Home Assistant Podcast 59 – 0.102, State of the Union 2019 and getting holiday ready with Florin 00:00 / 1X

What has broken this week in the Internet of Things?

Best buy closes Insignia Devices

Insignia smart home devices have been closed off as of November 6th. These cloud-based devices were sold by Best Buy, and include products such as Freezers, smart plugs, light switches and a Wi-Fi camera.Most of the devices like the freezers will now become “dumb” products, but the Wi-Fi camera is now completely useless.

https://www.wired.com/story/best-buy-smart-home-dumb/

Insignia smart home devices have been closed off as of November 6th. These cloud-based devices were sold by Best Buy, and include products such as Freezers, smart plugs, light switches and a Wi-Fi camera.Most of the devices like the freezers will now become “dumb” products, but the Wi-Fi camera is now completely useless. https://www.wired.com/story/best-buy-smart-home-dumb/ Tuya Suffers Outage

Tuya Wifi devices, which are re-branded to many different local brands around the world had an outage on November 12th.During the outage, users couldn’t connect or control their smart devices. This was caused by an outage in an AWS zone in Europe.Reddit user ob2konobi wants to remind everyone of the free Tuya Convert software, which can flash Smartlife products with Tasmota, which can then allow local control of those devices.

https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert

Tuya Wifi devices, which are re-branded to many different local brands around the world had an outage on November 12th.During the outage, users couldn’t connect or control their smart devices. This was caused by an outage in an AWS zone in Europe.Reddit user ob2konobi wants to remind everyone of the free Tuya Convert software, which can flash Smartlife products with Tasmota, which can then allow local control of those devices. https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert Ecobee to disable notifications for outages

And not really a breaking change yet, but Ecobee is changing their notifications system, and now customers will no longer be alerted to an outage on Ecobee’s servers.This will stop some bad publicity whenever they have an outage.

State of the Union

The Home Assistant state of the union was held last week in Amsterdam, and there is so much to talk about.

This was the first time Paulus and Pascal got to meet in person!

Home Assistant teaming up with Stanford University to integrate a new private assistant, Almond

Almond is a smart assistant being developed by Stanford University, and Home Assistant has made changes to the conversation integration which can now allow Home Assistant to talk to this assistant.https://almond.stanford.edu/

0.102

New way to link integrations with Home Assistant and oAuth2

Nabu Casa is making it easier for integrations that use oAuth2 to link to a local instance of Home Assistant.Nabu Casa will be providing the web-side of the new oAuth link features free for all users, even if they’re not a Nabu Casa subscriber.The first integration to ship with this is the Somfy component in 0.102https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28220

Nabu Casa is making it easier for integrations that use oAuth2 to link to a local instance of Home Assistant.Nabu Casa will be providing the web-side of the new oAuth link features free for all users, even if they’re not a Nabu Casa subscriber.The first integration to ship with this is the Somfy component in 0.102https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28220 New scene editor and scene services

Announced by Paulus at the state of the Unionhttps://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28300

Announced by Paulus at the state of the Unionhttps://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28300 Device Automation Love

A whole bunch of new device support has been added to the UI automation builder against devices. Including conditions and triggers for fans, climate, locks and vacuum’s.

A whole bunch of new device support has been added to the UI automation builder against devices. Including conditions and triggers for fans, climate, locks and vacuum’s. Media Player Improvements for the Amazon Echo

If you’re exposing media players to the Amazon Echo via Home Assistant, there’s some awesome new features in this release for you. Includes playback state reporting!

Florin

Monitoring Tile Trackers

https://github.com/andrewjfreyer/monitor

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

Todays Guest

Florin Voicu Passionate about IT for over 25 years, especially about networks and service integration. HA has been a major enabler in taking that passion away from just computers and into most aspects of everyday life. Home Assistant Configuration

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