The Comical Sandy

Two weeks ago we hosted the State of the Open Home . It included a presentation by Prof. Michael Kane and Maharsi Pathak from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University . They presented about their research into lowering grid demand by reducing thermostat temperatures. They want to learn when and why a reduced temperature is too uncomfortable causing tenants to become thermally frustrated and reverting the reduction. With Home Assistant we want every home to be about privacy, choice and durability and it’s how we built Home Assistant. Because we believe in choice, all data in Home Assistant is accessible and one can extend or built on top of our platform. This architecture made it possible for Prof. Kane to gather data about all devices, survey users based on changes to devices and export all this data back to their research lab. For this they leverage our device integrations, added a custom survey feature to our UI and leverage push notific...

The Open Home is our vision for the smart home. It defines the values that we put at the heart of every decision we make at Home Assistant. It’s woven into our architecture, licensing, community and everything else. The Open Home is about privacy , choice and durability . If you prefer video, skip to the end . Privacy Your home should be your safe space. A place where you can be your true self without having to bother about what the world thinks of you. A place where you don’t need to act differently to avoid an algorithm categorizing your behavior. Privacy for the Open Home means that devices need to work locally. No one else needs to know if you turn on a light bulb or change the thermostat. It is okay for a product to offer a cloud connection, but it should be extra and opt-in. Choice Devices in your home gather data about itself and their surroundings. Your data. Vendors shouldn’t be able to limit your access to your data or limit the interoperability of your devices wit...

Last week we hosted the State of the Open Home and it included a demo of Genie . Genie is an open, privacy-preserving virtual assistant by Stanford OVAL . During the impressive demo they showed it’s latest capabilities. The demos run on a Baidu speaker with custom firmware and on a Pi Zero. In both cases it connects to the Genie server running as an official Home Assistant add-on to do it’s magic. Genie is the successor to the Almond project. With the help of various grants and sponsors Stanford is working on making Genie ready for general use. If you want to learn more, check out the Genie website and the getting started guide on how to make your own. To get in touch with other Genie users and their dev team, check their Discord or community forums . If you end up using Genie at home, don’t forget to share the love and share your demo’s and tutorials. from Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/12/21/stanford-genie/ via IFTTT

Hey Everyone! It’s time for the December 2021 Android release. It has been a while since the last Android release as the team has been very busy working on many new and exciting features. To kick things off we would like to announce that there is now a Wear OS app that you can find in the Play Store alongside todays phone app release! Wear OS Beta For the past couple of months the Android repo has been seeing a lot new contributors coming and bringing in some amazing work. There is now a Wear OS Beta app released in the Play Store! A big thank you to leroyboerefijn , dshokouhi , JBassett , Kisty , apo-mak , SkechyWolf and HunterX86 for all your hard work! A lot of work has been done to share the codebase between the phone and the watch because we wanted the watch to also have a standalone experience in case you are not near your phone. The app will remain as a Beta for several months but we feel in its current state it is ready for you to enjoy. The reason we have decided to keep ...

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant companion app for iOS 2021.12. The big new feature: multiple server support. Find it in the app settings on iOS and Mac. Pro-tip: Swipe with three fingers left, right, or up to quickly switch between servers. Full release notes. At the State of the Open Home I gave a quick demo, which I have embedded below: from Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/12/18/ios-multi-server/ via IFTTT

Home Assistant Core 2021.12, the final release of the year 2021; And I really think this release will contain a holiday gift for everyone! With the holiday season coming, it is time to slow down a bit for the project, and enjoy time with our family. In a couple of weeks, 2022 will be here! All I want to add to these last release notes of 2021 is: Thank you . Thank you for hanging out with the project. Thank you for contributing, and thank you for reporting an issue. Thank you for helping out a fellow Home Assistant user on the forum, chat, Reddit, or anywhere else. Thank you for sharing your experiences, ideas, automations, scripts, YouTube videos, and blogs; and above all: Thank you for using Home Assistant ❤️ Happy holidays and for the last time in 2021: Enjoy the release! ../Frenck PS: We are skipping the January release because of the holidays. So, the first release in 2022, will be Wednesday, 2 February 2022. Brand new configuration panel The button entity Redesigned a...