0.27

[balloob]

#0.27 is here to break eggs and take names: notifications, Hue fakery, safety and unification come to Home Assistant

This week's blog post could only be possibly described by exactly one word:

#Amazing

^{or maybe#supersized}

Keep reading to see what #Amazing things we have in store for you this week 😄! And make sure you read all the way to the end, because I left a present down there for those committed few among you :)

But first...

Some general housekeeping

Paulus (@balloob) is on vacation in Europe this week, so you will all have to deal with me, Robbie (@robbiet480) for this release blog post. Don't worry, Paulus will be back to tearing apart your pull requests in no time :-).

Special thanks to my awesome helpers for this week's release who are looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm crossing my t's and dotting my i's: @Teagan42, @infamy and @fabaff.

For my next trick, let's hand out some...

Trophies

I felt that I had to 1-up Paulus (@balloob) somehow with his 500,000 pageviews stat he shared in the 0.26 blog post, so I pushed myself and our development community as a whole super hard the last two weeks to put a lot of love into Home Assistant to bring you not just 1, but 6 #Amazing stats for this release. As of 0.27, we have now surpassed the following milestones:

• 10,000 builds on Travis (congrats to @BluGeni)
• 3,000 issues and pull requests (thanks @kellerza!)
• 2,000 pull requests alone (awesome @fabaff!!)
• 900 forks on Github!

In addition,

• We are very close to 4,000 stars on Github!
• I'm now #5 contributor by most commits!!! Hey wait, how'd this get in here 😳

Now that we have that great news out of the way, onto this week's release which is going to keep the #Amazing gravy train rolling right along and get to the stuff you all really are here for.

0.27

While this release is #Amazing, we had to break a few eggs (now you understand the title reference!) to make a beautiful omelette (using home automation obviously) so some platforms and components have needed to introduce breaking changes. Please make sure to read the Breaking Changes section below.

Hue Bridge Emulation

Thanks to @mgbowen we now have the functionality previously provided by @blocke's ha-local-echo built right into Home Assistant! This means that for those of you with devices that either lack or have a subpar integration with Home Assistant (looking at you Amazon Echo) you can now have a better experience by having your Home Assistant pretend to be a Hue Bridge. Personally, I have used @auchter's Haaska previously but found that it was slow to respond and sometimes failed entirely. With the new emulated_hue component, you can have local control of entities through Amazon Echo.

Notification improvements

We have some excellent upgrades to the notification system coming to you in 0.27, courtesy of me, @robbiet480.

HTML5 Push Notifications

This release adds support for HTML5 push notifications on Chrome/Firefox/Opera on both desktop and Android devices. This means that you can send a notification to your phone even your Home Assistant is not in your mobile browser. When using Chrome you can even include 2 action buttons so that you can control your Home Assistant from your phone's lock screen, allowing you to do things like sound alarms or unlock your front door, all without leaving the notification. Thanks again to me (@robbiet480) and Paulus (@balloob) for all the hard work on this!

Notification Groups

Using the new notify group platform allows you to cut down a lot of duplicate automation logic by combining multiple notification platforms and targets into a single notify service. Check out the docs for more info.

target is no longer needed

For platforms that support it, starting with the new HTML5 platform, any targets that are available will be exposed as individual services, so no more having to remember which targets to use. Please note that the existing services also still exist so you can keep using target if you wish.

Validate config before a restart

Ever restarted Home Assistant to test a config change just to find out there is a validation error? Well, not anymore! @kellerza has added a command line script that will validate your configuration as if you started Home Assistant.

$ hass --script check_config

Config validation

This release includes a big push on making sure all platforms contain proper configuration validation. This should help in getting your configuration right. Thanks to @fabaff, @pavoni, @pvizeli, @nkgilley for all the hard work on this, you all rock!

FFMPEG motion / noise sensing

It's now possible to use FFMPEG to monitor a video stream and detect motion thanks to a new binary sensor platform by @pvizeli.

Component clean up - thermostat & hvac -> climate. rollershutter & garage_door -> cover

Due to our wild growth we ended up with a few components that had a lot of overlapping functionality. @turbokongen took on the hard job on merging them. Thermostat and HVAC platforms are now combined under the new Climate component. Rollershutter and Garage Door platforms are now combined under the new Cover component. You can easily upgrade by just swapping out the name. For example replace thermostat with climate. The old components have been deprecated and will be removed in the near future.

A new fan component

Along with the new climate component, @Teagan42 and I (@robbiet480) decided we needed something simpler to just control a fan. Currently it has support for controlling Insteon fans. MQTT support will appear in 0.28.0. I tried to get it implemented before 0.27.0 but spent too long writing this blog post 😢.

All changes

• Merge thermostat and HVAC components into new climate component (@turbokongen)
• Merge rollershutter and garage door components into new cover component (@turbokongen)
• Alarm Control Panel - Manual: Allow returning to previous state after trigger (@tobiebooth)
• Sensor - DHT: Allow range checking (@open-homeautomation)
• Light entities will now expose their features (@shmuelzon)
• Sensor: Monitor HP ILO sensors on HP servers (@Juggels)
• Sensor: Monitor Fritzbox Calls (@DavidMStraub)
• Notify: LlamaLab Automate is now supported (@danielperna84)
• Sensor: Serial CO2 sensors now supported (@open-homeautomation)
• Sensor: MQTT room presence detection (@mKeRix)
• Notify: New group platform allows grouping notify targets across platforms (@robbiet480)
• HTML5 push notifications (@robbiet480, @balloob)
• Weather: Wunderground now supported (@arsaboo, @Teagan42)
• New check config script to test validity before restarting HA (@kellerza)
• Binary Sensor: Allow monitoring a camera feed using FFMpeg (@pvizeli)
• Cover: Z-Wave platform now supports positions (@nunofgs)
• Device tracker: allow using Gravatar for entity picture (@robbiet480)
• Notify: platforms with known targets will expose them as standalone services (@robbiet480)
• Camera: MJPEG and Generic camera's can now authenticate using digest auth (@Meatz)
• Weather: Forecast.io now can show daily temp/precip forecast values (@DavidMStraub)
• Media Player: WebOS TV now allows customizing the sources (@roidayan)
• Device tracker: Allow tracking devices using Bluetooth Low-Energy (@open-homeautomation)
• Notify: Ensure Slack messages appear as correct user (@technicalpickles)
• YAML: Secrets will look for values in all parents folders up to the config root folder (@Teagan42)
• Camera: Generic camera now supports template support (@balloob)
• Slack: Allow sending attachments (@technicalpickles)
• Device Tracking: TP-Link Archer C7 5ghz devices will now also be found (@dpford)
• Z-Wave: New rename node service added (@jnewland)
• Wink: bug fixes (@w1ll1am23)
• Homematic: new device support, add controller state and variable support (@danielperna84 @pvizeli, @mcdeck)
• Allow emulating a Hue bridge to control entities (@mgbowen)

Breaking changes

• Ecobee3 occupancy sensors have moved from sensor platform to binary sensor platform.
• Forecast.io entity IDs are now like sensor.forecastio_temperature. Previously they were like sensor.weather_temperature. Apologies for this change, but we needed to make Forecast.io more generic now that we have many weather platforms.
• The loopenergy sensor configuration format changed slightly, please reformat based on the revised documentation.
• The configuration for the Sabnzbd sensor has slightly changed. The prefix type: is no longer required for monitored variables.

Deprecations

• Using the thermostat and hvac components has been deprecated. Please migrate to the new climate component. (just change the component name, the configurations are compatible)
• Using the rollershutter and garage_door components have also been deprecated. Please migrate to the new cover component. (just change the component name, the configurations are compatible)

Finishing up

Thanks all for sticking with me to the end. I'll be taking over a lot of Paulus's (@balloob) work while he is gone, but as I said, don't worry because he'll be back well before 0.28 comes out. Hopefully you didn't find this jovial blog post too jarring from our standard style, I just wrote a lot of this at 2am after being awake for almost 20 hours, so I'm a little loopy hahaha 😴.

Also, thanks as always to our developer contributors, documentation contributors, but most of all our users! This would've just been a script that Paulus (@balloob) used to control his lights at home if we didn't have your enthusiasm.

Feel free to let me know what you thought of this blog post and release on Gitter or my Twitter, or even the Home Assistant Twitter. Did I mention we have a brand new Facebook page that you should absolutely Like? There's a convenient Facebook Like and Twitter follow button right over there -->.

I almost forgot about your 🎁 for reading all the way to here: a 🍪! Hope you enjoy it in good health 😄.

Talk to you soon on Gitter and in your pull request comments!

• Robbie

(p.s. To those of you that scrolled directly to the bottom to get your present, just know that you didn't earn it like the others did. 😄)

[nkgilley]

Nzbget sensor also has breaking changes.

[robbiet480]

@nkgilley Can you give me a comment describing the breaking change that I can put into the notes?

[nkgilley]

@robbiet480

The configuration for the NZBGet sensor has also changed. base_url has been removed in favor of a required host and an optional port. The monitored_variables have also changed their names to:

article_cache: Number of cached articles.
average_download_rate: Average download rate
download_paused: Paused downloads
download_rate: Current download rate
download_size: The size to download
free_disk_space: Free disk space at the storage location of NZBGet
post_paused: Paused posts
remaining_size: Remaining size to download
uptime: Uptime of NZBGet

[robbiet480]

@nkgilley These are all breaking changes or are they just deprecated? That's quite a bit of change that doesn't really belong in the release notes. Can you add a section to the NZBGet docs specifying all the changes that I can link to?

[robbiet480]

@nkgilley Just added a note about NZBGet to the blog post telling users to go read the docs page for all the changes.

[fabaff]

Sorry, my bad. I removed the breaking change of NZBGet along the way.