Home Assistant

0.65: Rename entities, new filter sensor, UpCloud and Channels

Paulus Schoutsen 20 minutes reading time
  • Release-Notes
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Release 0.65 has arrived and oh boy, is it awesome. First off, in case you have missed the previous release notes and announcements: Starting with this release, Home Assistant has dropped support for Python 3.4. The minimum supported version is now Python 3.5.3. If you are on Hass.io or Docker, you’ll automatically be running the latest and greatest. If you’re on an older Hassbian installation or did your own Linux setup you’ll need to upgrade to at least Python 3.5.3.

Naming entities

With the introduction of the entity registry in 0.63, Home Assistant is making sure that the same devices always receive the same entity IDs. This release is taking it a step further by allowing users to change the name of a device from the frontend. Changing the name will be instantly applied and overrides whatever name the device is given by the integration. If you want to switch back to the name from the integration, set the name to blank.

This feature is, just like the entity registry, only available for integrations that provide unique IDs for their entities. Adding this to each integration is still a work in progress.

Screencap of interaction with the UI to override the name of a light. The new entity registry settings page in action.

Filter sensor

The filter sensor is a new 2nd order sensor by @dgomes: it will consume data from a sensor entity and apply filters to it. For the initial implementation it comes with Low-pass, Outlier and Throttle filters. Expect more to be added in the future.

sensor:
  - platform: filter
    name: "filtered realistic humidity"
    entity_id: sensor.realistic_humidity
    filters:
      - filter: outlier
        window_size: 4
        radius: 4.0
      - filter: lowpass
        time_constant: 10
        precision: 2

Chart showing a humidity sensor with a lot of spikes and a smooth graph produced by the new filter sensor. Graph showing both the input sensor and the output of the filter sensor.

Light Group

We have had some discussion lately and realized that our current group component is very limiting. Extending it would probably lead to more confusion so we’ve decided to take a new approach: groups that are designed to be part of a specific component. The first one in this series comes at the hand of @OttoWinter: the group light (docs).

The group light creates a single light inside Home Assistant that is representing a group of lights. All commands will be forwarded and the state is a combination of all the lights.

light:
  - platform: group
    name: Cool Light Group
    entities:
      - light.amazing_light
      - light.foobar
      - light.sun

HomeKit

HomeKit got some more upgrades. We’ve added support for temperature sensors in Fahrenheit, alarm systems, switches and thermostats. Just a few releases more and we should be able to cover it all.

Optional words for the Conversation component

The conversation component has always been a great introduction to controlling your house by voice. There is no hotword detection or powerful language engine behind it, but it gives a great intro to what is possible. Starting with this release, it will get a little bit more powerful with the introduction of optional words. To mark a word optional, wrap it in square brackets: Change the light to [the color] {color}.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
conversation:
  intents:
    LivingRoomTemperature:
     - What is the temperature in the living room
     - What is [the] living room temperature

intent_script:
  LivingRoomTemperature:
    speech:
      text: It is currently  degrees in the living room.

Screenshot of the frontend with the conversation panel open. Have conversations with Home Assistant via the conversation component.

New Platforms

Release 0.65.1 - March 10

Release 0.65.2 - March 10

Release 0.65.3 - March 11

If you need help…

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

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Breaking Changes

All changes