Home Assistant Core 0.118!
The second last release of 2020, while the end of the year is slowly closing in.
This also means we have only one more release left this year… And we plan to finish the year with a big bang! Also announced: the Home Assistant Conference. I am really excited about that one! The last major release of this year will be during the conference on December 13.
Back to 0.118! Some nice additions this release: Navigating around with the Quick bar (oh, I just love that feature), some new Lovelace cards, native types in templates is now the default and the Nest thermostat is back! 🎉
All in all, a fine release, with an exciting one ahead of us.
../Frenck
Table of contents
Home Assistant Conference
Exciting news! Home Assistant is hosting an online conference this year!
An event to celebrate our community, share ideas, history, creations and celebrate major milestones! The event will take place on Sunday, December 13.
Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, will give the opening and closing keynote, aided by other Home Assistant developers. In between, we have three different tracks of talks (for everyone, advanced users and developers) with a total of 16 different talks.
Check out the conference schedule to see the subjects of the talks and the list of speakers.
The Home Assistant Conference will be hosted on Hopin, an online conference platform. Tickets to attend will cost $1, which will cover the cost of the platform.
The conference will also be available as a free YouTube live stream. The live stream will be limited to the keynotes and the “everyone” track. You won’t have access to the chat and have that online conference feeling, so we recommend getting a ticket!
For the latest information, check our dedicated Home Assistant Conference page.
Grid Card
Ever since the start of Lovelace, users have been making grids. However, this was not easy as it involved fiddling by combining horizontal and vertical stacks — a confusing and frustrating experience.
@balloob to the rescue! This release adds a new Grid Card. You won’t have to write a complicated YAML soup combining both horizontal and vertical stacks.
The Grid Card offers straight forward options to mimic these setups and adds an option to force each card to be square to boot.
Screenshot of Grid Card.
*Note that the square option won’t work with all cards.
Quick Bar navigation
The Quickbar, which was introduced in Home Assistant 0.117, really took off! We are happy to see you like it.
If you haven’t tried the new Quick Bar yet… you should! It is a quick and
easy way to get to entities or run commands. From anywhere in Home
Assistant; press e for entities or c for commands.
This release, support for navigating Home Assistant via the Quick Bar was added. You can now jump to any place, from any place. Amazing job @donkawechico
Screenshot of navigating around using the Quick Bar.
Native types support for templates
Announced in 0.117, but now by default enabled. Native template types allow templates to result in not just strings (text), but also other types.
Ever tried to make a list of entities or set an RGB color via a template? If so, you probably would have learned, that it is not that simple. In Home Assistant, the result of a template always has been a piece of text (a string), even if you made a list.
script:
my_script:
alias: Example
description: Example script with native lists in templates
variables:
entities:
- light.living_room_window
- light.living_room_table
color: [255, 0, 0]
sequence:
service: light.turn_on
data:
entity_id: "{{ entities }}"
rgb_color: "{{ color }}"
This is an extremely powerful change to our template engine, that allows for more advanced future additions and can significantly reduce the complexity of existing templates in your set up.
It should be mostly compatible with your existing templates; However, be sure to check the breaking changes section for known possible breaking scenarios.
Logbook Card
Another new Lovelace card this release. @zsarnett added the Logbook Card.
This card allows you to show the logs of one (or more) entities on a Lovelace Dashboard. This can be really helpful if you want to monitor, for example, the motion events of a sensor or a camera.
Screenshot of the new Logbook Card.
Header & Footer Editor
Entity cards in Lovelace have support for customizing the header and footer of that card. This is really useful for adding a nice image, a couple of buttons or a graph to the card.
Up until now, you needed some YAML magic to achieve that. Thanks to @zsarnett we now have a Header & Footer editor available in the UI making this feature much easier to use.
Screenshot of the new Header/Footer editor.
Supervisor Network Configuration
Expected to be available soon, a new Supervisor version which includes a new network layer with added support for wireless networks, multiple network interfaces and even VLANs.
This should cover most of the feature requests we had around networking.
New Supervisor Network configuration UI
The next step is that we use all the information from our new network backend to simplify some add-ons. Also, updates for Snapshot/Restore of these network settings are planned.
Home Assistant OS
The last few days, two new Home Assistant OS releases have been published.
While 4.17 continues to make small improvements in the 4.x release series, the latest pre-release 5.5 comes closer to our goals to declare 5.x release series stable. In particular, this pre-release includes the Linux 5.4 kernel for all Raspberry Pis! We also intend to declare 64-bit the recommended installation method for Raspberry Pi 4.
Release 5.5 is also the first release to support Hardkernel’s ODROID-C4, a very cost-effective single board computer featuring the Amlogic S905X3 SoC and 4GB of DDR4 memory (thanks @ubergeek801). Testers welcome!
Other noteworthy changes
- The new Nest SDM integration now supports thermostats! Thanks, @allenporter!
- Entity pickers in the UI will now show the full name of the entities. Thanks, @spacegaier!
- The Roon media player now supports media browsing but also has support for grouping and transferring between different players. Thanks @pavoni
- @cnorick added a button to duplicate Scripts from the UI.
- The Shelly integration now has real-time status updates, which has been implemented by @thecode!
- @apop880 prepared the WLED integration for Christmas by adding a service for loading WLED presets.
- Date pickers in entity cards have been replaced with a modern, good looking version. Thanks, @thomasloven!
- @joshmcrty Made numbers shown in the frontend formatted in a way that matches your language settings.
-
@spacegaier has been busy improving the frontend, making it more accessible to people
with disabilities. In this case, ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
labels have been added, so screen readers can use our
+buttons. Thanks!
New Integrations
We welcome the following new integration this release:
New Platforms
The following integration got support for a new platform:
Integrations now available to set up from the UI
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
If you need help…
…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.
Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/11/18/release-118/
