Home Assistant

0.30: More Async, HASSbian, Digital Ocean, statistics, REST

Fabian Affolter seven minutes reading time
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Yes, after only nine days comes 0.30. Don’t worry, we will try to keep our usual release cycle and not start to release every day.

We guess that you already know: The Raspberry Pi image is available now. For Hassbian, @Landrash has combined the most essential parts for a Home Assistant setup in an easy-to-use image for the Raspberry Pi device family. Hassbian is quite young, thus we are looking forward to receive feedback, issue report, and suggestions to improve it.

A large amount of resources of the development are still focusing on the effort to move Home Assistant further to asynchronous programming. It’s a labor-intensive task, comes with segmentation faults, and unstable instances when certain combinations of sensors are used. The benefit will be more speed in the near future.

To reduce the run-time of your tests, @balloob did a lot of tweaking. For now the RFXtrx tests are excluded which cut the needed time for running on your Pull Request in half.

Documentation

All configuration sample entries are now minimized. This should help to avoid problem for starters and newbies as they only get what’s needed and not a full sample with all optional entries. If there is an issue with an entry in your configuration.yaml file the error message will provide you an URL that point to the documentation.

As soon as the Hacktoberfest started there were a lot of incoming Pull Requests for the documentation. A huge “Thank you” to all participants. Especially, we would like to give a cookie to @hillaryfraley. She created around a dozen Pull Requests so far and didn’t only fix typos but complete sections. The Hacktoberfest is still on-going and we are looking forward to get more Pull Requests.

Statistics

With the statistics sensor we would like to introduce a new sensor that is similar to the template sensor or the trend sensor. This sensor is consuming values from another sensor and is doing some statistical analysis of the data. Over a group of samples is the average/mean, the min/max, the total, the standard deviation, and the variance calculated which can be used in your automation rules. If the source is a binary sensor then the state changes are counted.

As the results are processed on-the-fly you still need to use the data from your database for an in-depth analysis of your stored information. Check the latest notebook for doing statistics with your Home Assistant database.

REST! We don’t…

There was a lot of work done on our implementation which are working with RESTful APIs. @w1ll1am23 extended the aREST platforms to display if an aREST unit is available or not. The aREST implementations are now covered by the configuration check as well. Please check the Breaking changes section for more details.

The REST sensor supports now HTTP authentication (basic and digest) and custom headers. This will allow you to access resources which are protected. This sample sensor will access GitHub and retrieve the latest release number while by-passing the rate limit for non-authenticated requests.

sensor
  - platform: rest
    resource: https://api.github.com/repos/home-assistant/home-assistant/releases/latest
    username: YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME
    password: YOUR_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN
    authentication: basic
    value_template: '{{ value_json.tag_name }}'
    headers:
      Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json
      Content-Type: application/json
      User-Agent: Home Assistant REST sensor

Misc

  • GitHub released with a recent update a review feature. This will give you more control over your comments while you review an open Pull Request.
  • Thanks to @robbiet480 we are now running mention-bot. It will help you when you create a new Pull Request to identify potential reviewers.
  • The Home Assistant Community Forum has now an additional section called “Installation”.

All changes

Release 0.30.1 - October 8

  • Device Tracker known_devices.yaml validation is now more accepting (@kellerza)
  • Handle X10 light numbers greater than 9 (@mtl010957)
  • Fix command line covers without a template (@roidayan)

Release 0.30.2 - October 12

  • Handle Volvo’s with dashes in their name (@molobrakos)
  • Fix some html5 push notification configuration options were discarded after first use (@T3m3z)
  • Fix Homematic device name with autodiscovery (@pvizeli)
  • Make ‘pin’ optional for zigbee device config (@flyte)
  • Fix when sending a notification to a service with target attached (i.e. notify.html5_unnamed_device_2) the target was not submitted to the platform as a list causing iteration over every character in the string. (@robbiet480)
  • Fix for Slack targets (@fabaff)
  • Fix for Pushover targets (@Nixon506E)

Breaking changes

  • All deprecated condition options from automation have been removed (deprecated since May and have printed warnings to your console):
    • use_trigger_values is gone. You have to copy your triggers to conditions and adjust for the correct config.
    • condition_type is gone. Use condition: or instead.
    • To specify the type of a condition, use condition: instead of platform:.
  • The Forecast.io was renamed to Dark Sky. Replace your - platform: forecast with - platform: darksky.
  • The aREST configuration between the sensor and the switch platform was aligned.

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our Forum or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you the former communication channels. Thanks.