Oct 31, 2024 9 min read

We are number one

Welcome to the October 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!

This has been an incredible month for the Open Home Foundation. It started out with a real challenge we worked hard to overcome, but it ended with some of the best news for the future of the open home—that Home Assistant is the largest open-source project. Also, this edition has the results from our recent request to improve our voice assistant’s wake word engine, along with another winning Home Assistant release.

The Open Home Continues to grow

I’m writing this edition of the newsletter from a hotel room in San Francisco, right after taking the stage with Frenck at this year's GitHub Universe. When we were invited to speak at the day 2 keynote, we were incredibly humbled, and I didn’t think twice about it. Both Frenck and I personally owe a lot to GitHub; it's a platform that lets us create, connect, and ultimately change the course of our lives. On a professional level, Github makes the work we do on Open Home projects possible, and they have always gone above and beyond to support Home Assistant, along with hosting many of our other projects and libraries. We also knew this was a chance to share everything we’ve learned in building a big community on the platform with other aspiring open-source creators.

We had just celebrated Home Assistant’s 11th anniversary, and getting to speak at GitHub Universe seemed like the perfect way to cap this all off, but little did we know we were just about to receive our biggest Birthday gift yet. On day one of Universe, GitHub published its annual Octoverse report, highlighting the platform's biggest trends and projects. It named Home Assistant 2024’s largest open-source project by contributors. Home Assistant had more than 21,000 people contribute over the year, an increase from last year's roughly 17,000 contributors. We also ranked 2nd for the number of first-time contributors, meaning there are thousands of people who chose our project as their first foray into the world of open-source.

This isn’t the only one of our associated projects on this year’s top projects list, its amazing to see Open Home Foundation collaboration partner Zigbee2MQTT at the 10th spot for first-time contributors. The project provides more choice in the smart home and deserves the support. This win for these projects shows how interdependent we all are, and that a rising tide lifts all boats. It also shows that there is a big appetite to build and share projects that allow people to have a more open home, one that gives them privacy, choice, and sustainability.

This links perfectly to what we said on stage; by designing something that gives people full control and empowers them to build, we have grown one of the biggest and most awesome open communities on GitHub. We explained how the project encourages people to look under the hood, and tinker, and has tools and channels to encourage people to learn, and then share their creations. It's a virtuous circle in which the community builds cool things that attract new users, who build new things. We also spoke about how our community is our guiding star, keeping us on course. I feel the larger we get the stronger the mission becomes and I’m so thankful for all the support we get from the community - they make this all possible.

Important changes to the Open Home Foundation

When we launched the Open Home Foundation in April of this year, it was the logical culmination of years of work on the Home Assistant project. We sought a lot of advice along the way and eventually found that establishing the foundation in Switzerland would give us the best protections for Open Home projects. We looked for inspiration from other organizations defending our digital rights, and eventually settled on moving ownership of projects to a non-profit Verein (“association”) that would be supported by for- and non-profit partners.

Since establishing the foundation, we have not been sitting still and have been looking for ways to make the foundation even stronger. This is why we’re now moving the Open Home Foundation from being a Verein to a Stiftung (“foundation”); this is even more strict and is an overall better fit. Proton also created a Swiss Stiftung earlier this year, and though it differs structurally from our foundation, they have done a great job explaining why an organization would choose this structure and the benefits. From the outside, it will be hard to see any difference in how we operate, but internally it brings extra protections and helps ensure the future of the foundation and the projects it supports.

Another change we’re working on is to make it easier for organizations around the world to donate to the Open Home Foundation. We’re currently applying to be a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States, which will make it much easier for companies located there to support our work. We can’t say anything today about new supporters, but watch this space!

2024.10: Heading in the right direction

This month was a perfect mix of new UI features, advanced features, improvements, and lots of bug fixes. A brand new heading card improves the organization of dashboards, allowing people to add titles or subtitles, make them clickable, and even add entities to show off sensor readings quickly. The new section dashboard is really accelerating its development, and if you haven’t yet, check it out!

Home Assistant now includes statistics issues in repairs, which will help people store their data long-term with fewer issues. Finally, YAML automation syntax has been improved to make more sense, making it easier to read and organize. Home Assistant continues to be on the cutting edge of Matter support, reaching the 1.3 specification.

Thanks for the samples, we need more!

Wake Word Collective - Help us improve voice

A few months ago, we promoted an early version of our Wake Word Collective tool in this newsletter. It records voice samples and uses those to train models used by our wake word engine, improving its ability to wake up to receive commands. From that one email alone, we received over 5,800 samples covering 30 different languages. While our wake word engine used to only excel at picking up the English pronunciation of “Okay Nabu”, it’s now many times more effective at picking up different accents. Our testing shows our model trained on the data you provided, now falsely rejects 5% of samples, while previous models rejected 18%, which shows your samples are making a difference!

We’ve improved the tool a bit more since you last used it, but we would urge you to lend your voice again. Get your family members involved; we need to improve how the tool picks up different registers of voice, particularly feminine registers. So please try it out again, share it around, and help us make an open and private voice assistant a reality.

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 issue and replacement

We have incredible pride in the hardware we build under the Home Assistant brand and stand behind it 100%. That’s why when we started receiving a small number of reports of issues with our Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 branded devices, we moved really quickly to try to find the problem. We found that the design was not what was at fault, but instead, a defective part that worked its way into a production run.

We knew there was only one way to ensure this issue wouldn’t impact any other customers, and that was by providing a comprehensive replacement program. One reason the Open Home Foundation was set up was to combat waste in the smart home, so we wanted to run this replacement program responsibly. We’re giving people a large 5-year window to claim their replacement, so they can keep their devices working until they really need a replacement. This hasn’t been easy, and took away time from focusing on doing cool new things, but we needed to stand by our products and customers.

This issue doesn’t affect SkyConnect-branded devices, but if you have a ZBT-1 branded device (if you’re unsure, here’s a graphic that helps), take a look at our blog that details the problem and the replacement program.

Community highlights

Presence direction zones made easy

One of the communities favorite ESPHome-based projects has just got better. Everything Smart Home’s Presence Lite has the ability to define zones for mmWave detection in the setting page, but it was always a bit cumbersome. This new Home Assistant Addon allows for it to be done in a great UI that reminds me of Ripley’s motion detector from Alien.

Incredible hydroponic setup

When people with real skills get mixed up with Home Assistant, incredible things can happen. u/leshx has built one of the most complex DIY hydroponic setups in a home I’ve ever seen.

These wall-hung dashboards are getting out of hand

u/DlabDlab21 is reusing an old 50” TV as a wall-mounted Home Assistant dashboard. Usually, the community hangs a 10” tablet, this has 25x more screen area, which gives you room for a couple more cards.

In other news

Android 15 has a new screensaver that turns your device into a smart home dashboard. It can even control Home Assistant devices, if only it was as good as the Sections dashboard. (Mishaal Rahman, Android Authority)
Alexa, where’s my Star Trek Computer? After 10 years of Alexa, we’re all still just asking it to do the same things we did at the start. (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, the Verge)
Raspberry Pi now offers its own SSDs and SD Cards. A simple but effective way to get people up and running with their OS on some reliable media. (Andrew Liszewski, the Verge)

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