Rohan and Phil are joined by Billy to break down the 0.113 release and talk to Billy from Montana about how he uses Home Assistant.
Inovelli Z-wave Switches
In episode 69 talking to Adrian about smart bulbs and switches, we mentioned the Lutron Aurora as a possible smart switch compatible with smart bulbs. u/FORD_GT on Reddit also reached out to and mentioned the Inovelli Red Z-wave switches that can be customised to disable the internal relay on the switch. This gives physical switches around the home that can control smart bulbs with Home Assistant and z-wave events. The switches are on back-order and available in the US z-wave frequency for around US$35. The switches also have a notification LED. Brian Hanifen on the Home Assistant forums has shared a script which you can use to flash the LED’s on the switches different colours for notifications as well. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/inovelli-z-wave-red-series-notification-led/1654830.113
New Features
- Even more speed improvements This release has a lot more speed improvements, resulting in less CPU usage. Pascal has worked on a highly optimized version of Python 3.8 which Home Assistant Core users in Docker/ Home Assistant OS will get to experience.
- Running Modes for Scripts and Automations You can now have different running modes for scripts and automations which make these much more powerful. The biggest and most useful change comes in the form of Parallel scripts. If you’re a programmer you might be used to defining reusable functions in your code. In Home Assistant scripts are generally used to achieve this. In Home Assistant previously a script could only have one open execution at a time. So if you have a script to randomize light colours and call it from multiple automations, you would need to wait until the previous script executions had completed. With Parallel scripts you can now have multiple threads of scripts and automations running at the same time, truly making Home Assistant scripts more code re-use friendly. There are also other modes which can change how scripts behave if they are executed at the time another one is already running, so be sure to checkout the release notes for this one! Thanks Phil Bruckner!
- Loops! Another feature programmers will be more happy to see is loops landing in Scripts and Automations. You can now specify actions to repeat for a certain number of times, or while a condition is true.
- Switch Cases / Chooser Scripts and Automations now have a “chooser” block, which can be used like switch case or elseif block in your automations.
- Cool Down for Automations You can now specify a cool-down on automations which restricts the frequency of when an automation will run.
Pictures from Billy
