Lightify Says Goodbye

Lightify by Osram will be closing their cloud servers in August 2021. This will remove cloud access to Lightify gateways, which powers remote access and Google Home/Amazon Echo capabilities. As the LIGHTIFY System is a cloud based system, the majority of functions will unfortunately be lost and LIGHTIFY app control will be only very limited. To control your smart lights and plugs beyond August 31st, 2021, you need to fully reset your entire system. Afterwards you can simply integrate it into any other ZigBee® compatible system https://www.osram.com/cb/lightify/lightify-home/lightify-home-faq/index.jsp  

Philips Hue continues v1 hub deprecation

As we mentioned back in episode 50, Philips Hue are continuing with their plans to deprecate their v1 hue bridge. If you wish to still use the v1 bridge, you’ll need to download another Hue app which is designed to work with that bridge.

Nabu Casa Cloud adds 5 new data centres

To reduce latency and the time it takes to load your remote connection to Home Assistant, Nabu Casa have added 5 new data centres for their Home Assistant Cloud service. When restarting your Home Assistant instance, you should automatically connect to the closest data centre.

0.107

New Features

• Multiple Lovelace Dashboards Allows you to have multiple Lovelace UI’s. For example you may have a dedicated UI for tablets, another UI you use for your phone. You can also choose to restrict dashboards to admin users. A great feature to stop kids from being able to control the parents room.
• New Card Picker with Live Preview When editing Lovelace views via the interface, there is an awesome new live preview which allows you to select which type of card you want to display, using your own data. The preview from the release notes looks very cool
• Data tables are faster Probably a pain point for many users, the entities filtering is quite slow. From this release it should be lightning fast
• Homekit Get some new features Includes initial basic support for Homekit enabled TV’s and Homekit occupancy sensors https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32188 https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32404

 

Breaking Changes

Many many breaking changes this release, here’s some highlights…

• Some Group functionalities have been removed Now that the states UI has been removed, there are some features of Groups which have also been removed as of this release. The group.set_visibility service is removed View and control configuration options against a group Before upgrading, check your groups don’t still have these hanging around. [Phil Note] When I upgraded to the beta, Home Assistant didn’t enter safe mode. However the group being in invalid state stopped some components from loading, including lights and fans.
• Facebook Messenger If you’re using the Facebook Messenger notification platform, it might be harder for you to send messages to users now. Facebook have removed the BROADCAST MESSAGE option, which means Home Assistant may not be able to send a message to a recipient unless they have recently messaged your Facebook Page.
• Units of time Time units have been standardized throughout all integrations. If you rely on time units in your automations, best to check they still function as required. https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32065

 

Other Noteworthy Updates

• ZHA Component now supports light flashing If you’re using the direct Zigee light component with a zigbee radio, you can now have your zigbee lights flash as an effect. https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32234
• SMS Support for Pushbullet It is now possible to use the Pushbullet notification platform to send SMS messages. https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32347
• Amazon Echo can now start and stop timers If you have Home Assistant timers you want to control with voice, you can now expose them to your Amazon Echo and say “turn on/off [timer name]”. https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/32616

 

Rohan’s Kevo Lock

Kwikset Kevo  

Quentin

• Blog post about wifi & zigbee channels at https://statusq.org/archives/2018/01/09/8435/

• Jonathan Oxer / SuperHouse #23: Preparing your home automation system for death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aaLGKBgTZc

• Using two Shellys to control the bathroom lights: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/shelly-fan-control-or-why-my-bathroom-light-switch-now-has-two-ip-addresses/118280

• Weather from the University of Cambridge: https://github.com/quentinsf/weather_cambridge_dcst

• Controlling Rollease motorised window shades: https://github.com/quentinsf/rollease2mqtt/tree/master/rollease2mqtt

• Monitoring the outputs of my home alarms system with ESP8266 boards: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/monitoring-home-alarm-outputs/140415

• Robin Cole’s plugin for reading Hue sensors and switches in HA: https://github.com/robmarkcole/Hue-sensors-HASS