2026.9.2

2026.9.2

A performance and reliability release, mostly about running clean on real devices:
Android WebViews stop flickering during rotation, with a manual Compatibility
rendering option for the phones and tablets the automatic detection still misses,
and the scene turns smoothly again on entry-level hardware while drawing lighter
overall. Alongside it, a handful of correctness fixes settle real edge cases (an
inverted battery sign, the live flow direction, a coarse-cadence cost chip, a
Firefox console warning, a stale Helios-Forecast curve after switching to
Yesterday), and energy totals can now be set to their own Wh/kWh unit, independent
of live power.

Fixed: an inverted battery power sensor no longer reads backwards

2026.9.1 added an automatic correction for battery power sensors reported with
the opposite sign. It could turn on a battery you had already set to "Inverted"
in the Home Assistant Energy dashboard: it re-flipped the already-correct reading,
so the battery ran backwards and the live home-consumption chip was inflated. The
correction now judges the sign the card actually shows (honoring your Energy
dashboard's normal / inverted choice) rather than the raw sensor, so a correctly
configured inverted sensor is left alone while a genuinely mislabeled one is still
fixed. Thanks to @FoxP.

Fixed: the house and timeline follow the live flow direction

The home tint and the timeline border take the colour of the selected chip, but
for the grid and battery chips they used the period's dominant direction. So the
house could read "discharging" (blue) while the battery was charging right now
(purple), and the same for grid import versus export. They now follow the live,
instant direction, matching the chip and the flow, in both live and scrub. Thanks
to @FoxP.

Fixed: no more Firefox console warnings from the GPU probe

On Firefox the card logged two console messages, a deprecation warning for
WEBGL_debug_renderer_info and a "WebGL context was lost" notice, from the one-off
probe that reads your GPU to choose the right rendering path. The probe now reads
the standard RENDERER where the browser exposes it (Firefox) and no longer
force-frees its throwaway context, so the console stays clean. No change on other
browsers. Thanks to @FoxP.

Changed: a lighter idle and cheaper redraws

First pass of a performance sweep. The rain and snow canvases now pause when the
card scrolls off-screen (they kept animating before), the particle loops no longer
measure the layout on every frame, and the buildings and shadows are redrawn only
when the scene actually changed instead of on every frame. The card runs cooler
and lighter, especially on a wall tablet or a busy dashboard.

Changed: smooth rotation on entry-level tablets

Entry Android GPUs (and the Home Assistant app / kiosk WebViews) fall back to a
compatibility renderer because a GPU-drawn basemap corrupts into colored noise on
those drivers. That path re-projected the whole map on the CPU every frame, so
rotating the scene dropped to a few frames per second. It now keeps the fast GPU
rotation on a CPU-rasterized basemap, which dodges the corruption while staying
pixel-correct, so the scene turns smoothly on those devices too. Thanks to
@beatschubser (#383).

Changed: a lighter map that flickers less on Android tablets

On Android WebViews (the Home Assistant app, kiosk browsers) the scene could flicker
while rotating or panning. The "your real sky" weather grade was applied as a CSS filter
over the map, which forced the whole 3D scene to re-draw every frame on those devices.
The grade is now painted straight into the ground and buildings, which removes that
per-frame cost on every device and calms the flicker on many of them. Some phones and
tablets still flicker on the 3D-transformed map, though, which is what the new
compatibility rendering option below is for. Thanks to @Aaroneisele55 (#396) and
@charleslales (#370).

Added: a compatibility rendering option for devices that still flicker

If the map still flickers or tears while you rotate it, the new Compatibility
rendering toggle in the card options draws the ground with a simpler, more compatible
method (no 3D transform, a per-frame redraw instead) that avoids the glitch, in exchange
for slightly less smooth rotation. It is off by default: the automatic detection handles
most devices on its own, and this is the manual fallback for the ones it misses.

Fixed: the energy diagram stays readable while the scene turns

With auto-rotation on, the sun path and the irradiance readout swept in front of the
day's energy diagram, so you had to wait for the rotation to come round before you
could read it. The diagram now always draws on top of the sun path. Thanks to
@beatschubser (#397).

Fixed: the cost chip no longer flips to zero between meter reports

For a grid meter that reports on a coarse cadence (every 15 minutes, say), Home
Assistant's cost sensor only steps when the meter does, leaving the buckets in between
at zero. The cost chip read those as a real 0.00/h, so it flickered between the true
rate and zero while you were genuinely importing. It now recognises the meter's
reporting cadence and holds the last report's rate between updates, while a meter that
has genuinely stopped still falls to zero. Thanks to @Rag30 (#395).

Fixed: switching to Yesterday could still show a narrower forecast window

With a Helios-Forecast source
configured, switching to a period reaching further into the past than the one
already loaded, most commonly the Yesterday tab, could keep showing the
forecast fetched for the narrower period for up to five minutes: the fetch was
throttled purely by elapsed time, not by whether the cached data actually
covered the newly needed window. The card now re-fetches immediately whenever
the requested past window grows, instead of waiting the throttle out on stale
data. Home Assistant's built-in solar forecast (Forecast.Solar, Solcast, ...)
is unaffected either way: that API never returns past days, so it still cannot
show a forecast for a day already gone. Thanks to @FoxP (#406).

Added: a separate unit for energy totals

power-unit (W / kW) used to set the energy totals' unit too, kW pairing with
kWh and W with Wh, with no way to pick one independently of the other. A new
energy-unit option (Wh / kWh / Auto, the visual editor's "Energy unit")
lets you set the day curve, the detail panel and the timeline's day totals on
their own, for example precise W chips alongside kWh totals. Auto (the
default) keeps today's behaviour, so an existing card reads exactly the same
until you pick a unit here. Thanks to @zigomatichub (#407).

---

2026.9.1

A follow-up to 2026.9.0 that sharpens the details: the card follows your Home
Assistant units, the weather reads truer (no phantom rain, real rain and snow
intensity, and the right regional model at borders), the live cost chip stays
honest when a price source lags, the battery flow self-corrects, and the
entry-tablet fix now reaches the Home Assistant app.

Added: follow your Home Assistant units (temperature, and W/ft2)

The temperature readouts (chip, detail panel, timeline tooltip) now follow your
Home Assistant unit system, so an imperial install reads Fahrenheit like
every other entity. A local temperature-entity in °F or K is normalised at
ingest too, fixing a case where its readings were stored as if they were Celsius
and polluted the curve. The irradiance unit gains W/ft² alongside W/m²
and kW/m². Thanks to @danswett.

Fixed: the live cost chip no longer freezes on a stale price

When a cost statistic lags (a utility integration that backfills a day at a time
can sit hours behind), the live cost chip could freeze on an old bucket and show
it as "now". It now falls back to price times power when the statistics go stale,
checked per direction, so the chip stays live. Thanks to @danswett.

Fixed: the battery flow direction now self-corrects

The live battery chip and its flow take their direction from the battery's power
sensor, assuming Home Assistant's discharge-positive convention. Some batteries
report the opposite, so the flow (and the animated dot) ran backwards even though
the Energy dashboard was right. Helios now cross-checks the live sensor against
your directional charge and discharge energy meters and corrects the direction
automatically, with nothing to configure.

If you had set the battery sign option to work around this, your chip may now
read backwards: set it back to the default. That option is, and always was,
only a display preference for how the chip shows + / -; it never affects the
flow, which is why it could not fix the direction. It is now labelled to make
that clear.

Fixed: no more phantom rain under a clear sky

The scene drew rain from the faintest trace of forecast precipitation, so a
hundredth of a millimetre in an hour, the kind a clear-sky forecast still
reports, could sprinkle rain across a cloudless scene. Precipitation below a
light-rain threshold now stays dry; real rain and snow still paint. Thanks to
@FoxP and @MatCos.

Changed: rain and snow show their real intensity

The amount of rain or snow the scene drew climbed too fast and then flattened
out: a trace already looked like steady rain, and everything from a moderate
shower upward drew the same, so a downpour and a violent storm were
indistinguishable. Rain and snow density now follow the standard meteorological
intensity classes, so a drizzle reads light and a storm reads heavy, across the
full range. Thanks to @MatCos.

Fixed: border locations get the right regional weather model

Helios pairs a global weather model with the best regional high-resolution one
for your location. The regional coverage areas overlap at national borders, and
the first area listed used to win, so a place near a border, or anywhere inside a
smaller area enclosed by a larger one, could be read with a neighbour's model.
The card now picks the area your location sits most centrally within, so the
regional model matches where you actually are. Thanks to @MatCos.

Fixed: the entry-tablet flicker fix now reaches the Home Assistant app

2026.9.0 moved entry-level tablets onto a lighter drawing path to stop the whole
view flickering, but it recognised the affected graphics only when the browser
exposed the chip name. The Home Assistant app and kiosk WebViews hide that name
for privacy, so the flicker returned inside them even though Chrome on the very
same tablet was fine. On Android, Helios now treats a hidden graphics name as
reason enough to use the lighter path, so the app and kiosk views are covered too.
Thanks to @charleslales and @Richaaldo (#370).

---

2026.9.0

"Your real sky"

When I released Helios six months ago, it was a sun crossing an empty scene. Tonight it carries the weather of the place you actually live: the light dimming as the clouds gather, the rain and the snow, the ridge of your own horizon, and, when your dashboard tracks a price, what your energy is costing you right now.

This is, honestly, the version I had in my head the first time I hit publish. It exists because of you: your messages, your issues, your feedback (the tough kind included), your coffees and your stars.

Everything from 2026.8.0 is still here. This release only adds to it, nothing was taken away.

And because I couldn't help myself, there's a new trailer, made by hand, no AI, with a synthwave track I love a bit too much. Turn the volume up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrGNsCsGLGg

Added: the terrain horizon

Helios now knows the shape of the land around your home. It works out the local
skyline from the surrounding terrain (worldwide, with no setup on your part) and
uses it two ways: the sun dims realistically the moment it drops behind a hill
or a mountain, not only at the flat horizon, and a discreet horizon ridge is
drawn around the house. The realistic dimming is always on, so the scene stays
true to where you live; the drawn line can be shown or hidden and recoloured in
the editor. A perfect match for anyone in a valley or the mountains.

Added: state of charge on the battery chip

The battery chip now has a readout option: keep showing live power (the
default), or switch it to the battery's state of charge (%), so a wall
dashboard can show how full the battery is at a glance. It falls back to whichever
value your battery actually provides.

Added: a cost chip

When your Home Assistant Energy dashboard tracks a price, a new cost chip
joins the card: it reads out what your energy is costing you right now, in
your own currency per hour (net of any export revenue), and behaves like every
other chip. Tap it to bring its cost curve up on the timeline and around the
house, and scrub the day to read the cost at any moment. Like the weather chips
it sits along the bottom as secondary information, and you'll only see it if a
price is set in the Energy dashboard, Helios never invents one. It has a fixed,
configurable colour and icon, and a negative rate simply means you're earning
(selling your surplus). It reads Home Assistant's own cost statistics whenever
they exist, so any tariff is handled out of the box, a flat price, peak /
off-peak, Tempo, or a whole-home cost sensor from an integration, each already
priced correctly hour by hour by Home Assistant. A fixed price with no cost
statistic still works, computed as energy times price. Multi-tariff grids
(peak / off-peak, Tempo) are detected automatically, even when you only set a
price per tariff and never an explicit cost sensor: Helios finds Home Assistant's
own per-tariff cost statistics and sums them. And the chip is fully in the
editor now, show or hide it, and pick its colour and icon, like every other
chip. The chip follows the timeline as you scrub (the cost at the hovered
moment, like the other chips), and its day curve around the house now draws
for multi-tariff grids too, not just a fixed price. Open its detail panel for the
cumulative total over the selected period, what you spent, what you earned, and
the net.

Added: the real weather, painted over the scene

The card now shows the weather at your home, resolved for the moment on the
timeline: clear-sky sunshine that dims as the cloud cover builds, an overcast
grey, then rain, snow or a thunderstorm on top. Each layer is driven by a real
measured value (cloud cover, precipitation, snowfall, the weather code), never a
guess, and the whole thing follows the scrub, so you can watch a front arrive
across the day. The sun glow now also fades as the sun nears the horizon, so
sunrise and sunset read honestly.

Added: outdoor temperature and humidity

Two new chips show the outdoor temperature and humidity, grouped along the bottom
of the scene as secondary readings, and behave exactly like the other chips: tap
one to bring its day curve up around the house and its series onto the timeline,
tap again to toggle the curve, with the same detail panel (min / mean / max) and
hover readout.
Temperature scales to its own range so a two-degree swing is legible; humidity
sits on a fixed 0-100 % scale. Thanks to @tfriberg for the suggestion (#332).

Added: local weather sensors override the forecast

If you run a weather station, you can point each weather reading at your own
sensor, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, snowfall, or the
condition from a Home Assistant weather entity, and it takes over from
Open-Meteo for the live and past hours, while the forecast stays on the model.

Added: a locked view that is the same on every device

The viewing angle of a locked card lived in the browser, so it differed from one
device to the next. Turning on Lock rotation now captures the current angle
into the card's configuration in one step: frame the scene in the preview, enable
the lock, and the exact same view is saved and frozen on every device and
browser. Thanks to @ferreto1978 (#310, #353) and @roumano (#363).

Fixed: the grid import/export arrow, definitively

The 2026.8.3 fix for the swapped grid tower icons was itself the wrong way round,
because the MDI icon names are the opposite of what they draw. The arrow now
follows the real flow, points into the grid when exporting and away from it when
importing, everywhere it appears, with a code note so it can't be "corrected"
back. Thanks to @7oku (#356).

Fixed: the battery detail chart now shows your battery names

On a multi-bank install, the battery detail chart labelled its banks "Battery 1,
2, 3…" instead of the names you gave each battery in the Energy dashboard. It now
uses your configured names throughout the per-bank charge, discharge and
state-of-charge rows. Thanks to @tfriberg (#365).

Fixed: cloud shadows stayed round on a narrow card

The drifting cloud shadows were sized to the card's width and height, so on a
narrow or portrait card they stretched into tall ovals. They're now sized to the
card's width on both axes, staying round at any card shape. Thanks to @tfriberg
(#332).

Fixed: the forecast curve could be shifted by the wrong time zone

When your device or Home Assistant server sat in a different time zone from your
home's coordinates (a "server time" setup, or simply browsing from elsewhere),
the weather forecast curve was displaced by the difference between the two zones,
so it no longer lined up with your live production. The forecast times are now
anchored to a fixed reference regardless of where you view the card from, so the
curve always aligns with the moment it belongs to. Thanks to @m1chaelmichael for
the precise report (#366).

Fixed: the production curve could read above your real power

On installations whose production meter reports its energy less often than the
graph's detail (or at an uneven pace), the past-production curve could briefly
climb above the real power your panels can produce - a 2.5 kW-capped array
plotting more than 2.5 kW for a moment. The curve is reconstructed from the
Energy dashboard's energy, and a long report landing in a short slice made the
computed average too high. Helios now spreads each reading across the interval it
actually covers, so the curve never resolves finer than your meter reports and
can no longer overshoot - while the totals still match the Energy dashboard
exactly. Thanks to @ritonbrunis-lab for the clear screenshots (#371).

Fixed: flicker and black screen on some entry-level tablets

On a few low-end wall tablets the whole view could shimmer or recompose between
frames, and a kiosk screenshot came back black. The cause was the same family as
the old half-3D iPad issue: the device's graphics couldn't correctly compose the
tilted 3D ground layer. Helios now recognises those graphics chips and switches
them to a lighter drawing path automatically - no setting to touch, and the 2.5D
look is kept. Thanks to @Richaaldo and @charleslales for the detailed reports (#370).

Changed: the battery now connects to the home, not the solar

The battery used to show a line from the solar chip while charging, which quietly
claimed the charge came from your panels. That isn't always true - an AC-coupled
battery, or one charged from the grid overnight, would be drawn charging "from
solar" even with no sun. The battery is now a single connection to the home, like
every other chip: the flow runs from the battery to the home while discharging and
from the home to the battery while charging, without claiming a source. As always,
the flow's value is your real measured battery power - nothing is invented. Thanks
to @addinsella for the sharp, fair pushback (#355).

---

Thank you for being here. I'm proud of this one.

ReikanYsora / Jérôme

2026.8.3

A small release on top of 2026.8.2: a new sun-chip readout, a fairer flow
animation, and a handful of fixes.

Fixed: the grid import and export icons were the wrong way round

In the grid chip, its detail panel and the timeline tooltip, the import and export
tower icons were swapped, so the arrow pointed the wrong way for the direction it
labelled (#352). The icons now match their flow, and each one is defined in a single
place so the two can no longer drift apart. Thanks to @wasabi216 for the report.

Changed: flow animation now paces every flow against one configurable reference

Every flow's animation speed is scaled so a bigger flow reads as faster, but the
flows didn't all share the same scale: grid export used a reference five times
smaller than the rest, so a small export could look quicker than a much larger
production (#351). Production, grid import and export, battery and device flows now
animate on one shared curve and one shared reference, so their relative pace is honest
across the whole card. That
reference is a new Max expected power setting (default 5000 W) in the editor's
data display section: the power at which a flow animates at full speed, so you can
raise it for a large installation or lower it for a small one. Thanks to @wasabi216.

Added: the sun chip can read out the sun's position

A new Sun chip readout option (in the data display section) switches the sun chip
between solar irradiance (the default) and the sun's position as azimuth and elevation
(#310). The position comes from the card's own sun maths, so it needs no extra sensor.
Idea from @ferreto1978, and thanks to @thomluther for the push.

Fixed: the grid flow bead now matches the other beads

The grid import and export bead was the only flow bead without the thin outline every
other bead carries, so it read slightly differently. It now has the same outline, and
the beads are consistent across the whole scene.

Fixed: a sun-position card showed an empty home chip

On a card set to show the sun's position with the home hidden and no energy chips, an
empty home ring appeared: the sun chip was counted as holding the home anchor, even
though it has no leader to the home. Such a card now drops the ring, leaving just the
sun and the location. Thanks to @ferreto1978.

---

2026.8.2

A corrective release on top of 2026.8.1.

Fixed: the card rendered only in half 3D on some older iPads

On older iPads, older WebKit could composite the flat basemap over the 3D scene
incorrectly, leaving the card looking cut in half (#304). Helios now detects those devices,
including inside the Home Assistant and Kiosk apps, not just Safari, and paints the
ground already projected into the scene, so the whole card renders. The perspective
on the map's vector elements is very slightly different on that path, but the scene
is whole again. Every other device is unchanged. Thanks to @Spaniard85 for testing
the fix on the affected hardware.

Changed: the detail panel now names its period, and marks averages with Ø

The detail panel shows the selected period as its title, so every figure reads as a
total or average over that window, not a live value. Averages (including the battery
state of charge) now carry a Ø mean symbol instead of the old approximately-equal
sign, which wrongly suggested a rough value. Thanks to @stalakerob for the nudge on
the battery line (#331).

2026.8.1

A hotfix on top of 2026.8.0.

Changed: assign devices to groups by drag-and-drop

Putting a device into a monitoring group is now a matter of dragging its chip into a group zone in the editor, instead of the small cycle button whose "no group" state showed an X that read as a delete button. Four group zones plus a "No group" pool; it works with a mouse and on touch. Existing group settings are unchanged.

Fixed: multi-meter grid and battery bands were impossible to tell apart

On a setup with several grid or battery meters, the timeline already split each flow into one band per source, but every band carried the first source's name. The timeline tooltip now names each band by its own source, so a multi-tariff grid or a multi-bank battery reads clearly. Single-meter setups are unchanged.

New: a Live button on the timeline

After scrubbing the lower graph, a small Live button jumps straight back to the present, instead of nudging the slider back by hand.

New: state of charge in the battery detail panel

The battery detail panel gains a state-of-charge line (its average over the shown period). Thanks to @SBergers for the contribution.

2026.8.0

The biggest release yet. The devices you track in the Home Assistant energy
dashboard become first-class citizens of the card, the scene lives through the
day/night cycle, the map is now yours to theme, and the whole thing is lighter and
faster.

New: monitoring groups replace the custom entity

You can now bundle the devices tracked in your energy dashboard into up to four
monitoring groups, each with its own name, colour and icon, set in the editor.
A group shows up as its own chip on the scene and its own curve in the timeline.
The old single "custom entity" is gone; groups do the same job for any number of
devices and need no YAML. Each group is shown by a coloured pill (its number by
default, its icon once you set one), consistent across the editor and the scene.

New: your own map, fully themeable

The basemap is now drawn by Helios's own vector renderer, built on OpenFreeMap
(open data, still no API key). A new Map configuration editor section lets you
theme the ground itself: pick Auto (follows your Home Assistant theme), Dark, Light
or Custom, and in Custom set the colour and visibility of every layer, ground,
water, parks, roads, paths, railways, buildings and more. Make it match your
dashboard, or make it your own.

New: the scene follows the sun

The whole scene is now graded through the day/night cycle. The ground and buildings
warm toward midday and cool through dusk into night, so a glance tells you roughly
where the day is, no flat overlay, just light.

New: a sun-only card, and easier scrolling on mobile

Hide every chip (including home consumption) and the card collapses to just the sun
position and your location, a solar-position card you can drop on a non-energy
dashboard, for shutters or climate control keyed on the sun. And on a phone the card
no longer traps your scroll: swipe up or down and the page moves as it should, swipe
sideways and the scene turns. Your finger's direction decides, so neither gesture has
to wait for the other. Once a turn is under way, drifting up or down tilts the scene
as it always did on a mouse (#308).

New: per-bank battery state of charge

The battery timeline now draws one state-of-charge line per battery bank, each
tinted by its live charge/discharge flow, so you can read each pack against the
charge and discharge beams above it.

New: the day curve

Click any chip a second time, once it is the active one, and the day you are looking
at rises around your house as a curve.

It does not stand on a ring. It stands on the sun's own path, projected straight
down onto the ground: the track closes in on the house at midday, when the sun is
overhead, and reaches out to the exact spots where the arc meets the ground at
sunrise and sunset. So where a point sits on that track IS the hour it happened, and
a dashed line drops from the sun to the curve right beneath it. Scrub the timeline
and the whole thing follows: another day means that day's sun, that day's track and
that day's readings, never an average of the week around it.

Every metric draws itself its own way. Production splits into one curve per solar
source, each in its energy-dashboard colour, like the timeline; today's remaining
hours carry on from your forecast, dashed, so the shape of the day runs unbroken from
this morning to tonight and only its certainty gives way at the present moment.
Grid and Battery now split the same way: one stacked band per source, every
grid meter's import and export and every battery's charge and discharge, in the Home
Assistant energy colours, so a multi-meter grid or a multi-pack battery reads each
source instead of one lumped flow. The battery keeps its dashed state-of-charge curve
per pack. The curve on the house and the timeline below it draw the exact same split,
so there is never a second reading of the same day. A single grid meter or battery is
unchanged. A monitoring group draws one curve per device, in each device's colour.
Irradiance draws one too, on every period but Month, which reaches back further
than the weather model does.

Switch chips and the curve re-points and stays up, so you can walk one day through
each metric. The curve writes itself on as it is raised, from its own midnight, and
the chips that have nothing to say about the metric on show step aside while it is
up. Click the active chip again to put it away. It follows your Graph detail
setting like every other curve, so it smooths out at one point an hour and resolves
every cloud at six.

Changed: a calmer scene

The home now simply takes the active chip's colour (keeping the squash-and-grow
animation when you switch chips). The camera lock is a scene-only setting. A single
tap on a chip now opens its detail panel (it used to want a double-tap), and a tap
anywhere on the scene background dismisses it, which finally makes it easy to close
on a phone. The sun arc uses the true -0.833 degree horizon so sunrise and sunset
land where Home Assistant puts them.

Changed: solid buildings, shadows that follow their walls

The surroundings have been rebuilt. Buildings are no longer cut in half at the seams
between map tiles, and faces no longer flicker in and out while you turn the scene:
the order they are painted in is worked out from the buildings' real outlines. Rows
of houses that touch at the same height are drawn as one block, roof lines and all,
rather than a queue of overlapping boxes. Facades are lit by the sun's direction, so
a wall facing it reads brighter than one turned away, and a wall in shade is lit by
the sky alone.

Shadows follow each building's true outline, including concave blocks and inner
courtyards, and account for the roof rather than the walls alone. They no longer lie
underneath the building casting them, they stop at the ground their neighbours stand
on instead of running through them, and their fade no longer swings to the other
side when you nudge the camera by a fraction of a degree.

The display radius now tops out at 250 m, which is as far as the ground beneath
the buildings actually reaches. A card set higher than that settles at 250 m; before,
the extra radius put buildings out past the edge of the map with nothing under them.

Changed: a clearer default timeline

The default in-card period is now Forecast (today to two days ahead), a tighter
window that reads better on a phone. The timeline and period-selector top borders
take the active chip's colour, so the whole bar reads as one with the metric you are
looking at. The timeline itself now sizes from the card's own height rather than its
width, so it keeps its proportions whether the card is a squat tile on a dashboard
or a tall one on a wall tablet. On a phone it used to pin to its minimum and take no
notice of the vertical room it had, so a tall card and a squat one got the same bar.

Changed: focused translations

Helios now ships 27 European languages, curated for the communities that use
the card most. This cuts the download size substantially with no change to the
languages kept; any other language falls back to English.

Fixed

• The scene now renders in full on older iPads. The buildings-and-shadows layer draws
  a whole neighbourhood, well past the card, and on those devices the browser capped
  that layer's size and painted only its top half. It is now bound to the card, so the
  whole scene draws, and as a bonus every device now paints far less off-card area on
  each frame (#304).
• Map and building colours repaint live as you change them in the editor, instead of
  waiting for the next data refresh.
• Scene: left-click drag-rotate now works on Firefox (#306).
• The basemap no longer vanishes after the card has sat in a background tab for a
  while, leaving the buildings floating over nothing. It is repainted from memory
  the moment the card comes back, which matters most on a wall tablet.
• The building colour and the home colour now take a plain colour (#ff0000,
  rgb(...)) as well as a Home Assistant colour name, like every other colour in
  the editor. They previously accepted the name only, and silently ignored anything
  else, leaving the buildings grey.
• The irradiance tooltip shows the forecast value and its beam again (#305).
• The dashed timeline lines (the solar forecast and the per-bank battery state of
  charge) now always draw their full length instead of stopping short until you
  scrubbed the timeline.
• The battery timeline no longer stacks a cluster of markers on its charge line.
• Assorted robustness: DST-safe day maths, a watchdog on slow map tiles, cleaner
  teardown of animations, and quieter, deduplicated data-layer warnings.

Removed

• The clock and period-over-period trend dials. The scene, the timeline and
  its period selector now tell the same story more directly.
• The Year period. Month is now the longest view, and the last one the scene can
  still speak for: any day of it can be scrubbed to and read under that day's own
  sun. A year sat on a daily store that carried no shape of a day at all, so the arc,
  the shadows and the curve had nothing to say about it, and 365 bars two pixels wide
  had nothing to say to the eye. Your energy dashboard already tells that story
  better. Cards saved on Year fall back to the default period.

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2026.7.4

A quick corrective release for 2026.7.3. Apologies for the fast turnaround, and thanks to everyone who flagged it.

Fixed

• Detail panel totals now match the energy clock and the dashboard on every period. The per-chip detail panel (double-tap a chip) read from the card's rolling ~5-day window, so on month/year periods its figures drifted from the clock and the Home Assistant dashboard, and were empty on the year view. Every energy total is now computed with the exact same method the clock uses, so the panel, the clock and the dashboard agree on every period from a day to a year. (Folds in the earlier consumption watt-hours-labelled-as-kWh error.)
• A scene chip selection drives the clock and trend dials again when you switch to them, instead of keeping a previously shown metric.
• The solar forecast is clearly visible on the irradiance view. It matches the production forecast's styling, with extra contrast and weight so the dashed line separates from the amber irradiance area under it.

Full details: see CHANGELOG.md.

Moral of the story: never let a developer finish "just one more feature" at 2 a.m. :)

2026.7.3

Helios now follows your Home Assistant energy dashboard at 100% and never estimates a value: everything the card shows, live or historical, comes straight from your dashboard, with nothing extra to wire and no per-card value that can drift from it.

Highlights

• Detail panels: double-tap (or double-click) any chip for a compact readout of that metric over the period you are viewing, tinted in the chip's own colour. Total, peak and per-day average for production/consumption; import, export and net for grid; charged and discharged for battery flux; min/avg/max for SoC and the custom entity; peak + average irradiance plus sunrise, solar noon, sunset, highest altitude and day length for the sun. Icons only, in your unit, recomputed from the exact series the chart draws.
• Measured values only: live chips appear only when a real live power sensor is configured on the matching energy-dashboard source; curves, energy clock and totals read your kWh meters, so they match the dashboard to the watt-hour. A mis-wired grid sensor is detected and explained in the editor rather than shown as an untrustworthy value.
• 3D buildings, from a more reliable source: read from OpenFreeMap vector tiles (free, key-less), replacing the OpenStreetMap Overpass API that had started refusing the card by waves. Same building data, still cached locally.
• Cleaner dials: the central column of the clock and trend dials is replaced by the flat Helios mark laid on the ground plane. Hover or tap it for the period total, without obstructing the bars, the arc or the labels.
• The weather panel is gone, along with its temperature and wind options. Weather is kept where it matters: cloud cover and irradiance still drive the sun disc, the shadows and the irradiance view.
• Plus: the custom entity now takes its two sensors, dashboard source names on the cards, the solar forecast on the irradiance view, and several fixes (stray battery leader on a hidden SoC chip, custom chip visible at zero while scrubbing, minus sign on zero values, production-curve plateau).

Full details: see CHANGELOG.md.

2026.7.2

2026.7.2

A refinement release on top of 2026.7.1: a new ambient info panel, more display
and unit options, and a batch of accuracy fixes for specific setups.

New: weather and astronomy panel

• A small info panel in the top-right corner showing the local weather right
  now: temperature and wind, with the sky condition shown as an icon, sourced
  from Open-Meteo, with optional Home Assistant entity overrides for outdoor
  temperature and wind speed. It can be shown or hidden from the editor.
• An optional astronomical readout (a toggle in the editor, shown only when
  the panel is on) that adds the sun's altitude and azimuth, sunrise, solar noon,
  sunset and day length, each labelled with an icon to keep the panel compact.
• The wind-direction arrow is projected onto the tilted 3D ground, so it
  keeps pointing at the true compass direction as you orbit the camera.
• The panel stays visible in No UI mode, so a wall display keeps its ambient
  weather even once the timeline and controls have faded away.

New: No UI mode

• An opt-in mode that fades the timeline and the on-card controls after a few
  seconds of inactivity and brings them back on any tap or move. Built for
  kiosks and wall displays.

Display and units

• A power unit selector (W or kW); energy follows it, so kW pairs with kWh
  and W with Wh.
• A separate solar-constant (irradiance) unit selector.
• A battery-sign option: default (minus charging, plus discharging),
  inverted, or hidden on the battery chip.
• An optional home-consumption override entity for the consumption chip
  readout, when an inverter exposes a direct sensor.

Accuracy fixes

• Correct southern-hemisphere Clock and Trend, with hour binning now done in
  the server's timezone rather than the browser's.
• Fixed near-zero Clock and Trend totals on kWh-only solar sources.
• Coarse-reporting meters (those that report every 15 minutes or more) are
  smoothed so their curves no longer sawtooth.
• Fixed the solar forecast reading half power on sub-hourly buckets
  (contributed by @adamhf).
• Non-solar 24/7 producers (water turbines, micro-hydro) configured under
  solar production now keep their night-time hours on the Clock and Trend dials,
  and each per-source ring reads the exact recorder energy, matching the Energy
  dashboard instead of the slightly lagging calibration series.
• Multi-string solar forecast now sums every configured forecast provider
  instead of showing only the first string's prediction.
• Multi-battery installs with mixed wiring (one bank with a live power
  sensor, another with only energy meters) no longer drop a battery from the
  live power readout.
• The home now keeps the colour of the selected chip after you leave the
  dashboard and return, instead of resetting to the default metric.

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