2021.1: Happy New Year!

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We said goodbye to 2020, which was a weird and wild year. 2020 will be remembered because of the awful pandemic, that hopefully will get under control in 2021.

We wish you, your family, friends and everyone around you, safety, health, happiness and countless blessings for 2021!

Happy New Year!

Kicking off the year with Home Assistant Core 2021.1!

Now don’t get too excited. The 2020.12 release was jam-packed, and most of us enjoyed the holidays with our loved ones. Furthermore, we didn’t have a full release cycle, this one was shorter than usual. This is due to the delaying of the previous release cycle (for the conference) and the introduction of the new release cycle (monthly now).

As a result of that, this release starts 2021 slowly, with a light release. No big new features, no new integrations. Just fixes, tweaking and tuning.

Besides, I’m curious, what is your smart home new years resolution? Let me know in the comments!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

In memoriam of Villhellm

It is with sadness that we announce that one of the Jedis in our Discord Server, @Villhellm (William), who had been actively involved with the Home Assistant community for a number of years, had passed away right before Christmas of 2020 at the age of 27.

He had been an active member in forums, and other discord servers related to Home Automation (Dr. Zzs, DigiblurDIY, and many more.)

We want to take a moment to recognize his efforts and the support he had provided to the HA community, and may he rest in peace.

Some of his friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help his surviving wife and family members. We now have an opportunity to help his family get through these difficult times.

We thank you for your support!

Home Assistant Conference Videos

A couple of weeks ago, the Home Assistant Conference of 2020 took place. We had quite a few messages and requests for making all talks held at the conference available for viewing.

We have started the process of making those available on our YouTube Channel. So, if you haven’t done it already, go to our channel and subscribe and you’ll be notified when we make another talk available.

All videos of the conference will be added to the Home Assistant Conference 2020 playlist on YouTube as well.

Other noteworthy changes

This release has no big new features, but we do have quite a bit of tweaks that are definitely noteworthy to mention.

  • @spacegaier removed the “No Area” from the device tables, reducing the clutter in those lists.
  • Since 2020.12, entities can be assigned to areas. Thanks to @elupus, these areas are now sent to Google Assistant as room hints.
  • Rachio now has pause and resume services, thanks to @brg468.
  • A bunch of new sensors are added to Météo-France. Additional weather conditions, UV, and wind gust, done by @mbo18!
  • @alengwenus has been refactoring the LCN integration. While it does not bring new things to the surface, it does improve in quality and prepares for future improvements. Keep up the good work!
  • Homeatic IP Cloud now supports HmIP-HDM1 and HmIPW-DRD3, thanks to contributions by @SukramJ.
  • Accuweather now has Wind information, thanks @abmantis!
  • ReCollect Waste now has integration options, starting by giving the option to display pickup types by their human-friendly names. Thanks, @bachya!
  • @postlund rewrote the Apple TV integration for 2020.12, but he is not stopping! Besides some fixes, he extended the device information and added some attributes.
  • The SQL Sensor now supports MSSQL, thanks to @dgomes!
  • Support for climate devices with a temperature range, has been added to the HomeKit controller integration. Thanks, @thevoltagesource!
  • The MQTT integration discovery feature, now has support for device trackers, which has been added by @PeteBa.
  • Sending animations using the Telegram Bot is now possible with the new animation service added by @tofuSCHNITZEL.
  • If you have a Xiaomi Miio vacuum cleaner with a mop function, this release added status for the water box and the mop itself. Thanks, @JJdeVries!
  • WeMo now supports the outdoor plug, thanks @mattbilodeau!
  • The Music Player Daemon integration now shows album art in the media player. Looks good @mweinelt!
  • Amazon Polly has a new voice: Olivia. A female, Australian and neural voice. Thanks @aque0us!
  • Google Cloud TTS now has support for SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language). Thanks, @lufton!
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/2021/01/06/release-20211/
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wow, I might actually be brave enough to jump in and install this one on the .0 release.

:slightly_smiling_face:

And Happy New Year to all, too!

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Happy new year! :partying_face:

My resolution is to set up the ZigBee door sensors & motion sensor that I got myself for Christmas. But more than anything my plan is to get everything ‘perfect’, I have a few automations that could be improved with some tweaks and my YAML needs a good tidy!

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My resolution is to work on improving stability. My automations work great, but too many of my sensors/devices are flaky. I’m starting by improving wiring connections, but I also hope for z-wave improvements in HA to help. (I’ve also resolved to never buy z-wave again, and that all new devices need to work over mqtt as z-wave support in HA remains absolutely atrocious)

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And the upstream fixes for non-RFC compliant HTTP servers are available for rest-template and Axis integration :tada:

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That’s terrible news about villhellm, condolences. Way too young.

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My sincerest condolences to villhelm’s wife, family, and friends. His passing is a tragic loss to all.

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Terrible news about villhelm. As if 2020 could not get any worse. Sincere condolences to his wife and family at this sad time.

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I’m really hopeful for the upcoming zwave-js project being brought into the fold in 2021.
(https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/483)

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My condolences to his wife and dear friends.

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Condolences, 27,so so young

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My 2021 HA resolutions are admittedly ambitious for me to accomplish but I have a whole year, right? :smiley:

  • Completing a multi-zone and multi-stage HVAC automation/collection of automations to augment or replace our Nest. Not certain if SDM will be enabled to deliver the level of control I’d like - specifically changing which remote nest sensor the main thermostat is pinned to.
  • Improve the acceptance factor of our HA instance (nod to Isabella Gross Alström)
  • Introduce some touchable screen interfaces to the home, including a “master panel” with custom floor layout panels
  • Complete build out of sensors, automations, data collections, and lovelace interfaces to support my new home brewing addiction hobby
  • Improve room to room presence detection, preferably detect who without them carrying a device (maybe some opencv work)

Also my sincere condolences to Villhellm’s friends and family. Very tragic to lose someone so young. Thank you for sharing a way for us to help them.

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I am not sure that I ever interacted with @Villhellm, but condolences are extended to his family and friends. :cry:

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I use @postlund’s custom component for Apple TV (https://github.com/postlund/hass-atv-beta) which fixes issues with MRP discovery.

I see he’s rewritten the core Apple TV component in this release. Anyone know if the core integration can now be used instead of the custom component?

I ask because the alerts page no longer has the Apple TV alert, and the custom component hasn’t been updated in several months.

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Yes, they should be more or less equal now. I intend to replace the custom component code with what is currently in Home Assistant soon.

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Is there any known issue? My Apple TV was losing connection every few seconds and is now unknown and newly discovered, but i cannot readd it. MRP is failing before PIN is showng up and airplay is also failing after entering the PIN.

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Yeah, that sounds like what I was seeing last month when I tried to flip back to the core integration instead of the custom component. Sounds like it’s still an issue in the latest release then.

I’ll try it out myself today and see if I see the same errors.

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Just a couple of questions if that’s OK?

  1. I don’t have HTTPS so does that mean that the Neato component won’t work?

Please note that your instance must be accessible via HTTPS. However, your instance does not need to be exposed to the Internet.

b: Has the Leaf component fix been merged yet?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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The integration now supports Oauth (which was asked by the neato developers a while back) which now has the following requirement:

Redirect URI: since users will be authenticated with OAuth, you need to provide a return URL to capture the auth token in your application and use it to authorize calls. This MUST be a secure URL (https://).

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I did a check and get this error:

[20:14:28] INFO: Installed Home Assistant 2021.1.0
[20:14:28] INFO: Making a copy of your configuration for checking...
[20:14:32] INFO: Checking your configuration against this version...
[20:20:32] ERROR: The configuration check did not pass!
[20:20:32] ERROR: See the output below for more details.
Testing configuration at /tmp/config
Fatal error while loading config: (idna 3.1 (/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages), Requirement.parse('idna<3,>=2.5'), {'requests'})
Failed config
  General Errors: 
    - (idna 3.1 (/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages), Requirement.parse('idna<3,>=2.5'), {'requests'})

Successful config (partial)
[20:20:32] INFO: The full output has been written to /share/check_config.txt
[cont-finish.d] executing container finish scripts...
[cont-finish.d] done.

What can it be?