Guest Interviews, Release Breakdowns

Home Assistant Podcast 39 – 0.83 and giving more automation ideas to Sean

Published December 3, 2018
Recorded December 2, 2018
Duration 53:23
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Rohan and Phil talk 0.83, and workshop some solutions and improvements for Seans smart home

Wednesday Release Cycles

As of this release, Home Assistant will now be released mid-week on Wednesdays (or there abouts). This also means the beta will come out on Wednesdays as well. This will give the developers more time during the week to work on patches and features, and more time on the weekend to automate their houses.  

Home Assistant Podcast now available on Spotify

If you prefer to use Spotify for your Podcasts, we’re now available there. https://open.spotify.com/show/6PeAI9SHRZhghU7NRPXvT3?si=NTwuMJ-SRXebYsXOXu70ww  

State of the Union

Paulus gave a talk in Amsterdam. There’s a video of the talk on the Home Assistant blog, and you can hear the speech of the future of Home Assistant in our previous special episode. Nabu Casa has now been taking subscriptions for almost a month. During the state of the union, Paulus explained how these subscriptions are helping Home Assistant grow.
  • A Home Assistant Cloud subscription is not just access to voice assistants. Forum hosting, and dedicated people working on Home Assistant!
 

Lovelace to become official User Interface in 0.84

This is the final release with the current user interface as the default interface. Starting with the next release, 0.84 Home Assistant will have the Lovelace User Interface enabled by default.

0.83

New Features

  • Lock support for Google Assistant You can now have Google Assistant lock your doors, and also optionally unlock them. Unlocking needs to be opted-in and set in your configuration YAML file.
  • Light Switch Platform You can now have Home Assistant treat switches as lights, with the new Light Switch Platform. If you have a smart wall plug, you can now create a Light component for it, which then allows you to group it as part of a Light Group in Home Assistant, and might make some vooice assistants easier to work with.This will be a timely addition for Christmas tree season! https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18562

Breaking Changes

There are a few breaking changes in this release, so we’ve cherry-picked some of the highlights!  
  • Logbook Speed Improvements There are some updates to the Logbook component to try and make things load a bit faster.As part of the update, there are some changes to the way include and exclude domains.In configurations where both exclude and include domains are specified, excluded domains are ignored now (were not ignored previously). To get it inline with other similar components.https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/18376
 
  • Xiaomi Aqara Events are now prefixed with “xiaomi_aqara” You’ll need to go ahead and update all of your automations which might look for events from the Xiaomi gateway. This will affect things like button click events etc.

Other Noteworthy Updates

General

Links Discussed


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

Sean Green

Sean is an east coast graphic designer of ten years. When not working, he's either trying to figure out why his YAML isn't working, or spending time with his wife and cat.

Home Assistant Config

Spotlight

 

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