Software Update: Home Assistant Core 0.106.0

Version 0.106 of Home Assistant Core has been released. Home Assistant Core is an open source home automation platform that runs under Python 3. It runs via Hassbian on a Raspberry Pi 3 or a Linux, macOS or Windows computer. It supports detecting devices such as Nest thermostats, Philips Hue, Belkin WeMo switches, Mr. Coffee makers, the smart switches from IKEA and the mqtt protocol. In addition, where possible, it can control these devices and apply automation. For more information, please refer to this page and our Forum. The announcement for this release can be found below.

0.106: Light brightness stepping, better Safe Mode and person dialog

A great release that improves stability, reliability and a lot of helpful additions to make everything much more friendly and easier to use. So let’s dive in!

Safe Mode improvements

In Home Assistant 0.105, we introduced Safe Mode. Our goal is to make sure Home Assistant always starts and provide you an interface to work with. No matter what.

@balloob has been busy this release to improve on this feature even more, and Home Assistant is now able to overcome issues when things in the core system get into trouble and even when the Lovelace configuration isn’t readable. Besides that, the way Safe Mode is presented has changed, so you instantly know you are in Safe Mode:

Stepping up and down the brightness of lights

Ever tried to make an automation to brighten or dim your lights? Or tried to hook up a remote to control the brightness of a light? If you have, you probably know that doing that was pretty painful and involved some additional templating to get that going.

This release just made that a lot easier. An example device automation:

We have also added this functionality to the light.turn_on service. You can now change the brightness, based on the current brightness, using the brightness_step (-255, 255) and brightness_step_pct (-100, 100) parameters.

Good to know, when the brightness hits 0, it will turn off the light. If the light is already off, and you step the brightness up, it will turn on. This is awesome, because if you have a rotating dimmer button (for example, an IKEA SYMFONISK), you can rotate it to change the brightness, but also turn the light on/off by just rotating it.

Person more info dialogs improvements

Persons have a new more info dialog. They now show the location of the person on the map and if the person is not in a zone, you can create a zone with the current location of that person with one click.

Entities configuration panel now shows all entities

The entities configuration panel previously only contained entities that were uniquely identifiable by Home Assistant (they have a so-called: unique ID). However, those are not provided by all integrations of Home Assistant, confusing since the entities panel did not show all of your entities.

In this version, we now include all entities in the panel, giving you a nice complete overview of all available entities in your system. You can’t edit all entities, since that requires an entity to be uniquely identifiable. If an entity doesn’t have a unique ID, the pencil icon will be struck through.

Since all entities are now available in this panel, it does not only provide you a clear overview of all the available entities; you can also make use of the “related items” feature introduced in release 0.105 to see where they are being used!

Updates to the developer tools panels

The developer tools panel also got some nice little touches. In the “Info” tab you can now find a list of all integrations you are using and the logs are now aware of the integrations as well.

Both now include links to the documentation and our GitHub issue tracker. This allows you to dive in quickly when you run into troubles with an integration.

sensor card

Our sensor card has had a style update. We initially got the design from the Lovelace Mini Graph Card and now updated to match the improved new look of that card.

Other noteworthy changes

But wait… there’s more! Some other smaller noteworthy changes in this release:

• In the zone editor that was introduced in the previous release, you can now change the location of your home zone. The radius of the home zone cannot be changed yet (we will work on that!), but you can drag the home zone on the map.

• Also an improvement on a feature introduced in the previous release, the state_color option is now also available for other cards, so you can override the defaults of the cards.

• New automations now default to device automations instead of state triggers and service calls. Device automations are so much easier and clearer to create from the UI. You can, of course, still use the old triggers and actions like you are used to.

• In the generated Lovelace we no longer include automations and battery entities. You can find these in the automation configuration panel and the battery in the device configuration page. If you want to have your automations and/or battery in your Lovelace UI, you can always take control and add them.

• Scripts and scenes now have the ability to set a custom icon. Previously, you would have to create a customization to do this, now, you can just set them in your configuration.

  scene: – name: Movies icon: mdi:movie-open entities: light.tv_back_light: state: on brightness: 125 light.ceiling: off

  YAML

custom cards

Are you the creator of an awesome custom card for Lovelace?

We have made some changes to Lovelace that might impact your custom card, so be sure to read the blog post on the developers site about this.

New Integrations

• Add Salt Fiber Box device tracker (@bjornorri – #30986) (salt docs) (new integration)
• Add GDACS feed integration(@exxamalte – #31235) (gdacs docs) (new integration)
• Add Minecraft Server Integration (@elmurato – #30992) (minecraft_server docs) (new integration)
• Add MELCloud integration(@vilppuvuorinen – #30712) (melcloud docs) (new integration)
• Dynalite Integration (@ziv1234 – #27841) (dynalite docs) (new integration)
• Add initial version of Vilfo Router integration (@ManneW – #31177) (vilfo docs) (new integration)

New Platforms

• Add totalconnect zones as binary sensors (@austinmroczek – #28712) (totalconnect docs) (new platform)
• Add Tahoma lock support (@vlebourl – #31311) (tahoma docs) (new platform)
• Clean up Tahoma smart lock (@vlebourl – #31430) (tahoma docs) (new platform)
• Add Tado water_heater(@michaelarnauts – #30095) (tado docs) (breaking change) (new platform)