Exposing your Home Assistant instance outside of your network always has been tricky. You have to set up port forwarding on your router and most likely add a dynamic DNS service to work around your ISP changing your IP. After this you would be able to use Home Assistant from anywhere but there is one big red flag: no encryption.

This tutorial will take you through the steps to setup a dynamic DNS for your IP and allow trusted encrypted connection to it - for free using DuckDNS and Let’s Encrypt.

Philips Hue was one of the first to get smart lights accepted by the mainstream. Their Zigbee-based hub is rock solid, never crashes, great API and worked with other Zigbee light bulbs too. They are a bit expensive but the platform was worth every penny, till now.

Yesterday a thread on /r/homeautomation published that Philips Hue now blocks all but their own bulbs and those of “friends of Hue”. I have been able to confirm this in the Philips Hue FAQ:

This means that after you update your Hue bridge to the latest version:

• As of now, you can still use your existing paired 3rd party light bulbs
• You cannot pair new 3rd party light bulbs
• You’re out of luck if for some reason you have to pair existing 3rd party light bulbs again
• Resetting your hub will force pairing of all your bulbs again

If you own a Philips Hue hub and are using 3rd party light bulbs, make sure you do not upgrade your hub if you want to be able to pair new 3rd party lightbulbs. But do realize that you are sitting on a ticking time bomb.

I have read, but have been unable to confirm it, that resetting your hub will force a software upgrade. So beware of that too.

I will no longer suggest people to buy into the Philips Hue ecosystem.

In this tutorial I will explain how you can activate Tasker tasks from Home Assistant command line switches. We are going to set up a switch that when toggled will make your Android device say either “On” or “Off”.

You could also do this with the automation component instead so whenever you put your house to sleep mode for example your Android device will open up Google Play Books or the Kindle app ready for you to read as well as dimming your lights, but this tutorial is all about the switches.

The InfluxDB database is a so-called time series database primarly designed to store sensor data and real-time analytics.

The influxdb component makes it possible to transfer all state changes from Home Assistant to an external InfluxDB database.

It’s been a few weeks but we managed to polish a nice new release of Home Assistant for y’all!

• New lock component including Wink support (@miniconfig)
• New binary sensor component including aRest and MQTT support (@fabaff)
• New rollershutter component including MQTT support (@sfam)
• New InfluxDB component to store data in InfluxDB (@fabaff)
• Thermostat: Ecobee now supported (@nkgilley)
• Thermostat: Homematic now supported (@goir)
• Support for parsing JSON values received over MQTT (@mcdeck)
• Bunch of bug fixes and optimizations

To update, run pip3 install --upgrade homeassistant.

From time to time we come along things that are worth sharing with fellow Home Assisters. Here a list of some cool stuff from last week:

First is the public beta of Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that is free, automated and open. This means that it will now be very easy to secure your connection to Home Assistant while you are away from home. W1ll1am23 has written up a guide how to get started.

The next thing is a show-off of some of the cool stuff people do with Home Assistant. This is miniconfig talking to Home Assistant using the Amazon Echo!

And last but not least, Midwestern Mac did a microSD card performance comparison for the Raspberry Pi. If you’re using a Pi, make sure to check it out!

Around a week ago we started with the first survey. Now 30 people have participated. Thank you very much if you did. We think that’s enough time to have some “only partially representative” data. It’s hard to tell how many Home Assistant users are out there. Currently there are 215 members in our Gitter chat room and last week PyPI counted 5063 downloads.

The idea was to anonymously collect some details about the usage of the different parts of Home Assistant and a little bit about the environment its running in.

We have all been hard at work to get this latest release ready. One of the big highlights in this release is the introduction of an extended iconset to be used in the frontend (credits to @happyleavesaoc for idea and prototype). To get started with customizing, pick any icon from MaterialDesignIcons.com, prefix the name with mdi: and stick it into your customize section in configuration.yaml:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    switch.ac:
      icon: 'mdi:air-conditioner'

Breaking changes

• Any existing zone icon will have to be replaced with one from MaterialDesignIcons.com.
• LimitlessLED light services require colors to be specified in RGB instead of XY.

Changes

• Thermostat: Honeywell now supported (@sander76)
• Switch: Orvibo now supported (@happyleavesaoc)
• Camera: mjpeg camera’s now supported (@ryanturner)
• Notify: Pushetta now supported (@fabaff)
• Light: MQTT now supported (@hexxter)
• Light: Z-Wave now supported (@leoc)
• Switch: Z-Wave now supported (@leoc)
• New component logger allows filtering logged data (@badele)
• New component updater will notify users if an update for Home Assistant is available (@rmkraus)
• Notify: PushBullet now allows targeting contacts/channels/specific devices (@tomduijf)
• Light: Allow controlling color temperature (@tomduijf)
• Frontend: about page added (@balloob)
• Switch RGB as the color unit used in light component (@balloob)
• Re-install platform and component dependencies after a Home Assistant version upgrade (@balloob)

After two weeks of hard work I’m proud to announce the release of Home Assistant v0.7.6. For this release the main focus was bugs, test coverage and documentation. And we exceeded expectations on all three fronts. Bugs have been squashed, test coverage increased to 85% and thanks to the hard work by @fabaff and myself the component section on the website has gotten a complete revamp.

Changes

• Device tracker: Newer TP-Link routers now supported (@mKeRix)
• Alarm Control Panel: Manual alarm added (@sfam)
• Thermostat: Radiotherm now supported (@toddeye)
• Media Player: Amazon FireTV now supported (@happyleavesaoc)
• Device Tracker: Geofancy now supported (@wind-rider)
• New component Shell Command can expose shell commands as services (@balloob)
• Scripts can now be customized using customize key in configuration.yaml (@balloob)
• Light: Hyperion now supported (@MakeMeASandwich)
• Sensor: aRest can now also read out pins (@balloob)
• Sensor: Forecast.io now supports specifying units in configuration.yaml (@balloob)
• Thermostat: Heat Control has been completely rewritten (@balloob)
• Switch: Rest now supported (@bachp)
• Media Player: Plex can now be auto discovered and configure itself (@tomduijf)
• Downloader will now treat relative paths based on config dir (@tomduijf)
• Line Charts will use interpolation for sensor data and show current and target temperature for thermostats (@balloob)
• Device Tracker: OpenWRT via ubus now supported (@krzynio)

I recently learned about the ESP8266, a $5 chip that includes WiFi and is Arduino compatible. This means that all your DIY projects can now be done for a fraction of the price.

For this tutorial, I’ll walk through how to get going with ESP8266, get the temperature and humidity and report it to MQTT where Home Asssistant can pick it up.

Picture of the final setup (+ 2 LED for decoration)

Home Assistant will keep track of historical values and allow you to integrate it into automation.