Getting out of the home
Welcome to the June edition of the Open Home Foundation newsletter, the place to learn about the latest and greatest things for your smart home that improve its privacy, choice, and sustainability.
The Open Home newsletter is written by Paulus Schoutsen - President of the Open Home Foundation, and founder of Home Assistant. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!
June has been an especially energizing month for the Open Home Foundation, as we came together in person to reconnect, recharge, and refocus. It’s an incredible group of people all focused on improving the Open Home for everyone. We are looking for even more talent, so take a look at our jobs page as new opportunities are live now, with more to come!
This month’s newsletter covers highlights from our Summit, community day stats, new voice features, Apple following our lead, and more.
A meeting of minds
At the beginning of June this year, the Open Home Foundation did something pretty special: we all got together in person. We held our first Open Home Foundation Summit, an event where people supporting Open Home projects like Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant come together to bond, strategize, and innovate. We chose the city of Dublin, Ireland as it was a nice central location for everyone to travel to, but also because it's a beautiful and welcoming city.
Yes, we’re based in Switzerland, and have over 40 employees, but no physical office. We are a fully remote organization, and we’re really good at working and collaborating. We get a lot of incredible things done remotely, for example, building the best open voice hardware and software in existence.
Being a remote organization has allowed us to hire the best talent from the open source community from around the world, while giving us a broader perspective on our community’s needs. On a personal level, being remote has some nice perks. For instance, having no commute, being there when your children come home from school, doing laundry in between meetings… 🧺
Working remotely certainly has its perks, but it’s hard to replace the human connection. It is important to be together, in the same room. Whether that's to quickly bounce ideas off each other, or just chit-chat about life and share an inside joke. And that's what the Summit is about.
Just like it’s valuable for Foundation and Nabu Casa staff to meet in person, meeting our community and contributors is just as important. Every conversation gives me a new perspective, and that’s a big reason I try to host meetups whenever I’m in a new city. That’s why at this year's Summit, we did something new and invited some long-term contributors from ESPHome, Home Assistant Android App, and Music Assistant, along with Lewis from EverythingSmartHome. Their involvement added a whole new dimension to the Summit, and we’re planning to build on that next year.
The Summit week was filled with presentations detailing all the ongoing work in Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant. There were also workshops where we brainstormed new ideas and solutions for the community's biggest issues. Just to give you a flavor: we talked about future hardware, new protocols, the device database, improving automations, and a new merchandise store. A lot of exciting ideas came out of these sessions, and once they’re further developed, we’ll share them with the community to help shape what comes next. Let’s just say, there’s some truly ambitious stuff in the pipeline.
It wasn’t all work, we also did a lot of fun activities like kayaking on the Liffey, walking tours, and the Guinness Storehouse. We were even able to squeeze in a Dublin community meetup, where we met up with 40 people from in and around Ireland! I think we’re all feeling recharged and are filled with the kind of direction and purpose that only comes from meeting in person.
This month in the news
Some quick stats on Community Day
In case you missed it, Home Assistant Community Day was a big hit. We ended up holding 82 events with over 1,600 registered guests across the globe. It ran continuously for over 26 hours! Most meetups were in Europe and North America, but we had multiple meetups in Asia, South America, and even New Zealand. Thanks to everyone who took part!
Missy Quarry
The next iteration of our voice assistant is here
It's always incredible how much happens between each Voice chapter. This time, we have major improvements to language support on low-powered hardware, going from 6 to 21 supported languages! We’ve also taken steps to make it easier for others to build new voice assistant hardware — and it all runs faster than ever! It's worth taking a look at this update just to see voice features we’re currently working on… such as the much-requested music playback voice control.
Mike Hansen
Apple follows our lead
It must be hard to be Apple, always getting to Home features way after us. This month, they’re finally adding smarter energy control features to HomeKit (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge). It won’t be out until the next OS release, and it’ll rely on other apps to integrate it, so you might be waiting a while for this to appear. While you wait, I’d recommend managing your energy devices via Home Assistant, we have a slight lead with over 100 energy integrations already available. In all seriousness, I will always applaud Apple for putting effort into reducing energy usage, and hopefully, the rest of the industry follows Apple like they always do.
Rumor has it that Apple has filed to own the HomeOS trademark (Joe Rossignol, MacRumors). It’s only one word away from the best home OS that’s been around for some years… Home Assistant OS… I wonder if Apple's OS also runs on a Pi? Rumor has it Apple will be running this OS on their HomePod with a screen (Karen Haslam, MacWorld). Google seemingly abandoned building dedicated home display hardware (with an eccentric dedicated OS), opting instead for an Android tablet with some home controls here and there. I wrote previously about the flaws in this product category, but maybe Apple will do its thing and sprinkle some magic on it.
Calling all Music Assistant users
Music Assistant is running its first-ever user research survey to better understand our users. Music Assistant is such a great example of a user-driven open source project, just look at the major features we’ve implemented based on users’ requests. I have no doubt this will shape the future of the project. It only takes a few minutes to complete, and no identifiable information will be collected.
SwitchBot Joins Works with Home Assistant
Works with Home Assistant has done it again, and added another first — the first cleaning robot and air purifier! SwitchBot is bringing a long list of Bluetooth and Matter products to the program. If you want a glimpse of the smart home future, check out the K20 Pro robot. It can carry a whole range of accessories including a Works with Home Assistant certified air purifier, but also a fan, camera, and even an iPad holder. It’s straight out of the Jetsons.
Miranda Bishop
Other mentions of us in the press
- The Official Raspberry Pi magazine's June front-page story this month is home automation, and Home Assistant is heavily featured in that multi-page story.
- I made the list of 19 Best Raspberry Pi Developers… scroll right to the end to find me 😅
- Jeff Geerling (number one on the above list) has done a great overview of how he uses smart plugs with Home Assistant for testing devices, shooting videos, his home lab, and more.
Community highlights
Music Assistant is now a lot easier for guests to use, with a new community-made frontend that allows anyone to get in and make requests.
I’ve seen plenty of cool visualizations of the home with dashboards, but I’ve not seen a physical representation. This one lights up each room with LEDs controlled by an ESP, and it's made of Lego… my kids would constantly be taking it apart and rebuilding it.
This video is worth watching just for the satisfying sounds of the sign clicking. YouTuber Smart Solutions for Home has made an incredibly impressive ESP-controlled clicky sign with a very polished webUI, that allows it to connect to Home Assistant.
Don’t you hate when you can’t control your smart boat from Home Assistant. Well giantspacesquid has you covered, with their solar powered robotic boat being controllable via Home Assistant.
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