It’s been already almost two weeks ago that a few of the Home Assistant developers headed towards Portland for PyCon 2016 - the conference about everything Python. We were there to learn all the nifty tricks to make our code better but most of all, to talk Home Automation.

Couple of Home Assistant devs. Left to right: Paulus (@balloob), Alex (@infamy), Ryan (@rmkraus).

On Monday I (Paulus) gave a presentation about Home Assistant to an audience of over 400 people! It was a bit scary at first but after a couple of minutes it went all great including some great questions afterwards. Slides can be found here and the talk is embedded right below:

One of the things that really impressed me was the amount of people that approached us to tell how they love Home Assistant, how it has replaced their previous solution, how they enjoyed contributing to Home Assistant and how helpful our community is. It makes me proud of Home Assistant and especially our community.

It’s time for release 0.21 and it contains massive core improvements: replacement of our home grown HTTP stack with a standardized WSGI stack. This will improve performance, speed, security and make future development of advanced HTTP features a breeze.

This work was driven by the amazing Josh Wright. His knowledge, high standards and drive for security has helped improve Home Assistant a lot ever since he started helping out. Hip hip hurray for Josh!

Alright, time for the changes:

• New HTTP stack based on WSGI (@JshWright, @balloob)
• Frontend: lots of performance improvements (@balloob)
• Initial support for EnOcean lights, sensors and switches added (@rubund)
• Light: Osram Lightify is now supported (@olimpiurob)
• Light: Insteon Hub now supports brightness (@wkonkel)
• Add support for adding HA as Windows 10 tile (@fabaff)
• Condition: time condition can now cross midnight (@jaharkes)
• Template based sensors should now throw less warnings (@Bart274)
• New LIRC component allows receiving IR commands (@partofthething)
• The Feedreader component will now persist data to disk to prevent duplicate events (@shaftoe)
• Sun: azimuth attribute added (@fabaff)
• New Flux like switch platform to change light intensity in the evening (@nkgilley)
• We no longer crash if you live in a part of the world where the sun never sets (@balloob)
• Rollershutter: RFXTRX now supported (@jacobtomlinson)
• Switch: Template switches can now execute scripts (@kellerza)
• Z-Wave: automatically heal the network at midnight (@infamy)
• Sensor: DTE Energy Bridge now supported (@kylehendricks)
• Media Player: Kodi now supports different turn off commands (@armills)

Breaking Changes

• Our work in the WSGI stack is not fully done yet. We still have a minor issues where retrieving the error log in the about screen can raise an encoding error
• The API used to incorrectly accept a JSON body with form-url-encoded headers. Our cURL examples on the website used to be wrong and have been updated.
• Make sure your configuration.yaml file contains frontend: to serve the frontend

Hotfixes 0.21.1 and 0.21.2

We released two hotfixes to address some issues that couldn’t wait till the next release.

0.21.1 - June 12

• Add eventlet to base requirements to resolve some installation issues (@balloob)
• GTFS will filter out routes in the wrong direction (@imrehg)
• Recover from rare error condition from LIRC (@partofthething)
• Z-Wave autoheal will no longer raise exception (@balloob)
• Alexa will now execute the script before making reply (@balloob)
• Fix MJPEG camera streaming (@stjohnjohnson)
• Fix frontend in older browsers (@balloob)
• Fix history in more info dialog being cut off (@balloob)

0.21.2 - June 15

• Fix input_select calling the set_option service again when changed (@persandstrom)
• Fix more info dialog not being able to open on Safari (@balloob)
• Add support for OPTIONS HTTP command to get CORS working (@JshWright)

Our community is amazingly helpful and creative. If you haven’t been there yet, make sure to stop by our chat room and come hang out with us. In this blog post I want to highlight a few recent awesome projects and videos from the community.

SceneGen - cli for making scenes

SceneGen is a new command line utility developed by Andrew Cockburn that helps with creating scene configurations for Home Assistant. To use it, you put your house in the preferred state, run SceneGen and it will print the scene configuration for your current states.

Videos

Nick Touran has been working on integrating IR remotes with Home Assistant. He made it into a component which should be available in the next release which should arrive in a couple of days. In the meanwhile, he wrote up a blog post and has put out a video showing the new integration, very cool!

Ben from BRUH Automation has put out another great video how to get started tracking your location in Home Assistant using MQTT and OwnTracks.

Muhammed Kilic has created a video how to make your Home Assistant instance accessible from the internet using the free dynamic DNS service DuckDNS.

This post is by Home Assistant contributor Greg Dowling.

In Part 1 I talked about using iBeacons to improve presence tracking. In part 2 I’ll talk about how to track things like keys that can’t track themselves by using iBeacons.

Tracking things using iBeacons

In the first part I mentioned that iBeacons just send out I’m here packets, and we used this to trigger an update when your phone came close to a fixed beacon.

But beacons don’t have to be fixed.

Your phone knows roughly where it is located (based on mobile phone masts, Wi-Fi networks or GPS). If your phone sees an I’m here message then it knows the beacon is close.

If your phone can remember (or tell a server) where it was when it last saw the iBeacon - then it knows where the beacon was. So the result of this is that you can track where an iBeacon was - even though the iBeacon doesn’t have any tracking technology itself.

So if you put an iBeacon on your keys or in your car - then you can track them.

Here are my keys - with a Estimote Nearable iBeacon stuck to them. Ugly but effective!

We are always hard at work at the virtual Home Assistant headquarters to make it easier for you to get started with Home Assistant. That’s why @jbags81 recently introduced the all-in-one installer. It allows you to get up and running with a complete Home Assistant setup by entering one line of code into your Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Jessie:

wget -Nnv https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/fabric-home-assistant/master/hass_rpi_installer.sh && bash hass_rpi_installer.sh;

This feature wouldn’t be complete if it wasn’t accompanied by a new video by Ben from BRUH Automation. The video shows how to install Raspbian Jessie on your Raspberry Pi and use the new installation script to get a full Home Assistant system up and running.

Tons of new supported things in 0.20.

• Restarting now supported without forking (@jaharkes)
• Add purge days option to recorder component (@justyns, @infamy)
• Generic load_platform mechanism for entity components (@kellerza)
• Template: new relative_time function to render ie. 7 seconds ago (@robbiet480)
• Sensor: supervisord now supported (@happyleavesaoc)
• Docker: we should no longer get SSL errors with requests (@lwis)
• Media Player: Google Play Music Desktop Player now supported (@GreenTurtwig)
• Notify: Twilio SMS platform added (@robbiet480)
• Device Tracker: Asus WRT will now default to SSH (but telnet is still an option) (@froz)
• Support Nest Protect smoke alarms (@khabi)
• Configurator: allow supplying a link to the user (@mnestor)
• Media Player: Roku now supported (@bah2830)
• Sensor: Last.fm now supported (@darookee, @GreenTurtwig)
• Notify: Amazon Lambda, SNS, SQS now supported (@robbiet480)
• Light: allow human readable colors in turn_on command (@robbiet480)
• YAML: new include dir options !include_dir_merge_list and !include_dir_merge_named (@happyleavesaoc)
• Media Player: LG Netcast TVs now supported (@wokar)
• Media Player: Allow enqueuing media on Sonos (@shaftoe)
• Notify: Ecobee thermostats now supported (@nkgilley)
• Sensor: Mold indicator added (@xifle)
• Export to Logentries support added (@omgapuppy)
• Group more info dialog allows control of group domain if available (@fignuts)

Breaking changes

• Asus WRT will now default to SSH with Telnet being an option

device_tracker:
  platform: asuswrt
  protocol: telnet

I’ve been planning to write this post for a while now as we get questions like this a lot: “Why does Home Assistant use Polymer? Why not React, Redux and what not?”

It’s understandable, Polymer is quite the underdog in the world of web frameworks. A corporate backer does not guarantee popularity or an active community and this shows in the number of projects using Polymer.

Still, we use Polymer and it’s awesome. To explain why, I’ll be referencing the React workflow quite a bit, as they do a lot of things right, and show how it is done in Polymer.

Polymer gives us components for the web, just like React, but based on web standards: web components, CSS variables. These standards don’t have wide browser support yet but it’s being implemented by every major browser: It’s the future. For now they are being polyfilled and that works just fine but in the future the Home Assistant web app will be able to run native in the browsers == fast.

Ben from BRUH Automation authors a lot of great video’s about how he is using Home Assistant and how you can get started with it too. The video below will walk you through how to configure Home Assistant. Enjoy!

Make sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel for more Home Assistant video’s.

This release is big. Until now, our automations and scripts have been very static. Starting today it should all be a bit more dynamic.

Scripts are now available in automations and when responding to Alexa/Amazon Echo. Both of these components will now expose data to be used in script templates (including from_state !). Passing data to script entities is available by passing the data to the script services.

automation:
  trigger:
    platform: mqtt
    topic: some/notify/topic
  action:
    service: notify.notify
    data_template:
      message: 

automation 2:
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: light.hue
  action:
    service: notify.notify
    data_template:
      message:  is now 

Entity Namespaces allow you to influence the entity ids for a specific platform. For example you can turn light.living_room into light.holiday_home_living_room with the following config:

light:
  platform: hue
  entity_namespace: holiday_home

• Automation: allow script syntax for action (@balloob)
• Automation: expose trigger variable to script templates (@balloob)
• Script: allow passing variables for script templates in the script service calls (@balloob)
• Alexa/Amazon Echo: allow script syntax for action (@balloob)
• Alexa/Amazon Echo: expose intent variables to script templates (@balloob)
• Script syntax: conditions now supported to interrupt execution (@balloob)
• Automation: use new condition syntax (@balloob)
• Script syntax: two new conditions and and or to combine conditions (@balloob)
• Any platform: Allow setting entity namespace to prefix entity_ids. (@balloob)
• Switch: Raspberry Pi generic 433 Mhz GPIO adapters now supported (@milaq)
• Z-Wave: use more sane defaults (@danieljkemp)
• Media Player: Snapcast now supports picking a source (@happyleavesaoc)
• MySensors: major cleanup (@MartinHjelmare)
• Binary Sensor: Command line sensor now supports classes (@fabaff)
• MQTT: allow client key authentication (@timharton)
• Sensor: Forecast.io now supports minutely, hourly and daily summaries (@aceat64)
• Media Player: Pioneer AVR now supported (@kylehendricks)
• Switch: Acer Projectors now supported (@deisi)
• New HVAC component added with Z-Wave support (@turbokongen)
• Support added for OctoPrint (@w1ll1am23)
• Configuration.yaml can now refer to environment variables using !env_var (@bah2830)
• Lock: Z-Wave now supported (@devdelay)
• New Dweet component to export data (@fabaff)
• Media Player now supports stop command + initial kodi support (@hmronline)
• Zigbee: push updates now supported (@flyte)
• Wink devices with battery level will now show these (@w1ll1am23)
• Templates: new as_timestamp method now available (@srcLurker)
• API: Add [/api/discovery_info] with basic instance info (@robbiet480)
• Sensor: Google Maps travel time added (@Danielhiversen)
• HTTP: Allow adding CORS headers (@robbiet480)
• Sensor: Fitbit support added (@robbiet480)
• Bug fixes and tweaks by @turbokongen, @danieljkemp, @Danielhiversen, @TheRealLink, @persandstrom, @sander76, @fabaff, @ishults, @Bart274, @robbiet480, @Cinntax, @blackdog70, @gwendalg, @JshWright, @kylehendricks, @bradsk88, @shaftoe, @molobrakos, @bah2830, @nkgilley

Deprecations

• Conditions in automations should now specify which condition to use with condition: instead of platform:. For example condition: state.
• RFXtrx has a new config format.

Old RFXtrx config format:

  devices:
    123efab1:
      name: My DI.0 light device
      packetid: 1b2200000890efab1213f60

New RFXtrx config format:

  devices:
    1b2200000890efab1213f60:
      name: My DI.0 light device

At the beginning of April I gave a talk about Home Assistant at the OpenIoT summit in San Diego. I talk about the Home Assistant architecture and explain how to get started integrating your devices. Big thanks to my employer AppFolio (we’re hiring!) for letting me attend. Slides.