Sep 30, 2024 7 min read

Home Assistant turns 11 years old

Art by Clelia Rella

Welcome to the September 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, founder of Home Assistant, and Nabu Casa. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!

The Open Home is maturing like fine wine, with Home Assistant reaching 11 years old and showing no signs of slowing. We are also seeing clear signs from the smart home industry that Open Home projects are critical to the future of the smart home. One such sign is Nabu Casa being given a seat on the Z-Wave Alliance Board. All this and more are included in this month's edition.

Community is the engine driving forward the Open Home

Home Assistant this month turned 11 years old! This year's anniversary was focused on the community, as none of this would have been possible without them.

In the early days, the community was my inspiration to continue building Home Assistant. Over the years, more and more people brought their talents to help build Home Assistant, with more contributing every year (over 17,000 people did so last year 😮). They joined in the social channels, sharing their ideas, creations, and positive experiences. When we were all doing this in our spare time, that kind of comradery and encouragement kept us energized.

A real turning point was when the community helped turn this part-time passion into a full-time job, by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud. This has allowed Home Assistant to become better in every way, and gave us the ability to think even bigger. We were able to create the Open Home Foundation, to which I donated Home Assistant. This was my way of confirming to the community that this project is, and will forever be, theirs.

Franck Nijhof describes Home Assistant as a wheel that I started spinning all those years ago, and the community continues to add momentum to it. Now, it's spinning so fast that it can’t be tipped over, and community tells us which direction they want us to steer it next. Community will always define our direction, we listen and research, and make sure we’re solving the problems they have in their homes.

Another turn of the wheel - the voice example

Last year’s work on voice was a perfect example of that. We could see big tech ruining or outright retreating from the voice assistant space, and there were no real open-source alternatives available. We called out to the community to help, and the response was immense. The community helped us build a lightweight wake-word engine, improved text-to-speech/speech-to-text, gave us translations, connected it to large language models, and more. Now, a fully open-source voice assist exists that you can build yourself for a couple of dollars and that speaks languages not covered by Google and Amazon. All that code and research is freely available for anyone to use in their own projects.

Recently, we asked you to give us voice samples to help improve our wake word engine for all accents… and a couple thousand people have already contributed! If you haven’t yet, give us a minute of your time, and we’ll continue to build a voice assistant to replace the abandonware being provided by big tech.

Of course, voice is not our only focus, just a great example of the community taking on a challenge. This year Home Assistant announced its first official roadmap, which details the challenges the project is focusing on solving at the moment.

Home Assistant 11th Anniversary live stream

Continuing that theme of community was the focus of the 11th Anniversary livestream. Missy Quarry, Home Assistant’s community manager, co-hosted the stream with creator and Home Assistant community member Andrej Broz, better known as Bearded Tinker. Together, they threw a barrage of questions at Frenck and myself - we didn’t see any of them ahead of time so our responses don’t get any more real than that. It was a lot of fun, and there was even a little announcement slipped in there, so please check it out.

We are joining the Z-Wave Alliance Board

This week, it was announced that I will be taking a seat on the Z-Wave Alliance Board of Directors, representing Nabu Casa. This is a significant piece of recognition for the work Home Assistant and Nabu Casa have put into supporting open standards, while also showing the importance of open source projects in keeping standards successful and thriving.

Being part of this board allows us to play a bigger role in shaping Z-Wave’s future. As a Standards Development Organization (SDO), the Alliance is shaped by its members, and they brought Nabu Casa in for its connection to the community and expertise in open source. I will be giving a voice to Home Assistant users, open source development, and Open Home Foundation values.

Home Assistant 2024.9: Sections go BIG

The headline feature in this release is bigger sections. This feature, combined with resizable cards, allows you to make supersized cards that span multiple sections, so feel free to add a big map or security camera view. Smarter energy monitoring and a new LLM option were also added. Even though it was a smaller release, five new integrations were added, along with one existing integration being added to the UI.

Aqara joins Works with Home Assistant

It was announced that Aqara is bringing several of their devices to the Works with Home Assistant program. This will be the first partner to join since the program was moved to the Open Home Foundation. It was also the first to join certifying specific devices, making it much easier to see what will give you the best experience in Home Assistant. Aqara is the first partner to use our “Works via Matter with Home Assistant” badge, giving some great options to use with Home Assistant’s industry-leading Matter support.

Aqara IFA booth, Home Assistant in third place — IFA heavily features Home Assistant at multiple booths

Just to highlight, at this year’s IFA, Home Assistant was not only featured prominently on Aqara’s booth, we were also found all over the show floor. Brands are now realizing Home Assistant is the most capable and has the most loyal users.

Community highlights

E-ink price tags to help keep plants watered

Using esphome, epaper price tags, 3d printing, and a mi flora sensor u/AColdFloor has created the ultimate reminder system for forgetful indoor gardeners.

Smart light mega database

u/eaterout has tested 150+ smart lights, posting a number of key metrics in a massive searchable database. It has a nice UI and helps explain some of the key metrics like brightness, flicker, color accuracy, and more. For anyone who is smart bulb shopping, this could really help.

Physical playlists with RFID cards

This is a great use of RFID cards and a reader. u/imjoshleyva has linked these cards to his playlists and has a reader built into a 3d printed shell that can also pause and play the lists.

In other news

Google, the search company, is thinking of adding a search bar to the Google Home app. It’s never been a good option if you have many devices… or you like cleverly automating anything. (Pranob Mehrotra, Android Authority)
Sonos workers shed light on why the app update went so horribly. Technical debt across their devices and software is the root of their issues. Open source it, and we’ll help fix it. (Scharon Harding, ArsTechnica)
Bluetooth 6.0 has more security and precision for tracking and finding. Home Assistant users are already using Bluetooth for room presence detection, so this might be really helpful. (Emma Roth, Verge)

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