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
- Unique IDs are being fixed for some Zigbee Devices via the ZHA component
Corrects a stability issue with unique_id on cluster channels. If a node received a new nwk address the unique_id would change. This PR changes the unique_id to use the ieee address instead of the nwk address. Anyone who opted to use unique_id on events will have to update their automations to account for the change
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25707 - Updater component has been changed to a binary sensor
The updater component is now a binary sensor that is always available.
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25418 - Kodi Services have moved from media_player to Kodi
media_player.kodi_add_to_playlist is now kodi.add_to_playlist
media_player.kodi_call_method is now kodi.call_method
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25753 - Zwave.update_config service removed
This service never actually worked correctly due to a bug in the underlying library so to avoid confusion it has been removed.
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25959 - Sonos playing playlists now supported via play_media service call
If you make a call to a Sonos device with the media attribute set to something which the device doesn’t support, for example movie or video the call will now be rejected. You’ll need to update your automations to ensure that only valid media types are sent.Additionally there is now the ability to set the media type as Playlist to have a Sonos Playlist playing.
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26054 - Google Home Component has been removed
Google Home devices received an update a while ago which prevents them from being used as Device Trackers in Home Assistant now.If you’re looking for a replacement way for presence detection, checkout Monitor from Andrew Freyer.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/monitor-reliable-multi-user-distributed-bluetooth-occupancy-presence-detection/68505
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26035
Other Noteworthy Updates
- HomeKit now supports CO2 sensors
https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/25603
Cliff’s Smart Home
Kitchen Tablet
Lovelace UI
Sonoff’s
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.
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Cliff de Wit
Technologist, Cyclist, Photographer, Father, Starup Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer, former Microsoft SA Chief Innovation Officer
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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.
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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
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