --pre --upgrade homeassistant.

The documentation for the beta version can be found at https://rc.home-assistant.io/.

If you find issues with either the code or the docs of the pre-release, please open an issue in the appropriate place or, even better, submit a pull request to fix it.