We’re here to change your mind
Welcome to the January 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!
The new year has arrived, and it really feels like we’re already going full speed ahead. Attending one of the largest technology trade shows seven days into the year definitely adds to that feeling. Along with Home Assistant launching a big new feature that sparked a lot of conversation - we actually have quite a bit to talk about already!
From keyboard warriors to industry professionals
In the early days, if a brand changed an API we relied on, it was easy to assume this action was done with some malicious intent. Speaking with support would often lead nowhere. As we grew in scale and met people in the industry, we soon could speak directly to decision-makers in organizations. After a conversation, it would be clear they didn’t fully understand the impact of these changes on their users. Often, we would reach a compromise to keep the product connected to Home Assistant - achieving something in an hour that used to take months.
Having a voice in the industry has led to changed minds, and this is partly why the Open Home Foundation needs to exist. While Home Assistant - with its over one million households - has considerable leverage over brands, other smart home projects didn’t have that same protection. The Foundation amplifies the voices of our collaboration partners while holding the tech industry accountable, advocating for greater choice, privacy, and sustainability in the smart home.
It's not fun, or the most effective, to only connect with brands when things go wrong. Meeting under a spirit of collaboration is much better for everyone and has led to some great partnerships. One of the best ways to maximize the number of minds you can change is by attending and speaking at industry events. There is only so much you can achieve from behind a screen, and the strides you can make from a convention floor are impressive.
CES 2025
This year, we went to CES with a team of five. The Home Assistant logo was everywhere, often nestled between the logos of the industry's biggest players. Companies are eager to show the pro users we represent that they’re cool 😎.
We’re victims of our success. By creating a platform that supports over a thousand brands and provides top-tier support for the most popular open standards, we spark quite a few conversations while crossing the show floor.
We split up to maximize our presence at CES. Some of us roamed the convention floor to learn where the industry is headed and observe design trends, while the rest focused on meeting current and potential partners. Our current partners include brands, distributors, and open standard governing bodies. We always touch base to see what’s coming up and to offer our help in ensuring their future work aligns with the Open Home values.
A lot of companies want to tell the world that their devices are compatible with Home Assistant, but we ask for a little more to join our Works with Home Assistant program. We thoroughly test this hardware, but want brands to assure us they’ll support their products and the community before they use our logo and name. We also build hardware and a leading software platform for microcontrollers. So we’re now meeting chip vendors, seeing what’s on the horizon, and trying to see where we should focus future development.
Favorite weirdest smart home gadget
This is one that I could see myself using: a Matter keyboard for your computer! Keys go via the USB port except if you press the "fn" key in combination with F1-F10 keys. They are fired directly as Matter events inside Home Assistant. Cool and weird, but pretty smart!
Ain't no party like an Open Home party
What do you do if a bunch of YouTubers, distributors, and manufacturers converge in a single place? You host a party! And so that's what we did on the Thursday of CES. It was wonderful to see some people who power our community in person.
Thanks to Rob from the Hook Up for sponsoring the food!
Home Assistant 2025.1 and encrypted backups
Over the years, I have heard far too many stories about people losing their Home Assistant systems to hardware failure, causing downtime and stress. These stories are what drove Home Assistant to research and build a new automated backup feature. It was designed to allow any user, regardless of their skill level, to regularly back up to multiple locations, including off-site, for ultimate safety. We even added cloud backup storage to Home Assistant Cloud at no additional cost to users.
Privacy is a core value of the open home; if your data is leaving your home, we want it to be secure. These backups include device credentials and detailed usage history data about your life at home. In this release, it was thought the best way forward was to make encryption a requirement of automatic backups, and if you didn’t want to use encryption, you could keep doing things the old way (automations, blueprints, or add-ons).
Right after the release shipped, it became clear that the backup feature needed more configuration options, like being able to disable encryption on certain backup locations. The community did its duty by letting the team know. Developers have been working hard on the next release, addressing many of our community’s concerns, and building this feature out. Home Assistant’s community ultimately decides the direction of this project, and that is what has made it the best smart home project in existence.
This release had more than just backups, including everything added in the Month of What the Heck, dashboard background settings, and more. Check out the full release notes below.
Franck Nijhof
Last chance for the community survey
We’re extending the deadline for our community survey to January 31st. If you have 15 minutes to spare and want to tell us how you use Home Assistant, please share your thoughts with us. Your input will help us improve and make Home Assistant more inclusive.
Annika Schulz
Open Home Community Events
Meetups
Organized by the Home Assistant team
1 FEB - FOSDEM Brussels | Little Delirium starting @ 19:00 local time
24 FEB - Reykjavik | Location/time TBD | Interest form
Community-organized
Organizing an Open Home meetup? Hit reply and let us know!
Live streams
5 FEB - Home Assistant 2025.2 Release Party
12 FEB - Voice - Chapter 9
19 FEB - ESPHome Release Party - New Year Edition
Industry Events
FOSDEM Brussels, February 1-2
Z-Wave Alliance Summit Barcelona, February 7-8
Community Highlights
Stealth smart home
u/fuemmenneunzig has found that giving a little paint job to his contact sensors can go a long way in keeping devices discrete.
Pixel art floorplans for every home!
We have a new trend in Home Assistant, really cool looking 8-bit/16-bit home floor-plans! u/mythriz showed off his SNES-era Zelda floor-plan, while u/katschung even made a tutorial on how to make their Pokemon-inspired floor-plan.
Generative AI in Home Assistant
Lindo St. Angel has written an extensive article on using generative AI in Home Assistant, one that can write automations when asked, explore history data, and much more, a real peak in the future.
Shopping list barcode scanner
u/mattchew0 has built an ESPHome-based barcode scanner that integrates with Mealie and Home Assistant. Scan an item when you’ve run out, it then searches for the item from a barcode database and adds it to your shopping list.
Assist community highlights
Since we released Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition last month, we've seen an explosion of exciting community projects around voice, which led us to create a dedicated section in this newsletter.
Karaoke mic style voice assistant
DIY voice hardware that uses XMOS
The Koala satellite lets you build your own voice hardware that uses a similar XMOS voice processor, dual mics, and rotary control. @FortmatBCE designed it with a 2.5w speaker that looks like a good step up from many other voice options.
Control your EV and charging with voice
@BrettAdams shows off controlling his EV with a Voice Preview Edition - lets see another voice assistant open a frunk!
3D prints for your Voice Preview Edition
Do you need a vertical stand? Or a slightly less vertical stand? A wall mount? A magnetic mount? A Skadis Mount? A Sonos Play One mount for some reason?... people it's only been a month and you have all been busy!
The ONLY voice assistant that speaks Greek
In Other News
LG’s microwave has a 27-inch display that’ll be perfect for ads. Perfect headline by the Verge, no notes. (Thomas Ricker, The Verge)
Aqara, new possibilities for Home Assistant and Matter users. Aqara, a Works With Home Assistant partner, adds Matter bridging functionality to bring features previously only available in their Aqara Home App to Home Assistant. (AndrewFromAqara, Reddit AMA)
NSPanel adds web shortcut to allow embedding the Home Assistant dashboard directly. Long live the power of the open web 💪(Mia Ma, Sonoff Tech)
Allstate used Life360 and other apps to quietly track driving behavior. The Home Assistant community has a frustrating history with Life360, and here is another reason to avoid this brand. (Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica)
Pipe Dreams: the Life and Times of Yahoo Pipes. Before we had Node-RED, before we had IFTTT, we had Yahoo Pipes. (Glenn Fleishman, Retool)