Lowes shutting down Iris by Lowes Smart Home

• Lowes, an American home improvement store which sells some smart home products under the brand Iris have announced they will be closing their cloud services on March 31st 2019.
• “We have decided to shut down the Iris smart home platform and related services effective March 31, 2019. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and are committed to providing the resources and support needed as you transition to comparable smart home products. “
• “We have created an online redemption process that will allow customers who have eligible, connected Iris devices to receive a Visa prepaid card to help migrate to another smart home platform.”
• “All Iris customers need to complete the redemption process by March 31, 2019”
• Iris intends to release open source smart home software, renamed Arcus
• Iris wants the smart home enthusiast and developer communities to be able to benefit from the hard work and development of its platform software.

0.87

New Features

• Area Support This is the first release to bring the concept of “Areas” into Home Assistant, as discussed by Paulus during the state of the union. As of 0.87, you can create and assign devices to an area. An area being for example your kitchen, living room or garden.Future plans will be to allow Areas to be restricted to certain users. So a guest login may only be able to control devices from the guestroom area, etc. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/pull/2631
• Entity Registry UI The configuration panel now has an interface allowing you to see and manage all of your connected entities.
• System Health There is a new component called system health. When enabled, a new card will be displayed in your info screen detailing some information about your Home Assistant system. This includes operating system, python version etc.In the future components/integrations will be able to report to the system health, so for example Philips Hue detects an issue it can report to Home Assistant that there’s a problem with the integration.Currently Lovelace has been added to the system health panel. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20436
• SmartThings Component There is now an official SmartThings component in Home Assistant, which uses the SmartThings Cloud API. Allows you to control smartthings switches directly in Home Assistant, without the need of something like the SmartThings MQTT bridge. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20148
• QR Code Image Processing Platform Enables QR code recognition from cameras connected to Home Assistant. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20215
• EverLights light component EverLights are permanent Christmas lights installed on a home’s gutters or flashing. This integration can change all LEDs in a zone to a single color or activate a pattern that was previously saved to the control box. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/19817
• Utility Meter A new platform which aims to improve the ability for Home Assistant to measure consumption of utilities, like electricity, gas, water etc. The sensor will automatically reset the counter based on the configured cycle (ie monthly, weekly etc).On reset an attribute will store the previous counter, providing the means for comparison operations (“did I spend more or less this month?”)Services have been added to support complex scenarios such as peak energy tariffs in which during the operation cycle the meter might need to be paused. Should be able to combine these with the new Integration sensor, which aims to measure the time and power used by a device. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/19703 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/8025
• Co2 Signal Sensor A sensor which can report how much CO2 is being emitted to generate your household electricity.An example use case given was only start charging your electric vehicle when the CO2 emissions for your country are below a certain threshold.https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/19204
• HomeKit motion sensor devices Can now see those inside Home Assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20555
• Recollect Waste Sensor and Rova Garbage Sensor If your local area government/council uses Recollect Waste to provide residents with waste collection information, you can now use this sensor to let Home Assistant know the next scheduled pickup and what type of waste is going to be collected.There is also the Rova Garbage sensor which does something similar for US residents.https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20121 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18868

Breaking Changes

• Transmission and Dovado Routers have been moved to components If you’re using the transmission sensor and switch platforms, you’ll need to update your configuration.https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/19230 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20339
• Material Icons Updated Material Design Icons have been updated to a newer version. However, there are some icons which have now changed. https://dev.materialdesignicons.com/upgrade
• Typo fixed in the Air Quality Component C02 (C zero two) has been renamed to the correct CO2. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20306

Other Noteworthy Updates

• Verify SSL options added to REST switches and sensors You can now choose to ignore SSL certificate errors for REST switches and sensors https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20207
• Darkysky windspeed and windgust speeds changed to km/h instead of m/s https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/20340