2021.8 brings a new energy dashboard to Home Assistant, while we announce a competition and a new show.
New Hire for Nabu Casa
Nabu Casa has hired a UX developer, who will be focussed on improving the user experience for users of Home Assistant. Welcome on board MatthiasOtto Winter joining ESPHome for the summer
Otto Winter, the founder and creator of ESPHome is joining the Nabu Casa team to make some updates to ESPHome over his summer break.New payment options coming soon
Including annual subscriptions and payments in Euros.2021.8
New Features
- Energy Dashboard
- Updates for locks Locks can now be in a state of locked, unlocked or jammed
- This context added to scripts and automations Programmers should be familiar with the concept of “this”. For those creating scripts or automations via YAML, an instance of the automation or script can now be accessed using a “this” object in your templates. The developer who created this (Richard Schaefer) has a use case for Blueprints, allowing blueprint automations to reference timers based on the automation ID
- Device Template Functions If you like to use YAML templates, there’s now some device friendly helper functions available, including the ability to get an entity ID for a device, or a state of a device. These are separate to the existing functions you could use against entity IDs.
- Alarm Panels now get a vacation mode! Great if you want another way for your house to know when to go into vacation mode. Alarm panels can now be in armed_away, armed_home, disarmed, armed_night, and armed_vacation
- Dead Z-waveJS devices will now be marked as unavailable in Home Assistant
- Tesla now supports accounts with MFA setup If your Tesla account is configured to use MFA, you can now add your Tesla account to Home Assistant. If you don’t have MFA on your Tesla account, now is a good time to turn that on.
- Remove workday holidays by name If you use the Workday sensor, you can now specify specific holiday names which should be ignored by Home Assistant. For example if you generally work on Christmas day, but get all other holidays off, then you can have Home Assistant treat Christmas Day as a working day.
Breaking Changes
- HomeKit Previously the on/off switches provided to HomeKit by scripts, would enable or disable a script. This likely was not what is expected as Hey Siri turn on “script” would appear to do nothing. Pressing a script switch in HomeKit now runs the script instead.
- Z-wave JS Z-Wave JS entities will now be in an unavailable state when the parent node is considered dead by Z-Wave JS. This may impact existing automations because Home Assistant will block service calls to unavailable entities. A node can potentially be revived by sending a ping to it, therefore you can use the new node status sensor (disabled by default) to track node status and use the zwave_js.ping_node service to try to revive the node.
- Google Assistant Home Assistant will no longer expose the legacy fan speeds to Google Assistant. If you use fans with with Google Assistant, you’ll need to resync your device. Ask you Google device to Sync my device or trigger an update via the google_assistant.request_sync service.
- Sonos Sonos speaker regrouping behavior may change during snapshot restores for certain layouts. Previously, speakers which were joined after a snapshot was taken were not unjoined during restores.
- WLED Support for the wled.preset service is now deprecated. Additionally the playlist attribute of your wled lights has also been removed. You should move over to the new select entity for these lights.
- Home Assistant Supervisor Snapshots are being renamed to backups. As such service calls are being renamed.
