Home Assistant Podcast 55 – 0.98, a new Docker base and venturing to South Africa with Cliff 00:00 / 1X

Home Assistant Alerts

A new page from Home Assistant which will help alert you when a device or service has introduced breaking changes which may affect your use of Home Assistant.

Example: Google Home releases an update which requires an update to Home Assistant.

Currently the site just tracks the affected Home Assistant version, and integration.

In the future this site will be used by Home Assistant to notify users of errors they may receive and how to fix them automatically. For example if you’re running an older version of Home Assistant and an API gets changed, your Home Assistant UI could add a card to your system telling you which minimum version of Home Assistant you need to upgrade to, to continue using that feature.

https://alerts.home-assistant.io

New Base Docker Images for Home Assistant

Users who use Home Assistant via Docker (not HASS.IO) will notice more layers being downloaded from this release.

Home Assistant has changed their base images to Alpine Linux instead of Debian. Which should result in more consistency and better optimizations for Home Assistant now.

Users shouldn’t see any breaking changes or issues from this base image change, unless you were building your own Home Assistant image and installing additional Deb packages.

This also uses Docker manifests, which means simply pulling down the home assistant docker container, Docker will determine which base image your system requires, without you needing to manually specify a tag.

0.98

Webscraping Integrations are now Deprecated

Home Assistant will be removing components which rely on web-scraping to function

Webscraping is when code is used to mimic a user and log in to a website to get data inside Home Assistant.

This is usually needed when integrations do not offer an API.

These integrations are easy to break when a third-party website changes its layout or design

Some vendors (like USPS) have IP banned users for using these types of integrations

Home Assistant will remove components from release 0.100, or in about 6 weeks time

By removing these integrations, Home Assistant can reduce the number of moving parts it requires to operate.

New Features

Better Entity Management

It is now possible to disable entities within Home Assistant. If you’ve ever had a component which discovers entities in your home which you don’t want, you can now disable them.Additionally you can now also tell an integration, such as device trackers not to add any new entites to Home Assistant.

It is now possible to disable entities within Home Assistant. If you’ve ever had a component which discovers entities in your home which you don’t want, you can now disable them.Additionally you can now also tell an integration, such as device trackers not to add any entites to Home Assistant. Config Entry Options

Integrations can now offer the ability to set options from the user interface. In this release you can now set options for Deconz and Unifi integrations without needing to adjust your YAML!

Integrations can now offer the ability to set options from the user interface. In this release you can now set options for Deconz and Unifi integrations without needing to adjust your YAML! Ring Cameras with Sirens and Lights now Supported

RIng cameras which have a siren will now have a switch exposed in Home Assistant. Turning the switch on will sound the siren attached to the Ring camera. Same applies if you have a light on your Ring device, you can now turn those on and off too!

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25612

RIng cameras which have a siren will now have a switch exposed in Home Assistant. Turning the switch on will sound the siren attached to the Ring camera. Same applies if you have a light on your Ring device, you can now turn those on and off too! https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25612 GeoNet NZ Quakes Feed Integration

Allows Home Assistant to get information about quakes in the New Zealand region that happened within the last 7 days. It retrieves incidents from a feed and shows information of those incidents filtered by distance to Home Assistant’s location.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25736

Allows Home Assistant to get information about quakes in the New Zealand region that happened within the last 7 days. It retrieves incidents from a feed and shows information of those incidents filtered by distance to Home Assistant’s location. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25736 Lutron RA2 Occupancy Sensors

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25854

Breaking Changes

Unique IDs are being fixed for some Zigbee Devices via the ZHA component

Corrects a stability issue with unique_id on cluster channels. If a node received a new nwk address the unique_id would change. This PR changes the unique_id to use the ieee address instead of the nwk address. Anyone who opted to use unique_id on events will have to update their automations to account for the change

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25707

Corrects a stability issue with unique_id on cluster channels. If a node received a new nwk address the unique_id would change. This PR changes the unique_id to use the ieee address instead of the nwk address. Anyone who opted to use unique_id on events will have to update their automations to account for the change https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25707 Updater component has been changed to a binary sensor

The updater component is now a binary sensor that is always available.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25418

The updater component is now a binary sensor that is always available. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25418 Kodi Services have moved from media_player to Kodi

media_player.kodi_add_to_playlist is now kodi.add_to_playlist

media_player.kodi_call_method is now kodi.call_method

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25753

media_player.kodi_add_to_playlist is now kodi.add_to_playlist media_player.kodi_call_method is now kodi.call_method https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25753 Zwave.update_config service removed

This service never actually worked correctly due to a bug in the underlying library so to avoid confusion it has been removed.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25959

This service never actually worked correctly due to a bug in the underlying library so to avoid confusion it has been removed. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25959 Sonos playing playlists now supported via play_media service call

If you make a call to a Sonos device with the media attribute set to something which the device doesn’t support, for example movie or video the call will now be rejected. You’ll need to update your automations to ensure that only valid media types are sent.Additionally there is now the ability to set the media type as Playlist to have a Sonos Playlist playing.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26054

If you make a call to a Sonos device with the media attribute set to something which the device doesn’t support, for example movie or video the call will now be rejected. You’ll need to update your automations to ensure that only valid media types are sent.Additionally there is now the ability to set the media type as Playlist to have a Sonos Playlist playing. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26054 Google Home Component has been removed

Google Home devices received an update a while ago which prevents them from being used as Device Trackers in Home Assistant now.If you’re looking for a replacement way for presence detection, checkout Monitor from Andrew Freyer.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/monitor-reliable-multi-user-distributed-bluetooth-occupancy-presence-detection/68505

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26035

Other Noteworthy Updates

HomeKit now supports CO2 sensors

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25603

Cliff’s Smart Home

Kitchen Tablet

Lovelace UI

Sonoff’s

Follow @nabucasa Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa Easily connect to Google and Amazon voice assistants for a small monthly fee that also supports the Home Assistant project. Configuration is via the User Interface so no fiddling with router settings, dynamic DNS or YAML. Website

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Cliff de Wit Technologist, Cyclist, Photographer, Father, Starup Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer, former Microsoft SA Chief Innovation Officer Follow @clifforddw

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