The Cloud Strikes Again

Ben emailed in to let us know that Loop in the UK is pulling support for reading electricity and gas meters from their servers from their Electricity Monitor. The Home Assistant integration notes have been updated. From November 13 2020 the servers which Home Assistant uses to fetch usage information will be removed. Message from loop reads

As you may know, the company behind Loop Energy Saver was bought by Trust Power in 2017… as you can imagine, this year has been particularly challenging for our small business. We’ve put all plans on hold and been forced to make some difficult decisions due to the impacts of the pandemic, the most significant being to switch off the old Loop systems that your product runs on later this year… Retiring the legacy product isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly but this focus on the new product is critical to the long-term survival of our business.

For affected customers, you’ll need to pay up for a new product from Loop to continue using their service. We are currently unsure if the new energy monitor will be supported by Home Assistant.  

Custom Header no longer in active development

Ryan Meek who has created the popular custom component Custom Header has made the difficult decision to stop working on the integration. The Github repo has been archived. Statement from Ryan:

Custom Header has become a beast to try to support and update, it is an absolute mess of code. The next HA update will both break CH and CH will be the cause of major performance issues even if fixed (without a major rewrite). What started out as a simple project to make the header smaller ballooned into this feature bloated monstrosity you see today, mostly for my inability to say no to any feature request. Since the start of Hacktoberfest I have been working on adding things to HA itself and found myself working on changes that would make things in Custom Header obsolete (some are already) and I’m really enjoying the process.

0.117

New Features

• Scriptomation YAML Editor If you use the automation UI in Home Assistant, it is now possible to toggle between the UI and a YAML editor.
• New Quick Bar Dialog For those familiar with Visual Studio Code, Home Assistant now features a quick bar dialog. Pressing E will show a dialog. You can then quickly access entities. Use C to call reload services, for example to quickly reload your Home Assistant configuration without needing to go through all the UI pages.Note: In the Podcast we mention the Visual Studio Code shortcut keys CTRL SHIFT P etc, which were the key combinations used in the beta. However these were changed just before 0.117 was released to E and C.
• Spotify URI’s can now be sent to Sonos players Now makes it easier for Home Assistant to cast Spotify songs and playlists to Sonos speakers.
• New media_player.repeat_set service Will allow supported platforms (starting with Sonos) to have repeat mode enabled or disabled by a service call.
• New Xbox Component Xbox consoles can now be controlled from Home Assistant thanks to a new component created by Jason Hunter (episode 47 guest) Allows apps and games to be opened from within Home Assistant. Can also send button press events to the console from Home Assistant. https://twitter.com/hunterjm/status/1318352626497486849
• New dismiss all notifications button in the Notifications dialog Sometimes its the small things!
• Persistent Notifications and TTS can now be configured for Notifications Great for adding these to notification groups, or alerts.

 

Breaking Changes

• Template changes from Frenck A major change has been made to Templates. Templates can now return different types, not just strings. This means templates can now be used to return lists or numbers, not just strings.
• Cloudflare must now be re-configured from the UI If you had previously setup Cloudflare with YAML, you will need to remove that and now re-configure Cloudflare in the UI. The new Cloudflare integration will now use API tokens, which is much more secure.
• Australian Bureau of Meteorology (aka “the BOM”) has been removed This integration was using web scraping to fetch data, which Home Assistant no longer supports.

 

Discussion with Glenn

• bTicino component: https://github.com/pippocla/my_home
• https://github.com/ejurgensen/forked-daapd
• Salt Level: https://adonno.com/salt-level-sensor/
• Garage Door Controller: https://khaz.me/cheap-and-easy-home-assistant-garage-door-control/
• Zack’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXpteV7qpsWi9uUkOeLAhaA
• Zack on Episode 42: https://hasspodcast.io/HA042