Building the Open Home: A new home for the newsletter
4 min read
Building the Open Home: A new home for the newsletter
The Open Home Concept
This is the second edition of the Home Assistant newsletter and it has a new name: Building the Open Home. Our new name is a nod to the Open Home, our vision for creating a smart home that embraces privacy, choice, and durability (video).
The content of this newsletter has not changed. We're going to keep you up to date on what is happening with Home Assistant and how our community sets up their smart homes. The new name better reflects that this newsletter will talk about Home Assistant and other cool projects in the smart home space.
Home Assistant 2022.4 released!
A new version of Home Assistant has been released today. This release focuses on making it possible to do the most common adjustments via the user interface. There is way more, but the crème de la crème are:
Create Groups in the UI
Add Group Dialog
A group lets you combine multiple entities into a single entity. Entities that are members of a group can be controlled and monitored as a whole. This can be useful for cases where you want to control, for example, the multiple bulbs in a light fixture as a single light in Home Assistant.
Show your entities as other types
Change how your entity is shown
You can now change the type of entity to better represent the device.
For example, you can turn any Home Assistant switch into a Home Assistant Light, Cover, Fan, Lock, or Siren. This will replace it with the updated domain and hide the switch. This is great for those hard-wired light switches and allows you to add them to light groups!
Covers and Binary sensors can now be changed to show as different types that will update the icon and how it displays on and off. This is great when you want a different icon on your dashboards!
Update your Devices from Home Assistant
Installing a new version
You can now upgrade your devices from inside of Home Assistant just as you would for Home Assistant Releases. You will also notice the number of updates pending in the sidebar by the indicator badge on your configuration cog icon. It's now possible to read the release notes, skip or even install the upgrade to your device in one convenient place.
Founder of Z-Wave JS joins Nabu Casa to work full-time on open source 🎉
Dominic Griesel (@AlCalzone) will join Nabu Casa later this month to focus on further improving Z-Wave JS and will help Home Assistant in adopting Matter, a new smart home standard.
Z-Wave JS is open-source software that powers Z-Wave in Home Assistant and, because it's generic, is also used by several other home automation platforms. Z-Wave in Home Assistant wouldn't be as good as it is today if it wasn't for Z-Wave JS.
He will be employed by Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa – founded by Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant – exists to further develop Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects that help drive the Open Home. It has no investors and its sole income is from people subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud. If you like what Nabu Casa does, consider subscribing!
Raspberry Pi gives an update on the ongoing lack of stock. Besides supply chain issues they are also impacted by increased demand. They recommend only buying from approved resellers to ensure that you are not overpaying. (Eben Upton / Raspberry Pi)
