Home Assistant

0.10: Amazon Echo, iCloud, Dweet.io, Twitch and templating support!

Paulus Schoutsen two minutes reading time Comments

Alrighty, it’s time for Home Assistant 0.10. A lot amazing things have changed and sadly we also had to introduce a bunch of backwards incompatible changes. I would like to give a big shoutout to Philip Lundrigan (@philipbl) who put a lot in effort in helping the migration to move towards using templates for a wide variety of platforms.

Read on →

Set up encryption using Let's Encrypt

Paulus Schoutsen four minutes reading time Comments

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.

Read on →

Activating Tasker tasks from Home Assistant using command line switches

Rowan Hine three minutes reading time Comments


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.

Read on →

InfluxDB and Grafana

Fabian Affolter two minutes reading time Comments


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.

Read on →

0.9: Rollershutters, locks, binary sensors and InfluxDB

Paulus Schoutsen less than one minute reading time Comments

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

To update, run pip3 install --upgrade homeassistant.

Community Highlights

Paulus Schoutsen less than one minute reading time Comments

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!

Survey November 2015

Fabian Affolter two minutes reading time Comments

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.

Read on →

0.8: Honeywell Thermostats, Orvibo switches and Z-Wave switches and lights

Paulus Schoutsen 1 minute reading time Comments

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

0.7.6: Amazon FireTV, Radiotherm thermostats

Paulus Schoutsen two minutes reading time Comments

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

Read on →