Release notes for March 11, 2015

It has only been a little over a week since Theodor introduced YAML support for Home Assistant but so much has already happened that it is time for a summary of recent changes. Before mentioning the highlights I want to thank andythigpen, jamespcole and theolind for numerous bug fixes, enhancements and new contributions. Thanks!

Monitor local resources.
Theodor has contributed a new sensor platform to allow you to monitor disk usage, memory usage, CPU usage and running processes. This platform has superseded the process component which is now considered deprecated.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
sensor:
  - platform: systemmonitor
    resources:
      - type: disk_use_percent
        arg: /home
      - type: memory_free
      - type: process
        arg: kodi

Experimental Z-Wave support
There is now experimental support for connecting Z-Wave networks using a Z-Wave USB stick. Right now it only integrates Z-Wave sensors into Home Assistant. Our goal is to get this tested by more people before adding support for other Z-Wave devices.

The new component is built on top of python-openzwave. This package is currently not distributed on PyPi so we’ve added a script scripts/build_python_openzwave to install it on your machine. Alternatively you can use the Docker image which is ready to go.

The development was done using an AEON Z-Wave USB stick and an AEON Z-Wave MultiSensor.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyUSB0

Voice control
An initial version of voice control for Home Assistant has landed. The current implementation consists of two parts.

The first part is a component called conversation that exposes the service conversation/process. This service is capable of processing text and translating them into commands for devices. For now it will only support commands in the format of Turn <Friendly Name> <on/off>.

The second part is an upgrade to the frontend to use the speech-to-text in Chrome to allow users to speak commands. If you’re using Chrome, you can test this out in the demo.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
conversation: