0.28

It's already time for 0.28 thanks to our super short release cycles. Now, it' official...we hit 4000 stars on Github. That's amazing. Sorry, not as amazing as all the stuff that was going on for 0.27 but still pretty awesome.

Reload automation rules and groups

This release brings you a huge improvement of the automation and group handling. Both can be reloaded without a Home Assistant restart. The automations can be controlled directly from the frontend.

Raspberry Pi installation guide

Singleboard computers are very popular to run Home Assistant. To support this fact, the installation documentation for the Raspberry Pi devices was re-written to get users started as quickly as possible. @Landrash took the lead with on this tasks with help from @kellerza and @MartinHjelmare.

Climate and cover

There are countless bugfixes included in this release which will make your experience with the climate and the cover platforms better. Two week ago was the biggest merger of implementations released that ever happened in the history of Home Assistant. Thanks to @turbokongen, @pvizeli, @djbanks, @danielperna84, and others the improvements on the code and the frontend side is continuing...

API documentation

The Home Assistant API Documentation is a great addition to the already exisiting user documentation. The focus is not end-users but developers who whant to get details about the code without actually browsing the code on Github.

Templating

data_template needs to be present in all notify templates for the future.

action:
  service: notify.telegram
  data_template:
    message: "Test from your Home"
    data:
      location:
        latitude: "{{ state.device_tracker.phone.attributes.latitude }}"
        longitude: "{{ state.device_tracker.phone.attributes.longitude }}"

Stay tuned for more details.

Configuration validation

The validation of the configuration is still on-going. Approximatly 80 % is done. This means that we will propably talk about this topic in the next release notes again. To align the configuration of components and platforms we needed to break some. Please refer to the Breaking changes section to check if you need to update your configuration or simple check your log for configuration validation errors. Thanks to @kellerza, @fabaff, @Teagan42, and @pvizeli for your effort!

All changes

• Light: Added bitfield to Flux LED since we are supporting effects (@tchellomello)
• Device tracker: Owntracks waypoint import (@pavoni)
• Climate: A lot of bugfix (@turbokongen, @pvizeli, @djbanks)
• Notify: Improvement of the title handling (@lwis)
• RFXtrx: Sensor cleanup (@turbokongen)
• Device tracker: Fix for BLE device tracker (@open-homeautomation)
• Device tracker: Allow 'None' MAC addresses to be loaded from known_devices file (@kellerza)
• Cover: Bugfixes (@turbokongen, @danielperna84)
• Sensor: Support for displaying details about crypto currencies (@fabaff)
• Device tracker: Support for automatic to track your vehicles (@Teagan42)
• Devie tracker: Add exclude option to Nmap device tracker (@danieljkemp)
• Device tracker: Improved login errors for Asus device tracker (@kellerza)
• Sensor: Support for displaying the status of Xbox Live accounts (@mKerix)
• Notify: Adding link_names for sending Slack message (@salt-lick)
• Binary sensor: Add the occupancy sensor class (@robbiet480)
• Fan: Add supoort for MQTT fans (@robbiet480)
• Docs: Add Sphinx API doc generation (@bbangert)
• Core: Allow reloading automation without restart (@balloob)
• Sensor: Added scale and offset to the Temper sensor (@mKerix)
• Sensor: New support for [Trend] sensor (@pavoni)
• Device tracker: Keep looking for new BLE devices (@Bart274)
• Switch: Added device state attributes and support for legacy firmware for D-Link switches (@LinuxChristian)
• Sensor: Improve 1-Wire device family detection (@Ardetus)
• Modbus: Update to be thread safe (@persandstrom)
• Camera: FFMpeg is abale to get the images (@pvizeli)
• Core: Reload groups without restart (@balloob)
• Core: Fix remove listener (@balloob)
• Sensor: Support for monitoring your battery on a Linux host (@fabaff)
• Core: Add support for complex template structures to data_template (@pvizeli)
• check_config: Improve yaml fault tolerance and handle border cases (@kellerza)
• Core: Add additional template for custom date formats (@lwis)
• Sensor: Support for getting stats from Pi-Hole systems (@fabaff)
• Modbus: New write_registers Modbus service (@persandstrom)
• Device tracker: Fix TP-Link Archer C7 long passwords (@snikch)

Breaking changes

• OpenweatherMap entity IDs are now like sensor.owm_temperature. Previously they were like sensor.weather_temperature. Apologies for this change, but we needed to make OpenWeatherMap more generic now that we have many weather platforms.
• Updates of configuration variables due to configuration check or alignment with other platforms. Please update your configuration entries according to the documentation:
  • OctoPrint component
  • mFi platform (switch and sensor)
  • NX584 Alarm Control Panel
  • Mediaplayer platforms: FireTV and MPD
  • switch and the cover command_line platforms
• Custom components extending BaseNotificationService need to be aware that kwargs.get(ATTR_TITLE) will now return None if a title has not been set, and will need to specify kwargs.get(ATTR_TITLE, ATTR_TITLE_DEFAULT) if they always require a title.