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

 

Sponsored By

Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa

Easily connect to Google and Amazon voice assistants for a small monthly fee that also supports the Home Assistant project. Configuration is via the User Interface so no fiddling with router settings, dynamic DNS or YAML.

Website

Hosted By

Phil Hawthorne

Phil is a Melbourne based web developer who lives and breathes technology. When he's not at his day job, he’s in his home office attempting to simplify his life through complicated tech.

Website Smart Home Products Buy a Coffee

Rohan Karamandi

Rohan from Toronto, Canada works in the Technology sector as an architect designing network and datacenter solutions for his customers. His passion for technology stems from there and extends to IoT and home automation

Website Smart Home Products Buy a Coffee


Special Appearances By

Cliff de Wit

Technologist, Cyclist, Photographer, Father, Starup Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer, former Microsoft SA Chief Innovation Officer

Spotlight

 

Special episodes focused on various aspects of Home Assistant and Home Automation.