Home Assistant Podcast 39 – 0.83 and giving more automation ideas to Sean 00:00 / 1X

Wednesday Release Cycles

As of this release, Home Assistant will now be released mid-week on Wednesdays (or there abouts). This also means the beta will come out on Wednesdays as well.

This will give the developers more time during the week to work on patches and features, and more time on the weekend to automate their houses.

Home Assistant Podcast now available on Spotify

If you prefer to use Spotify for your Podcasts, we’re now available there.

https://open.spotify.com/show/6PeAI9SHRZhghU7NRPXvT3?si=NTwuMJ-SRXebYsXOXu70ww

State of the Union

Paulus gave a talk in Amsterdam. There’s a video of the talk on the Home Assistant blog, and you can hear the speech of the future of Home Assistant in our previous special episode.

Nabu Casa has now been taking subscriptions for almost a month. During the state of the union, Paulus explained how these subscriptions are helping Home Assistant grow.

A Home Assistant Cloud subscription is not just access to voice assistants. Forum hosting, and dedicated people working on Home Assistant!

Lovelace to become official User Interface in 0.84

This is the final release with the current user interface as the default interface. Starting with the next release, 0.84 Home Assistant will have the Lovelace User Interface enabled by default.

0.83

New Features

Lock support for Google Assistant

You can now have Google Assistant lock your doors, and also optionally unlock them. Unlocking needs to be opted-in and set in your configuration YAML file.

Google Home devices can now be used as bluetooth device trackers

Using an un-official API, Home Assistant can now use your Google Home devices to scan and detect other devices like your phone to determine if you’re home or not. You just need to have your phones bluetooth on, but it doesn’t need to be paired to be detected.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18190

Using an un-official API, Home Assistant can now use your Google Home devices to scan and detect other devices like your phone to determine if you’re home or not. You just need to have your phones bluetooth on, but it doesn’t need to be paired to be detected. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18190 Onboarding Cards for Google Home and Amazon Echo

Allows you to see which entities are being exposed to Home Assistant, and give new users instructions on how to enable Home Assistant Cloudhttps://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/pull/680#issuecomment-435828058

Allows you to see which entities are being exposed to Home Assistant, and give new users instructions on how to enable Home Assistant Cloudhttps://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/pull/680#issuecomment-435828058 Support for Fibaro Home Centre Hubs

This release adds another Z-wave hub to Home Assistant, this time from Fibaro.

This release adds another Z-wave hub to Home Assistant, this time from Fibaro. New Shopping List Lovelace Card

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/pull/1970

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/pull/1970 Tautili Sensor Platform

Allows you to see stats of your Plex Media Server in Home Assistant, such as top movie/TV show, transcoding count etc.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17835

Allows you to see stats of your Plex Media Server in Home Assistant, such as top movie/TV show, transcoding count etc. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17835 TP Link LTE Routers

This component currently only supports the ability to send an SMS from the router. Great for notifications when your internet connection is down!

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17111

This component currently only supports the ability to send an SMS from the router. Great for notifications when your internet connection is down! https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17111 Traccar Device Tracker support

Adds traccar as a new GPS device tracker. This platform has support for over 1500 different types of devices

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18200

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18200 Norwegian Public Transportation sensor

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18237

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18237 Support for Lupusec alarm control panel

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17691

Add upload and download sensors and component for asuswrt

Added by our guest, Magnus from episode 37

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17757

Support for 17track.net package sensors

The 17track.net sensor platform allows users to get package data tied to their 17track.net account

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18038

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18038 New launch sensor to keep track of space launches

Should compliment the ISS sensor well

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18274

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18274 W800rf32 Sensors

The W800 family of RF receivers are designed to receive X10 RF signals generated from X10 products: Palm Pad remotes, key chain remotes, Hawkeye motion detectors, and many, many other X10 RF devices.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/17920

Flu Near You Sensor

Submitted by Aaron Bachya, who you may remember from our Spotlight episode on developing for Home Assistant. Another health related sensor. Aaron has also contributed the pollen.com integrations as well.

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18136

Light Switch Platform

You can now have Home Assistant treat switches as lights, with the new Light Switch Platform. If you have a smart wall plug, you can now create a Light component for it, which then allows you to group it as part of a Light Group in Home Assistant, and might make some vooice assistants easier to work with.This will be a timely addition for Christmas tree season!

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18562

Breaking Changes

There are a few breaking changes in this release, so we’ve cherry-picked some of the highlights!

Logbook Speed Improvements

There are some updates to the Logbook component to try and make things load a bit faster.As part of the update, there are some changes to the way include and exclude domains.In configurations where both exclude and include domains are specified, excluded domains are ignored now (were not ignored previously). To get it inline with other similar components. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18376

Xiaomi Aqara Events are now prefixed with “xiaomi_aqara”

You’ll need to go ahead and update all of your automations which might look for events from the Xiaomi gateway. This will affect things like button click events etc.

Other Noteworthy Updates

General

Australia Support for Waze!

THANK YOU TROY KELLY

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18183

Links Discussed

Custom Hue Component: https://github.com/robmarkcole/Hue-sensors-HASS

Awesome HA: https://www.awesome-ha.com/

Todays Guest

Sean Green Sean is an east coast graphic designer of ten years. When not working, he's either trying to figure out why his YAML isn't working, or spending time with his wife and cat. Home Assistant Configuration

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