Rohan and Phil talk Home Assistant 0.98 and venture to South Africa to see how Cliff is using Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Alerts
A new page from Home Assistant which will help alert you when a device or service has introduced breaking changes which may affect your use of Home Assistant.
Example: Google Home releases an update which requires an update to Home Assistant.
Currently the site just tracks the affected Home Assistant version, and integration.
In the future this site will be used by Home Assistant to notify users of errors they may receive and how to fix them automatically. For example if you’re running an older version of Home Assistant and an API gets changed, your Home Assistant UI could add a card to your system telling you which minimum version of Home Assistant you need to upgrade to, to continue using that feature.
https://alerts.home-assistant.io
New Base Docker Images for Home Assistant
Users who use Home Assistant via Docker (not HASS.IO) will notice more layers being downloaded from this release.
Home Assistant has changed their base images to Alpine Linux instead of Debian. Which should result in more consistency and better optimizations for Home Assistant now.
Users shouldn’t see any breaking changes or issues from this base image change, unless you were building your own Home Assistant image and installing additional Deb packages.
This also uses Docker manifests, which means simply pulling down the home assistant docker container, Docker will determine which base image your system requires, without you needing to manually specify a tag.
0.98
Webscraping Integrations are now Deprecated
- Home Assistant will be removing components which rely on web-scraping to function
- Webscraping is when code is used to mimic a user and log in to a website to get data inside Home Assistant.
- This is usually needed when integrations do not offer an API.
- These integrations are easy to break when a third-party website changes its layout or design
- Some vendors (like USPS) have IP banned users for using these types of integrations
- Home Assistant will remove components from release 0.100, or in about 6 weeks time
- By removing these integrations, Home Assistant can reduce the number of moving parts it requires to operate.
New Features
- Better Entity Management
It is now possible to disable entities within Home Assistant. If you’ve ever had a component which discovers entities in your home which you don’t want, you can now disable them.Additionally you can now also tell an integration, such as device trackers not to add any new entites to Home Assistant.
- Config Entry Options
Integrations can now offer the ability to set options from the user interface. In this release you can now set options for Deconz and Unifi integrations without needing to adjust your YAML!
- Ring Cameras with Sirens and Lights now Supported
RIng cameras which have a siren will now have a switch exposed in Home Assistant. Turning the switch on will sound the siren attached to the Ring camera. Same applies if you have a light on your Ring device, you can now turn those on and off too!
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25612
- GeoNet NZ Quakes Feed Integration
Allows Home Assistant to get information about quakes in the New Zealand region that happened within the last 7 days. It retrieves incidents from a feed and shows information of those incidents filtered by distance to Home Assistant’s location.
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25736
- Lutron RA2 Occupancy Sensors
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25854
Breaking Changes
Other Noteworthy Updates
Cliff’s Smart Home
Kitchen Tablet
Lovelace UI
Sonoff’s