Rohan and Phil and joined by Stephan from New Zealand to talk 0.101, the Switchbot Curtain Kickstarter and Stephans use of Home Assistant
State of the Union Meetups
If you can’t make it to the Home Assistant state of the union in Amsterdam, there are a couple of meetups happening in Germany where you can join others watching the live stream.- Berlin – Germany 6:00pm -> 9:00pm https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Home-Assistant/events/265634883/
- Grünstadt – Germany 6:30pm -> 9:30pm https://www.meetup.com/Home-Assistant-Meetup-Rhein-Main-Neckar/events/265920456/
Starting Times (Local)
The keynote speech by Paulus will be kicking off on November 13th 6:30pm Amsterdam time. To save you the headache, here’s the time in some popular cities- US West Coast – 9:30am Wednesday
- US East Coast – 12:30pm Wednesday
- London – 5:30pm Wednesday
- Moscow – 8:30pm Wednesday
- New Delhi – 11pm Wednesday
- Perth – 1:30am Thursday 14th
- Melbourne – 4:30am Thursday 14th
- Auckland – 6:30am Thursday 14th
Switchbot Curtain Launch
Switchbot, which is a small device Isabella introduced us to in Episode 25 have launched a new kickstarter for a curtain controller. The project reached 100% funding within 12 minutes, and is one of the coolest home automation kickstarters I’ve seen for a while.- Small robot attaches to your curtain rail and can open and close curtains by pushing them open/close
- Has an optional solar panel which can be used to keep the device charged
0.101
New Features
- Airly Integration Shows air quality data in Poland, Germany and UK https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26375
- Apprise notifications Apprise allows you to send a notification to almost all of the most popular notification services available to us today such as: Telegram, Discord, Slack, Cisco Webex, Amazon SNS, Gotify, etc.With this integration you’ll be able to open up Home Assistant to send notifications to many more platforms. https://github.com/caronc/apprise/ https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26868
- Solar-Log Integration If you have a solar power inverter which is compatible with Solar-Log, you can now integrate your data inside Home Assistant.Once connected, Home Assistant will be able to report things like consumption and yield from all of your inverters. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27036
- Sinch SMS Notifications https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/26502
- Microsoft Teams If you’re one of the three people using Microsoft Teams, you can now integrate it with Home Assistant. Once integrated Home Assistant will be able to send notifications to a team channel. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27981
Breaking Changes
- API Password The biggest breaking change for this release.Before Home Assistant had the concept of usernames and passwords, there was just an “API Password”. It has been possible to keep using this single password moving forward.From 0.101, Home Assistant will no longer accept any requests to the API or front-end which appends the API password in the URL, for example ?=api_password=xAdditionally the concept of “trusted networks” has also been removed. Where it was possible to make calls to Home Assistant without a password if the request originated from within the trusted network range. From 0.101 you’ll need to update your configuration if you still use the legacy API password. Previously the API password was specified under the HTTP component in your YAML file. You’ll now need to setup a password via the auth provider section in your YAML. These features have been deprecated since March/April 2019, but have now officially been dropped since 0.101 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27656
- Python 3.6 Support has been deprecated In order to keep Home Assistant available on the latest versions of Python, Home Assistant 0.101 officially deprecates support for Python 3.6.Python 3.8 has been released as of October 14th 2019. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27680
- Roku power off state is changing Roku TV’s will now report a state of “standby” instead of “off” from 0.101 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28148
- New Turn On Service for Ecobee Previously, calling climate.turn_on would cause the ecobee thermostat to turn on in heat mode, regardless of the mode when the thermostat was turned off. Now, the thermostat will turn on to the last “active” HVAC mode (i.e. “heat”, “cool”, or “auto”) https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27103
- MQTT JSON Lights can now specify floating point numbers This breaking change might be a bit technical to understand, so let us explain.In previous versions of Home Assistant any calls made to a JSON MQTT light with a transition set would be converted to a round number. For example 2.5 seconds would be converted to just 2 seconds.From 0.101 Home Assistant will now send these transition times as “floating point numbers” allowing half seconds etc to be accepted. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27253
- Hipchat and Stride have been removed The chat services are being closed down, so these components are going away https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27399 https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27934
Other Noteworthy Updates
- Add for condition support for binary_sensor, light and switch conditions You can now have conditions inside your YAML which will apply when a binary_sensor has been in a state for a period of time. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27153/files
