Software Update: Home Assistant Core 2021.11.0

Version 2021.11.0 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 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 own Forum. The full release notes are here to find; this is the announcement for this release:

2021.11: Icon picker, device links and entity categories

Point eleven (.11), which means it is November! (or depending on where you are in this world, of course.)

It also means: This is the second last release of the year…

Hacktoberfest is over! In the month October, people contribute to projects (like Home Assistant) to celebrate open source. I’ve seen lots of new faces and new contributors this month. To those I want to say: Welcome! Thanks for contributing your free spare time; Thanks for being a hero!

And, there’s more! Something that isn’t really visible. In the background, an army of contributors are improving a tremendous amount of Home Assistant code, which improves stability, readability, and maintainability of our project’s codebase. As a matter of fact, because of this incredible work, counted by the number of contributions, this release might just as well be one of the biggest ever. Work, you generally don’t notice, but is still done. Weird huh? Another group of heroes!

For me personally, this has been a crazy month. After the last release, I was sad to read about issues people had with the new Tuya integration. I went to different stores, bought many Tuya devices, and spent a lot of time improving the experience by extending device support. Hopefully, I’ve been able to do enough to make the Tuya integration acceptable.

This release… a long-time wishlist item of mine is in: The icon picker! So cool to see this happening, it is amazing, beautiful, super helpful, and it also supports third-party icon sets!

Oh, to spoil some inside information, you might want to block your agenda for the Home Assistant State of the Union 2021 on Saturday 11 December, 8 pm (CET)!