We’re excited to announce that Aqara is bringing several of their devices to our Works with Home Assistant program. We know that Aqara is a brand that many in the community like to recommend for its solid options for Zigbee and Matter.

This will be the first partner to join since our recent update to the program, meaning it is the first to join certifying specific devices, making it much easier to see what will give you the best experience in Home Assistant. It will also be the first partner to use our “Works via Matter with Home Assistant” badge, giving some great options to use with Home Assistant’s industry-leading Matter support.

Art by Clelia Rella

TL;DR: HACS 2.0 is a big step forward, adding an easier install method, faster updates, a new UI, and proper Home Assistant update/repair notifications.

Home Assistant’s Community Store, HACS, has now hit v2.0, gaining some big improvements that continue to make it the best way to find, install, and update awesome community-made integrations and UI elements. This follows HACS being added as an Open Home Foundation collaboration partner, recognizing its important role in Home Assistant’s open ecosystem.

Just note, HACS is an advanced tool that can add custom code to your Home Assistant install, which can cause issues on your Home Assistant system. If you are a beginner or prioritize stability above all else, HACS might not be for you.

Jump to sections

• HACS reaches v2.0
• What is HACS?
• Why use HACS?
• A Brief History of HACS
• How to install

Want to skip the blog and just start playing with HACS 2.0? Just remember to proceed with caution and do not skip the backup step before you install.

Art by Clelia Rella

After two successful years of Works with Home Assistant, we’re continuing our work to improve this program. With this in mind, the program will move to the non-profit organization that owns Home Assistant, the Open Home Foundation, which will ensure it is always aligned with the values of the Open Home.

Read on to see how we’re making several small but important changes to add more clarity to the program, and ultimately working to build a better, larger hardware ecosystem of smart home devices.

Home Assistant 2024.8! 🎉

Warning! An awesome and huge release is coming your way this month!

11! new integrations and 7! integrations are now available via the UI; We have many noteworthy improvements to integrations and even more noteworthy improvements to Home Assistant itself. And that… is just the tip of the iceberg! 🗻

I’m most excited about the new badges for your dashboard. I mean, the old ones weren’t the prettiest, but these new ones are definitely gorgeous! Oh! And if you missed the last dashboard stream, I would highly recommend watching the recording of it, as it is very insightful!

This release also marks a significant milestone in the history of Home Assistant, as we are saying goodbye to service calls. Services have been around since day one, but we are now moving to actions, making things much easier to explain to people new to Home Assistant.

Enjoy the release! 🎉

../Frenck

Home Assistant Yellow fully assembled with additional (and not included) NVMe storage and Z-Wave GPIO module

TL;DR:  We will now only sell the Home Assistant Yellow as a kit, which requires the separate purchase of a CM4. Home Assistant Green is the best plug-and-play option for beginners.

An important part of getting more people to use Home Assistant is providing great purpose-built hardware. It’s our goal to provide hardware that makes it easier than ever to start with Home Assistant, along with compelling options for advanced users.  In 2022, we began shipping our Home Assistant Yellow, and I’m happy to say that now in 2024, it remains our flagship hardware product.  We see a long life ahead for this expandable little powerhouse, and that’s why we’re streamlining our hardware lineup to make a bit more sense going forward.

We will now only sell the Home Assistant Yellow as a kit and have stopped producing the Home Assistant Yellow Standard (our version that came preassembled with a CM4 and Home Assistant already installed). Rest assured, as the Home Assistant Yellow Standard’s hardware is identical to our kits, it will continue to receive the same support and software updates. The kits will continue to be available with or without power-over-ethernet (PoE).

It’s not the biggest change, but we wanted our community to know - and if you want to see why we made the change, and how our current hardware compares, keep reading.

We have been steadily shipping updates to our new dashboard design every month since we announced Project Grace, and our new grid system is finally maturing to a point where we would like our community of contributors to get involved!

If you are a UX/UI designer or a custom card developer who would like to contribute to the Home Assistant project, sign up to be part of our dashboard working group and read more about what you can do to improve compatibility of your custom cards.

Home Assistant 2024.7! 🎉

Get ready for a really nice release with something interesting for everyone! 🤗

And not just that, I bring you these release notes from our refreshed website 🤩 that Madelena and yours truly have been spontaneously working on over the past few days. We hope you like it! ❤️

Some fantastic additions to Assist: Timers! and the ability to expose your scripts to LLMs. In case you missed it, it has been covered and demonstrated live in our recent Voice - Chapter 7 livestream! which you definitely should watch. 📺

The sections view becomes more feature-rich with every release, and this time, the ability to resize cards is added. Absolutely the highlight of the release for me!

My second favorite highlight for this release is the ability to take control of blueprint-based automations. There are so many amazing blueprints out there, and many are perfect, but sometimes they fit 90% of what you need. Being able to take control of that last 10% is just amazing!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

This chapter might be one of the most feature-packed yet, bringing the highly requested timer feature and major improvements to wake words, along with experimental technology that even outclasses big tech’s voice assistants.

Welcome to Voice Chapter 7, on today’s menu:

• Big things for microWakeWord
• Timers are here!
• Timers control devices
• AI in control
• Expand an LLM with scripts
• Enhanced Media Control
• Easier updates for your voice assistant

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the new name for Home Assistant SkyConnect. Though it’s a new name and look, they have the exact same hardware, capability, and support.

We launched Home Assistant SkyConnect in late 2022, a device designed to be the easiest, most stable way to connect Zigbee and Home Assistant together. It also came with Thread connectivity support, which was (and still is) pretty groundbreaking at its price point. All these years later, it continues to receive strong support and is a community favorite.

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the same great product we all know and love. Going forward, whenever we mention updates or features for Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1, this will also apply to Home Assistant SkyConnect-branded devices. Keep reading to learn why we changed the name.

During our State of the Open Home livestream in April, we presented our roadmaps for Home Assistant, open protocols, and Home Assistant Cloud. If you’re not sure what a roadmap is, or why we aren’t just listing features and dates - please read our intro to Home Assistant Roadmaps.

There has already been a lot of great discussion about these roadmaps in the community, and we would really like to encourage you to give your thoughts in the comments of this blog - as they will inform how the roadmap evolves over time.

You can skip straight to the sections you’re most interested:

• Home Assistant: “A Home-Approved Smart Home”
• Home Assistant Cloud: “Peace of Mind”
• Open standards: “Certified Quality”

~ Madelena & JLo

Big thanks to everyone who had given feedback to us throughout the entire process!