We’re delighted to welcome ELTAKO to the Works with Home Assistant program! ELTAKO’s robust relay switches have formed the blueprint for smart building and smart home control across Europe for decades – and happen to be the first Matter relays to join the program.
You may never have seen one of ELTAKO’s little blue devices before, and that’s the point. They usually sit quietly behind walls, furniture and in distribution boards, doing their jobs without interfering with interiors. Now, thanks to their joining the Works with Home Assistant program, you can bring these professional-level installations to your own smart set-up.
ELTAKO has been a well-known name in the German building trade and throughout Europe for more than 75 years. In fact, the name itself derives from ‘ELektrischer TAst-KOntakt’ (electrical push-button contact) in a nod to ELTAKO’s first impulse switch innovation that started it all back in 1949.
For those of us who haven’t been around quite that long, an impulse switch (also known as a latching or step relay) toggles a circuit on or off each time it receives an electrical pulse. Instead of requiring constant power, it ‘remembers’ its state until the next signal. As well as using less energy, this means it’s possible to control a single light or system from multiple switches without complex wiring – with obvious advantages for the smart home. So synonymous is the brand with this type of device that impulse switches are still referred to as ‘ELTAKOS’ by the professional electricians and engineers who use them.
Because of this innovative spirit, it’s perhaps no surprise that over the years ELTAKO has broadened its range to a full ecosystem of sensors, dimmers, and energy meters – all based on wired or wireless technologies, such as RS485, EnOcean, Modbus or DALI, which are built for longevity and local control, rather than cloud dependency.
True to that philosophy, ELTAKO has embraced open standards such as Matter, ensuring its products speak the same languages that support our mission to keep homes open, private, and locally controlled.
"As a manufacturer that has relied on open standards like Matter and EnOcean from the very beginning, joining the Works with Home Assistant program is a natural step for us. This allows us to make our products accessible to an even larger community and enables our customers to integrate them seamlessly into diverse smart home environments. We are convinced that the future lies in openness and interoperability – which is why we deliberately embrace partnerships that offer users long-term investment security and maximum flexibility."
- Kai Sepp, Sales Director North & West Europe at ELTAKOELTAKO’s integration with Home Assistant starts with items from the 64 series, which was awarded the SmartHome Germany Award this year. This is the brand’s line that uses Matter over Wi-Fi, showing just how serious they are about interoperability moving forward.
We were also lucky enough to see the ELTAKO team at ISE Barcelona this year, and we’ll be catching up with them again at the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) meeting in November, also in Barca. Since CSA certification is a must for brands joining the program, it’s great to see ELTAKO so engaged.
As always, all the devices below have gone through our rigorous certification process to ensure they meet our standards for performance, reliability and open-home compatibility.
What devices have been certified?
These Matter devices that work over Wi-Fi are all about giving you freedom to control your current hardware – switch lights on and off and dim them automatically – without replacing it all. The shading actuator is particularly useful in continental Europe, where shutters are more common. It has a good energy-saving use case to reduce the need for air conditioning, since automatic shutters help keep your home cool in summer and warm in winter, potentially reducing utility bills. This also reflects ELTAKO’s wider focus on sustainability – from low-power devices to recyclable packaging and shipping materials.
In case you didn’t know, when using Matter devices with Home Assistant you have local control with no need for external internet for day-to-day operation. If you do want to access your dashboard while you’re away from home, using Home Assistant Cloud is a simple, secure, way to do this (and help fund Home Assistant’s development in the process!).
Like all brands within the Works with Home Assistant program, ELTAKO isn’t just adding our little blue logo to their little blue products – they’re joining our community. That means active engagement and shared expertise to help everyone get the best from their devices. Because ELTAKO’s products are built to professional standards, installation can sometimes require a qualified electrician – especially for wired set-ups. That’s where ELTAKO’s directory of system partners and specialists in many regions, as well as a tech support hotline, can help you find the installation advice you need, whether you’re a complete novice or electrical enthusiast.
With ELTAKO on board, we hope Home Assistant users will have further flexibility to explore new devices and experiment with different set-ups, as well as open up more ways to mix and match products to build a professional-standard smart home.
Q: If I have a device that is not listed under ‘Works with Home Assistant’ does this mean it’s not supported?
A: No! It just means that it hasn’t gone through a testing schedule with our team or doesn’t fit the requirements of the program. It might function perfectly well but be added to the testing schedule later down the road, or it might work under a different connectivity type that we don’t currently test under the program.
Q: OK, so what’s the point of the Works with program?
A: It highlights the devices we know work well with Home Assistant and the brands that make a long-term commitment to keeping support for these devices going. The certification agreement specifies that the devices must have key functionality within Home Assistant, operate locally without the need for cloud, and will continue to do so long-term.
Q: How were these devices tested?
A: All devices in this list were tested using a standard HA Green Hub and with our certified Matter Integration. If you have another set-up that’s not a problem, but we test against these as they are the most effective way for our team to certify within our ecosystem.
Q: Will you be adding more ELTAKO devices to the program?
A: Why not! We’re thrilled to foster a close relationship with the team at ELTAKO to work together on any upcoming releases, or add in further products that are not yet listed here. We’re really excited about what ELTAKO are doing with EnOcean and green power generally, but we haven’t tested or certified any of these products yet. We don’t have this protocol as part of the Works with Home Assistant certification (even if people are already using EnOcean in Home Assistant), and could explore how we certify these kinds of products.
Welcome to Voice Chapter 11 🎉, our long-running series where we share all the key developments in Open Voice. In this chapter, we will tell you how our assistant can now control more things in the home, in multiple languages at the same time, all while not talking your ear off. What’s more, our list of supported languages has grown again with several languages that big tech’s voice assistants won’t support. Join us for a deeper look at this voice chapter in our livestream on Wednesday, October 29. It’s been a couple of months, we’ve been building up our voice, and now have a lot to say, so let’s get to it!
Our original goal for the Year of Voice back in 2023 was to “let users control Home Assistant in their own language”. We’ve come a long way towards that goal, and really broadened our language support. We’ve also provided options that allow users to customize voice assistant pipelines with the services that best support their language, whether run locally or in the cloud of their choice. But what if you speak two languages within your home?
For some time, users have been able to create Assist voice assistant pipelines for different languages in Home Assistant, but interacting with the different pipelines has either required multiple voice satellite devices (one per language) or some kind of automation trigger to switch languages.
Since even the tiniest voice satellite hardware we support is capable of running multiple wake words now, we’ve added support in 2025.10 for configuring up to two wake words and voice assistant pipelines on each Assist satellite! This makes it straightforward to support dual language households by assigning different wake words to different languages. For example, “Okay Nabu” could run an English voice assistant pipeline while “Hey Jarvis” is used for French.
Multiple wake words and pipelines can be used for other purposes as well. Want to keep your local and cloud-based voice assistants separate? Easy! Assign a wake word like “Okay Nabu” to a fully local pipeline using our own Speech-to-Phrase and Piper. This pipeline would be limited to basic voice commands, but would not require anything to run outside of your Home Assistant server. Alongside this, “Hey Jarvis” could be assigned to a different pipeline that uses external services like Home Assistant Cloud and an LLM to answer questions or perform complex actions.
We’d love to hear feedback on how you plan to use multiple wake words and voice assistants in your home!
The whole world is engulfed in hype about AI and adding it to all the things — we’re not exactly quiet about the cool stuff we’re doing with AI. While powering your voice assistants with AI/LLMs makes them much more flexible and powerful, it comes at a cost: paying to use cloud-based services like OpenAI and Google, or pricey hardware and energy to run local models via systems like Ollama. We started building our voice assistant before AI was a thing, and thus it was designed without requiring it. We continue to make great progress towards delivering a solid voice experience to users who want to keep their home AI free — keeping AI opt-in only and not required are guidelines we follow.
Assist, our built-in voice assistant, can do a lot of cool things without the need for AI! This includes a ton of voice commands in dozens of languages for:
Want to include your own voice commands? You can quickly add custom sentences to an automation, allowing you to take any action and tailor the response.
The easiest way to get started is with Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, our small and easy-to-start with Voice Assistant hardware. This, combined with a Home Assistant Cloud subscription, allows any Home Assistant system to quickly handle voice commands, as our privacy-focused cloud processes the speech-to-text (turning your voice into text for Home Assistant) and text-to-speech (turning Home Assistant’s response back into voice). This is all without the use of LLMs, and supports the development of Home Assistant 😎.
For users wanting to keep all voice processing local, we offer add-ons for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech:
All of this together shows just how much can be done without needing to include AI, even though it can do some pretty amazing things. And we’re continuing to close the gap with the features highlighted in this blog post, including multilingual assistants, improved sentence matching, and the ability to ask questions from automations.
Intents are what connect a voice command to the right actions in Home Assistant to get something done. While the end result is often simple, such as turning on a light, intents are designed as a “do what I mean” layer above the level of basic actions. In the previous section, we listed the sorts of voice commands that intents enable, from turning on lights to adding items to your to-do list. Over the last three years, we’ve been progressively adding new and more complex intents.
Recently, we’ve added three new intents to make Assist even better. To control media players, you can now set the relative volume with voice commands like “turn up the volume” or “decrease TV volume by 25%”. This adds to the existing volume intent, which allows you to set the absolute volume level like “set TV volume to 50%”.
Next, it’s now possible to set the speed of a fan by percentage. For example, “set desk fan speed to 50%” or even “set fans to 50%” to target all fans in the current area. Make sure you expose the fans you want Assist to be able to control.
Lastly, you can now tell the kids to “get off your lawn” because your robot is going to mow it! Making use of the lawn_mower integration, your voice assistant can now understand commands like “mow the lawn” and “stop the mower”. Paired with the existing smart vacuum commands, you may never need to lift a finger again to keep things clean and tidy.
Picture this: you come home from work and, as you enter the living room, your voice assistant asks what type of music you’d like to hear while preparing dinner. As the music starts to play, it mentions you left the garage door open and wants to know if you’d like it closed. After dinner, as you’re hanging out on the couch, your voice assistant informs you that the temperature outside is lower than your AC setting and asks for confirmation to turn it off and open the windows.
Surely you’d need a powerful LLM to perform such wizardry, right? With the Ask Question action, this can all be done locally using Assist and a few automations!
Within an automation, the Ask Question action allows you to announce a message on a voice satellite, match the response against a list of possible answers, and take an action depending on the user’s answer. While answers can be open-ended, such as a musical artist or genre, limiting the possible answers allows you to use the fully local Speech-to-Phrase for recognizing speech without an internet connection.
Assist was designed to run fast and fully offline on hardware like the Raspberry Pi 4 for many different languages. It works by matching the text of your voice commands against sentence templates, such as “turn on the {name}” or “turn off lights in the {area}”. While this is very fast and straightforward to translate to many languages, it can also be inflexible, resulting in the dreaded “Sorry, I couldn’t understand that” or other errors.
Starting in Home Assistant 2025.9, we’ve included an improved “fuzzy matcher” that is much better at handling extra words or alternative phrasings of our supported voice commands.
The fuzzy matcher is pre-trained on the existing sentence templates, so we will be able to use it for all of our supported languages. However, this is initially only available for the English language and we’re working to determine the best way to enable this for other languages.
After a voice command, Assist responds with a short confirmation like “Turned on the lights” or “Brightness set”. This lets you know it understood your command and took the appropriate actions. However, if you’re in the same room as the voice assistant, this confirmation is redundant; you can see or hear that appropriate actions were taken.
Starting with Home Assistant 2025.10, Assist will detect if the voice command’s actions all took place within the same area as the satellite device. If so, a short confirmation “beep” will be played instead of the full verbal response. Besides being less verbose, this also serves as a reminder that your voice command only affected the current area.
Non-verbal confirmations will not be used in voice assistant pipelines with LLMs, since the user may have specific instructions in their prompt, such as “respond like a pirate”, and we wouldn’t want to deprive you of a fun response, me mateys 🏴☠️.
Large language models (LLMs) can be especially verbose in their responses, and we quickly realized that this exposed a weakness in Home Assistant’s text-to-speech (TTS) implementation. For most of its life, TTS in Home Assistant has required the full response to be generated before any audio can be played. This meant a lot of waiting for multi-paragraph LLM responses, especially with local TTS systems like Piper.
Fixing this required an overhaul of the TTS architecture to allow for streaming. Instead of waiting for the entire audio message to be synthesized before playing, we enabled TTS services within Home Assistant to work with chunks of text (input) and audio (output). As chunks of text are streamed in from an LLM, the TTS service can synthesize audio chunks and send them out to be played immediately.
To demonstrate the benefit of streaming, we asked an LLM to “tell me a long story about a frog” and timed how long it took to start speaking the (multi-paragraph) response. Without streaming, both Home Assistant Cloud and Piper took more than five seconds to respond! This is long enough to make you wonder if your voice assistant heard you 😄 With streaming enabled, both TTS services took about half a second to start talking back. A 10x improvement in latency!
Piper, our homegrown text-to-speech tool, continues to grow with support for several new languages! These new voices were trained from publicly available voice datasets, and are available now in the Piper add-on:
Want to know what the new voices sound like? You can listen to samples of every available Piper voice or even run Piper entirely within your web browser for free.
If your language is missing from Piper, or you don’t like the existing voices for your language, we’re always looking for volunteers to contribute their voices! Please contact us at voice@openhomefoundation.org
In the past three years, we’ve made great strides with Home Assistant Voice on both the hardware and software fronts. Users today have a wide variety of choices when it comes to voice: from fully local to using the latest and greatest AI to power their smart homes. The great thing about our experimentation with AI is that there are no investors looking for returns, fake money, or “rug-pulls”. We do everything for you, our community. We’re in this for the long haul, and want this all to be your choice, keeping you in full control of whether you want to use this technology or avoid the hype completely.
Much of the advanced work done on voice is only possible with the support of our community, especially those who subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud or anyone who has purchased our Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (both great ways to get started with voice).
Today, we’re announcing that we will no longer be producing Home Assistant Yellow. Rest assured, it will continue to receive software support far into the future.
I’m Carl, Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa, the organization that builds and sells official hardware for the Open Home Foundation. I couldn’t be more proud of our hardware achievements over the past 12 months, including Voice Preview Edition and Connect ZWA-2 (including its cool new Wi-Fi and PoE experimental firmware).
Home Assistant Yellow was similarly groundbreaking at launch and helped fund Home Assistant’s development. However, for reasons I’ll explain below, the time has come to end production. This means that if you were considering buying a Home Assistant Yellow, you’ll need to act fast, as stock will not be replenished (check the Order Now button on the Home Assistant Yellow page to see if your local retailer still has stock).
Nabu Casa is now exploring what hardware could replace Home Assistant Yellow, so if you have any suggestions on what we should do next, please tell us in the comments! In the meantime, the good news is that there are already plenty of other great ways to run Home Assistant. For example, if you’re looking for hardware that’s both easy to start with and supports the Open Home Foundation, we’d recommend the Home Assistant Green.
There is a long yellow brick road that brought us to today. All the way back in 2021, we announced Home Assistant Yellow (originally called Amber). It included some pretty unique features, including its built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, optional PoE, and overall expandable approach. As it used the Raspberry Pi Compute Module platform, included GPIO, and had an NVMe slot, there were a lot of different ways you could upgrade it over time (including people being able to upgrade from CM4 to CM5, which was quite the speed bump 🏎️).
It wasn’t all smooth sailing with Home Assistant Yellow. We essentially launched the device in the middle of the great Pi shortage. It definitely complicated things for a time, but it all eventually stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Home Assistant Green, which became the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant. This new product led us to end the sale of Home Assistant Yellow devices that shipped with a CM4 already installed (called the Home Assistant Yellow Standard), which allowed us to focus the product line on the kit versions.
Small, but so much room for activities
Home Assistant Green continues to have strong sales, but Home Assistant Yellow sales have been naturally slowing down, as happens a couple of years into any product’s life. This month, it finally reached the point where it no longer made sense to have another production run, which ultimately pushed us to discontinue Home Assistant Yellow.
Technology changes, and small-form-factor computing has always moved fast. For instance, in the early days of Home Assistant, the community’s de facto recommendation was always the most recent Raspberry Pi device, but we’re seeing more people gravitate towards Mini PCs. We’re now exploring what we could build next for our power users, but we’re still some way off, so don’t wait if you need something today.
As long as it’s possible to run Home Assistant on Yellow, we will continue to provide builds. If you want living proof of this commitment, take our first hardware device: Home Assistant Blue. It ended production in 2022, but still receives new builds of Home Assistant, something that shows no signs of changing for a long time. We continue to streamline and make Home Assistant more efficient, as it’s our goal for you to run it on the hardware you have.
I’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone who bought a Home Assistant Yellow over the years, and for all the great feedback you shared with us. We’re sad to say goodbye to our trusty little expandable powerhouse, but it’s had a good run and we’re super proud of how far we’ve come. Also, we’ll soon be announcing the date of our next hardware product (not a computing device… but something very cool nonetheless), so stay tuned!
Last month, we launched the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2, our take on the best possible Z-Wave adapter. Based on the reviews, it sounds like we hit the mark 😎. Today, we’re announcing a new, experimental firmware that allows you to do even more with the ultimate Z-Wave adapter.
I’m Keith, a Senior Hardware and Software Engineer at Nabu Casa, but you also might know me from my work on the ESPHome project. If you weren’t aware, Nabu Casa is the commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation, and the organization that helps build official Home Assistant hardware.
During the launch, one piece of feedback we often received was that people wanted more flexibility in where they could place Connect ZWA-2 in their home — often far away from their Home Assistant system. It was no easy feat (more on that below), but we were able to build a solution that allows you to put it anywhere you have a network connection.
This experimental firmware will allow you to not only leverage the Wi-Fi chip inside the Connect ZWA-2, but also use it with other hardware to facilitate the use of the much-requested PoE. 🎉 This new firmware is only possible because of the second-generation platform we built Connect ZWA-2 on, which is open by design, allowing you to tinker and extend the device you own. Every piece of Home Assistant hardware reflects Nabu Casa and the foundation’s philosophy of constant evolution, and the software it launches with is just the beginning. Whenever we think of a cool new capability, we will work together to add it.
If you want to start using your Connect ZWA-2 with Portable Z-Wave today, visit the brand new home for all the foundation’s web-based tools. Just be aware that this is experimental, and we recommend you read through this blog to understand how it works and its limitations. You can also watch the upcoming ESPHome livestream, where we’ll discuss this new tech in depth.
Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 connected to a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ETH
To get started using your Connect ZWA-2 over your local network, you can use one of the two following configurations:
First, before installing this new firmware, make sure to back up your Z-Wave network and ensure your Home Assistant instance is running version 2025.10.2 or later. Only after those steps should you use the toolkit website for Portable Z-Wave. The toolkit’s wizard will walk you through the whole process of installing and connecting your device to your network. When the installation is complete, it should join your network and be discovered by both the ESPHome and Z-Wave integrations in Home Assistant.
This firmware has proven to work well in our lab and home environments, but the real world is a different place; your local network and Z-Wave network might behave differently. For this reason, we’re seeking your feedback. If you try it out, please let us know about your experience – good or bad, brief or long-winded – by leaving a comment below. We’re eager to know how and where we can improve it!
Before we launch any of our hardware products, we try to get our pre-production batch to as many testers as possible – most are hobbyists and tinkerers from the community, and of course, the first thing they tend to do is get out the screwdriver and open it up (to be fair, it’s designed to be easy to open — no glue, no clips). When looking at the insides of Connect ZWA-2, they were instantly greeted with an ESP32 chip, and were equally excited and confused. It was initially included just as a USB controller, and yes, an ESP32-S3 is a bit overkill for this specific task, but we wanted to give the device room to grow. This brings us to the experiment we are sharing with you today…
When you use a Z-Wave adapter with Home Assistant, which relies on the Z-Wave JS add-on, they use USB to communicate via a specialized Z-Wave serial protocol. And yes, it is technically possible to run this Z-Wave serial protocol over your network (serial-over-IP), but our testing reveals that it’s not as reliable or as easy as we’d like. Some parts of the Z-Wave serial protocol are latency (delay) sensitive, specifically the acknowledgment of Z-Wave packets. If your network is busy and decides to take its sweet time with one of those critical packets, your Z-Wave device’s connection can time out and fail. This can stall Z-Wave device communication, or even completely break it.
For Z-Wave to work over a network, we need to address the latency-sensitive parts on the actual device; everything else can be forwarded over the network. This is where ESPHome steps in: it’s the open source software for network-capable microcontrollers that runs on ESP32 devices. We built an ESP32 into the Connect ZWA-2, and it has the horsepower (and Wi-Fi antenna) to handle this task.
To help make this all possible, we added Z-Wave support to ESPHome, allowing it to talk to Z-Wave chips. We then added the ability for Home Assistant and Z-Wave JS to communicate with Z-Wave adapters via ESPHome. As this work is open source, it shouldn’t be limited just to our Connect ZWA-2. Theoretically, it should be able to work with any certified Z-Wave adapter connected to an ESP32. However, before we look at supporting other adapters, we want to ensure that it’s stable when running on the Connect ZWA-2.
Home Assistant connected to the ZWA-2 via its integrated Wi-Fi chip.
Home Assistant connected to the ZWA-2 via the PoE module.
ESPHome handles serial message acknowledgments internally, then leverages its API (specifically its Protobuf implementation) to send the messages over the network more reliably than serial-over-IP. Even if your home network is bogged down by some spikes in traffic, ESPHome will have you covered, keeping your Z-Wave network stable. That’s not to say this has no impact on performance, but it may be less than you think – or can even notice!
Wi-Fi is very convenient, but the million-dollar question is: how will it impact your Z-Wave network? To find out, we ran some benchmarks to see how Portable Z-Wave stacks up to its USB counterpart.
Compared to a direct serial (USB) connection, a data packet will take longer to travel between Home Assistant/Z-Wave JS and your Z-Wave network when routed through your local network. On a network with only a low to moderate workload, the additional delay is very small and is generally not noticeable. That said, if your network is heavily stressed or the Wi-Fi signal is poor, you should expect packets to take longer to move around, which can lead to a perceivable delay. It can still control your lights and other devices, but it may be a bit slower. Here are some numbers illustrating the typical latency that we were able to achieve across our test environments:
| Connection type | Min (ms) | Max (ms) | Mean (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|
| USB | 4 | 9 | 5.36 |
| Ethernet | 15 | 32 | 25.14 |
| Wi-Fi | 15 | 92 | 29.16 |
Your results will likely differ somewhat, especially in less ideal conditions and environments. For instance, if you place your Connect ZWA-2 in a spot with really poor Wi-Fi connectivity, you might notice devices not reflecting their actual state or other buggy behavior. Avoid using VPNs or other complex network routing or configuration, as that will add latency. Also, don’t worry about Wi-Fi interfering with your Z-Wave network, as they operate on totally different radio frequencies that don’t interact. I think with a healthy dose of common sense, you can find a great spot that gets both great Wi-Fi connectivity while nicely optimizing your Z-Wave network.
This project was brought to you by a collaboration between Nabu Casa and the people below from the Open Home Foundation. None of this would be possible without the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers and those who care about Z-Wave and have purchased the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2. Thank you!
Thanks to Dominic, founder of Z-Wave JS, for quickly jumping in on this project, adding support to Z-Wave JS, and building the browser installation tooling.
Thanks to Nick and Jesse for their support with the ESPHome implementation.
Thanks to Steven for making the new Open Home Foundation toolbox website to allow easy installation of the experiment.
Q: Is the Portable Z-Wave experiment limited to the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2?
A: Theoretically, it should work with other Z-Wave adapters, but thus far we have only tested it with the ZWA-2. The code is part of ESPHome 2025.10, Home Assistant 2025.10.2, and Z-Wave JS v15.15.0. We chose Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 as the first device with support since it already contains an ESP32-S3. If you’d like to try it out with your favorite Z-Wave adapter, you should start by taking a look at our ESPHome configuration for the ZWA-2 (all that should need changing are the vendor and product IDs to match the Z-Wave adapter).
Q: Is the Portable Z-Wave experiment limited to Home Assistant?
A: No. It is made to work directly with Z-Wave JS. If you use Z-Wave JS v15.15.0, either standalone or with another smart home platform, you are able to use it, too! Configure Z-Wave JS to connect to esphome://<IP OF THE ZWA-2>.
Q: Can I use Ethernet instead of Power-over-Ethernet?
A: Yes. Use a Power-over-Ethernet injector in combination with the Waveshare ESP32-S3-ETH board.
Works with Home Assistant is opening its doors to another new partner who is bringing the first Garage Door Openers and Alarm Panel to the program, all of which are using ESPHome under the hood. Konnected are well known for their devices that let you retrofit new smarts into the devices you already have, allowing you to use them in Home Assistant and keep them working longer.
Konnected have been well-known in the Home Assistant community, as they’ve been active members for years. As members of the community, they know how hard it can be to connect the devices that are already built into your home, whether they’re smart or not. That’s why Konnected’s first product was their drop-in replacement alarm panel boards, which allow you to take decades-old wired alarm systems and add them into Home Assistant.
Another challenge the community was facing was garage door openers (GDOs), especially cloud-based openers. In the early days of Home Assistant, the community figured out the APIs for these providers and controlled them that way. Some manufacturers noticed this and put barriers up blocking people from controlling the devices they own, claiming it as “unauthorized usage” 🙄.
The community was naturally incensed, and did what tinkerers tend to do when a cloud gets in their way — they began tinkering with hardware. A community emerged to take back control of these devices, starting with projects like ratgdo, which Konnected used as a base for their work. Today, because of these projects, there are multiple great open source tools to control a large number of these GDOs, ranging from DIY schematics to finished controllers. Konnected has an open source solution which works locally, as well as having the form factor and safety standards to match. Even better, Konnected devices are available in over 60 countries.
For anyone who has used Konnected for quite some time, you’ll notice that they had their own integration, which has now been deprecated in favor of the ESPHome firmware, so that it’s always straightforward to find (or build) the firmware you need. They even publish all their code on GitHub 👏, which allows the community to help them fix issues and add features.
"We've been users of Home Assistant ourselves since 2018 and thrilled to finally be officially part of the Works with Home Assistant program. Konnected shares many of the same founding principles as Home Assistant, including our commitment to 100% local control, open-source firmware, and high-quality hardware that makes your home smarter, safer and accessible to everyone."
- Nate Clark, Founder / CEO at KonnectedKonnected is another example of ESPHome (a project from the Open Home Foundation) fostering an entirely new ecosystem of Open Home projects. It works fully locally, and it’s perfect for tinkerers, allowing you to build DIY smart home devices yourself (get started with one of our ready-made projects). Konnected also have a thriving community of their own if you have questions or comments.
Creators can also use it to make pre-built, plug-and-play products that give users a really seamless experience. Devices are easily discovered and added to your Wi-Fi network and Home Assistant, along with a one-click update within Home Assistant. To learn more about how Konnected uses ESPHome, look out for Nate on the next ESPHome live stream on October 14!
Remember, the development of projects like ESPHome from the Open Home Foundation is supported by Home Assistant Cloud subscribers and anyone who purchases Home Assistant hardware. While all of Konnected’s devices work locally, if you’re interested in remote access, allowing you to keep tabs on your home’s security when you’re out and about, check out Home Assistant Cloud.
The Konnected Smart Garage Door Opener blaQ
For anyone new to the Works With Home Assistant program, it’s a way for us to formally certify devices that have been tested by our team, and help you know what works great out of the box with Home Assistant. Any company joining also commits to providing long-term support and firmware updates. Works With Home Assistant is operated by the Open Home Foundation, and the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers funds this work. These items were all tested by members of the ESPHome team to see exactly how they function in their own homes.
The Konnected certified devices are listed below:
A nice benefit of retrofitting your old wired security system is not needing to maintain loads of battery-powered sensors 🪫. The Alarm Panel Pro has the ability to connect 12 zones (security speak for individual or joined up sensors), it also allows you to connect keypads and sirens, and includes 12V power for the devices that need that. It’s highly customizable, and there’s also plenty of support available if you need help with installation. You can power it using 12V or Power-over-Ethernet, or both! The Alarm Panel Pro is designed to be always-on, and they’ve designed it to consume very little power. This also allows it to easily run for hours on their backup battery.
You’ll also probably be wondering why there are two different variants of the garage door openers, and that’s because each supports a different set of manufacturers. There is a wizard to help you figure out which variant will work with your opener. Between the Konnected GDO blaQ and White, you get support for some of the biggest manufacturers out there, including Chamberlain, LiftMaster, Craftsman, Merlin, Genie, Stanley, and more.
Even with the Konnected controlling your garage door opener, you’re still able to use the included remote or the original manufacturer’s app (if you like that kind of torture). The GDO White features a built-in optical laser sensor that detects whether your garage door is open or closed. The GDO blaQ offers control over the opener’s light and lock, and can even partially open the door (for openers that support these features).
As we mentioned at the top, it’s great to have more products added to the program that help people get the most out of the things they already own. A big part of the Open Home Foundation’s mission is sustainability in the smart home, and Konnected are helping our community get longer lasting use of their existing security and garage door systems.
Q: If I have a device that is not listed under ‘Works with Home Assistant does this mean it’s not supported?
A: No! It just means that it hasn’t gone through a testing schedule with our team or doesn’t fit the requirements of the program. It might function perfectly well, but has not yet been added to the testing schedule, or it might work under a different connectivity type that we don’t currently test under the program.
Q: Ok, so what’s the point of the Works with program?
A: It highlights the devices we know work well with Home Assistant and the brands that make a long-term commitment to keeping support for these devices going. The certification agreement specifies that the devices must have full functionality within Home Assistant, operate locally without the need for cloud and will continue to do so long-term.
Q: How were these devices tested?
A: All devices in this list were tested using a standard Home Assistant Green Hub with the ESPHome integration. If you have another set-up that’s not a problem, but we test against these as they are the most effective way for our team to certify within our ecosystem.
Q: Will you be adding more Konnected devices to the program?
A: Why not! Konnected are also looking to do some exciting things with Matter soon, so we’re excited to work together on any upcoming releases or add in further products that are not yet listed here.
Boo! 👻
We just celebrated our birthday 🥳, which means it is time for spooky season; get ready for Halloween! And, hello to the October release of Home Assistant 2025.10! 🎃
This release iterates on some of the features we introduced in the last couple of releases, but also introduces some brand-new ones!
The highlight of this release is definitely the iterations of the automation editor, which gained a sidebar last release, and now has gained undo/redo functionality, a resizable sidebar, improved copy/paste, and more! Thanks for all the feedback you provided on the previous release; it made a massive difference in this release.
Using multiple wake words for voice assistants is now possible, which opens up a lot of possibilities, especially for dual-language households (like mine 😉). Dashboards get more intelligent by suggesting entities based on your usage patterns, and the AI Task can now generate images, which I’m curious to see what the community will do with it!
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
A huge thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible! And a special shout-out to @JLo, @laupalombi, and @piitaya who helped write the release notes this release. Also, @googanhiem, @SeraphicRav, @tronikos, and @richardpolzer for putting effort into tweaking its contents. Thanks to them, these release notes are in great shape. ❤️
In the last release, we introduced a new layout for the automation editor, and your feedback has been invaluable in helping us refine it!
This release fixes a few of the most common issues we managed to gather from all of you. Thanks for all the feedback! ❤️
Working on an action that is too complex for a small sidebar? Maybe one with a few YAML fields? You can now resize the sidebar to adapt the layout to your current task!
We previously introduced keyboard shortcuts to copy and cut.
Pasting was more complex to bring to life because you can paste a block (trigger, condition, action) in many different locations in your automation. In this release, we introduce a really simple pattern. If you previously copied a block, you can paste it below any block simply by selecting it and pressing CTRL+V.
Another very simple, but very welcome, quality-of-life improvement to the automation editor!
We initially relocated the overflow menu (the menu that appears when you click the ⋮) with all the options related to a block on the sidebar, thinking this would make the flow cleaner.
Due to popular demand and helpful feedback that some actions were more difficult to reach (such as testing a condition or running an action), we decided to bring it back to the main section of the editor as well.
We’ve all been there: you’re building a complex automation, make a mistake, and want to revert it, only to find out that it’s really not simple. Up until now, the only way to revert some unsaved changes made to an automation was to close it and start over again… A very painful workflow.
This release introduces an Undo functionality (and its associated Redo). You can now undo up to 75 steps back in your automation editing history (and redo them if you want). Standard keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+Z and CTRL+Y) are also available! An amazing contribution from @jpbede, thanks!
Finally, we noticed some unwanted complexity in our “repeat” building block, which allows you to repeat one or multiple actions for as long as you need to.
This complexity stemmed from the fact that we were trying to cover four main use cases in a single block.
We decided to split this building block into four smaller ones, with simpler descriptions explaining each use case. Nice!
Here’s how they were separated:
Note
For our advanced users: This evolution is only cosmetic. The YAML format of the repeat block does not change; this means your existing automations will not be affected by this change.
Tip
One of Home Assistant’s greatest strengths is our community. We’re building this automation editor together, and your input will shape where it goes next. There are two ways to get involved:
In 2025.8, we introduced a way to generate data using the LLM of your choice, paving the way to more AI-driven automations, dashboards, and other smart home interactions.
In this release, we introduce a way to generate images!
Now every time someone rings your doorbell, you can receive a notification with a cartoon version of the doorbell snapshot. @JLo has made this example a reality, and here’s his demo with the associated automation!
Log inalias: Demo Doorbell
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id:
- binary_sensor.doorbell_demo
to: "on"
actions:
- action: notify.mobile_app_iphone
data:
title: "🔔 Doorbell "
message: Processing image ...
data:
tag: doorbell
- action: ai_task.generate_data
data:
task_name: Doorbell description
instructions: |-
Someone rang my doorbell.
Instructions:
- Describe the scene, describe every person on the scene
- Count People
- Count Animals
entity_id: ai_task.ai_task_gpt_4o
structure:
summary:
description: >-
Summary of the scene and the people inside it. Keep it under 180
characters
selector:
text: null
person_count:
description: Number of person in the scene
selector:
number: null
animal_count:
description: Number of animal in the scene
selector:
number: null
attachments:
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/doorbell_test.png
media_content_type: image/png
metadata:
title: doorbell_test.png
thumbnail: null
media_class: image
children_media_class: null
navigateIds:
- {}
- media_content_type: app
media_content_id: media-source://media_source
response_variable: ai
- action: notify.mobile_app_iphone
data:
title: >-
🔔 Doorbell ({{ai.data.person_count}} 🧑🏻🦱 / {{ai.data.animal_count}}
🐊)
message: "{{ai.data.summary}}"
data:
tag: doorbell
- action: ai_task.generate_image
data:
task_name: Manga
instructions: Transform this image into a super cute manga!
entity_id: ai_task.google_ai_task
attachments:
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/doorbell_test.png
media_content_type: image/png
metadata:
title: doorbell_test.png
thumbnail: null
media_class: image
children_media_class: null
navigateIds:
- {}
- media_content_type: app
media_content_id: media-source://media_source
response_variable: ai_image
enabled: true
- action: notify.mobile_app_iphone
data:
title: >-
🔔 Doorbell ({{ai.data.person_count}} 🧑🏻🦱 / {{ai.data.animal_count}}
🐊)
message: "{{ai.data.summary}}"
data:
tag: doorbell
image: http://homeassistant.local:8123{{ai_image.url}}
enabled: true
mode: single
Image generation is already working great, and we cannot wait to see what you will build with this!
In the last release, we introduced the Home dashboard, offering a simpler way to control and monitor your smart home if you don’t have the time, energy, or need to customize your own dashboard in detail.
Now we’ve added a new concept: sections of suggested entities. This follows a basic algorithm that suggests entities you have interacted with the most in the past. It then shows these entities based on the hour of the day, with only relevant controls being suggested.
If you’re creating a manual dashboard with sections, you can integrate these prediction controls directly into it. The setup follows a section-based approach:
strategy:
type: common-controls
title: Common controls
Tip
One of Home Assistant’s greatest strengths is our community. We’re building this dashboard together, and your input will shape where it goes next. There are two ways to get involved:
For a very long time, ESPHome-based voice assistants (even the tiny Atom Echo) secretly supported multiple wake words under the hood. With this release, we’re finally opening up this feature to you!
You can now define two wake words and two assistants for every voice assistant in your home!
This makes it straightforward to support dual-language households by assigning different wake words to different languages. For example, “Okay Nabu” could be used for French, while “Hey Jarvis” is used for English.
Multiple wake words and assistants can be used for other purposes as well. Want to keep your local and cloud-based voice assistants separate? Easy! “Okay Nabu” could be used for a cloud-based assistant while “Hey Jarvis” is used for a local one.
We’d love to hear feedback on how you plan to use multiple wake words in your home!
After a voice command, Assist responds with a short confirmation like “Turned on the lights” or “Brightness set”. This lets you know that it understood your command and took the appropriate actions. However, if you’re in the same room as the voice assistant, this confirmation can feel redundant since you can see or hear that the appropriate actions were taken.
Starting with this release, Assist will detect if your voice command’s actions all took place within the same area as the satellite device. If so, a short confirmation “beep” will be played instead of the full verbal response. Besides being less verbose, this also serves as a quick reminder that your voice command only affected the current area.
Note
This feature does not work for AI-enabled Assistants, as they can generate a wide variety of responses that can’t be replaced with a simple beep.
Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰
We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:
One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.
This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:
3 integrations reached platinum 🏆
2 integrations reached silver 🥈
3 integrations reached bronze 🥉
This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.
A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏
While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes:
webhook_id. Thanks, @RoboMagus!MCF (1000 Cubic Feet) as an alternate unit of measure for volume, thanks to @ekobres, @xtimmy86x added m/min for speed sensors, and @pioto added inH₂O pressure unit support. Nice!This one, we have @jpbede and @matthiasdebaat to thank for! The ‘more information’ dialogs for media players have a revamped design, offering a cleaner and more intuitive interface.
When you have multiple charts in the history panel, zooming in on one chart will now automatically zoom in on all other charts as well. This makes it easier to compare data across different entities. Well done, @birrejan!
@TCWORLD has contributed a toolbar for the YAML and template code editors in our UI. This solves an issue where the previous floating button would float over the content of the editor and obscure it from view.
The new toolbar also includes undo and redo buttons, bringing the same convenient undo and redo functionality we introduced for the automation editor to these code editors as well. Plus, there’s a nice little copy button to quickly copy your code! Nice!
We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.10 in October. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release once a week, aiming for Friday.
markdown field description in ntfy integration (@tr4nt0r - #153421)ZeroDivisionError (@TheJulianJES - #153422)slack (@NoRi2909 - #153427)presencezone entity to the new API/firmware (@bieniu - #153737)sharkiq dependency bump to 1.4.2 (@Freebien - #153931)async_schedule_reload instead of async_reload for ZHA (@puddly - #154397)long_press entry for trigger_type in strings.json for Hue (@mvdwetering - #154437)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker to get it fixed! Or check our help page for guidance on more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign up for the Open Home Foundation Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community, and other projects that support the Open Home straight into your inbox.
We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.
We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:
Configuration and diagnostic entities with a label assigned to them will now be targeted/affected by service actions targeting that label. Previously, those entity categories were ignored on service action calls targeting labels.
If you have an automation or script with an action targeting a label, make sure that only entities that should be affected have that label assigned, even if they are config or diagnostic entities.
(@abmantis - #149309) (labels docs)
HERE deprecated the previous free tier. The new Base Plan has 5000 free requests per month. The automatic update interval of the HERE Travel Time integration changed from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, so one route can be supported without costs.
The Home Connect Alarm clock entity has been removed from the time platform, please use the number entity instead.
Removed previously deprecated extra attributes, please review your automations.
Shelly Gas:
Shelly Air:
(@chemelli74 - #140386) (shelly docs)
The effect of the property “invert position” is extended from the position itself to the status (open or closed). With this adjustment, it is no longer necessary to use cover templates to invert the position to correct the status. If you have covers with inverted position and are using the state in automations, you must adjust the automations accordingly.
The windFree preset mode for the air conditioner has been renamed to wind_free to allow translation to happen. Please adapt automations accordingly.
(@joostlek - #152833) (smartthings docs)
Switch Tibber electricity pricing to 15-minute intervals.
tibber.get_prices action now returns 15-minute data instead of hourly.price_level attribute is removed and no longer supported.intraday_price_ranking attribute is now scaled to (0,1) to better support 15-minute prices.We removed official support for Zabbix 5.0 from the integration. While this does not directly break connections to Zabbix 5.0, future updates will not check for compatibility with this version. Note that Zabbix 5 LTS left its support window in May of 2025.
(@nolsto - #149450) (zabbix docs)
ZhongHong’s climate entities set_fan_mode action behavior has changed.
The fan mode values are now converted to lowercase instead of uppercase to ensure compliance with the standard convention.
If you have automations relying on uppercase fan mode values, you will need to update them to use lowercase values instead.
(@Blear - #151559) (zhong_hong docs)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following changes are the most notable for this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2025.10
Every September, we celebrate the anniversary of Home Assistant’s first PR in 2013 – for our 12th birthday, we’re going all in on community again. Last month, we asked for submissions on how Home Assistant helps you, and today we will highlight our favorites! We will also take a look at all the cool milestones over the past year in the project, thanks to contributions from you all, and the new things coming up for the community.
When I (Missy Quarry) joined as the Community & Social Media Manager in February 2024, I was still new to how an open source project the size of Home Assistant manages its community. Over the past 18 months, I’ve seen Home Assistant community members from all walks of life — whether DIY tinkerers or people simply looking to make small improvements at home — contribute in their own ways. By sharing your stories and inspiring others, you’ve helped the project grow. For our 12th birthday, I want to celebrate these contributions, no matter the size or complexity. 😌
Before I jump into celebrating all your amazing contributions and how they shape the projects managed by the Open Home Foundation, I have a couple of birthday presents for you. 🎁
First, I’m thrilled to share our new Community website! Right now, it’s a simple hub to find community information with ease, but we expect to evolve this over the coming months (or so). You’ll find links to our official community platforms, information on events, and details on meetups, including how to get reimbursed for certain fees as a host. In the future, I’d like to include links to regional communities we’re aware of and showcase more of the kinds of stories I’ll be sharing today.
Feel like something’s missing from this new page? Let me know!
Next, we’ve been working hard to do more of our development in the open. Last September, I redesigned the Discord server and in doing so I gated the Developer category behind a role. This has made it more difficult to develop in the open with the channels hidden behind a role, so we’re switching things up.
As of this week, the Developer category is now read-only for every member. Want to take a peek into the future of Home Assistant? Head to the #projects channel and see what contributors are talking about! Want to join in and contribute with either your feedback or skills? I’ve created an info thread for the channel that explains how to assign yourself either the Developer or Designer role and unlock the ability to chat in the threads.
Let’s jump into those submitted stories now… 🤩
In my opinion, the best thing about Home Assistant is its flexibility - you can integrate such a wide range of devices into it and use their data to build a unique-to-your-home experience. And that’s exactly why I wanted to hear how you, the community, use it in your own home to benefit you. Here are my favorite stories you submitted - I hope one inspires your next project. ✨
A coffee automation to improve Home Approval Factor. ☕️ Jordan made a morning automation to avoid having the coffee grinder grind his morning mood.
u/katschung helped their girlfriend fully accept Home Assistant by creating a dashboard with a retrogame-style floor plan. 🕹️
Sythsaz uses Home Assistant to make sure their pupper is fed. 🐾 “I’ve managed to make it so my dog’s food auto emails the vet then the response to the email gets put on my calendar so I know how long a bag of food lasts as well as adding the receipts to Google Drive.”
Inspired by PowerDisplayESPHome, JannickBlmndl made an LED matrix that helps their household be more sustainable by being energy flexible. It displays the live energy prices from their energy provider. 📊
Tano Spirits in Melbourne, Australia, uses Home Assistant to automate their Japanese Shochu distillery, inspired by a small brewing company in Singapore. 🍻
Several years ago, HillPhantom found that Home Assistant wasn’t quite ready for him. Over the past year, though, he’s now got Ollama set up with his Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and has been building guides on how to make your own mmWave radar sensors in Home Assistant. 👋🏻
Over just a few weeks, Pieter van Kampen recently integrated 190 devices that respond to voice control and more than 1200 active entities from his KNX home to create over 30 automations to help with everything from mowing the lawn to controlling shades based on the sun’s location and intensity. 🪟
MB used Zigbee buttons to help collect data for their son’s doctor after he developed some trouble sleeping. This gave excellent insight for the doctor to start looking into causes, and they even used the system remotely while doing further evaluation. 📈
Graham Hosking took automations to another level (before we did) with his AI Automation Suggester and Automation Inspector. It takes the load off your brain by helping come up with new, clever automations! 🤖
Wessam Lauf fell down the rabbit hole that is Home Assistant once he got his setup running. Inspired by the Graphite theme and after some LLM vibe-coding, he wrote a template for his very own theme, Frosted Glass - now available in HACS. 🎨
Too many of us anthropomorphize our homes, telling it to chill out when five things break the same day. Biofects took that to heart and created this Home Assistant avatar for his home (here’s a bonus, nightmare fuel first version). 🫣
Our community is more than developers, it’s true. But we wouldn’t be the largest open source project on GitHub if we didn’t have a vibrant and active developer community. This ship sails largely due to their contributions, and we genuinely appreciate all of their efforts.
That’s why we’re eager to interview community members when we open new roles at the foundation. We’ve employed community members like Joostlek (who designed the new Integration Quality Scale and helps onboard new integrations into Core), Timo (who is our first ever Android developer and has focused on polishing the Android app), and Maxim (a talented developer from the Music Assistant community who works on both Music Assistant and ESPHome and is one of our newest additions to the team). Their contributions have helped shape how things work around here, but it was their contributions as community members that helped pave the way for their joining the foundation. These are just a select few of the several new hires at the foundation who were active community members.
(Have you checked our jobs page recently to see what roles are open? 👀)
With our community of contributors and working with Nabu Casa on the hardware design, we have successfully launched a few new pieces of hardware. The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition brought in language experts from every corner of the world to help ensure our language coverage is the most robust in the industry. Thanks to contributors, we support languages like Greek, Icelandic, and more recently Irish Gaeilge! 😎 We had community contributors help make sure the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 was prepared for launch last month. Sincerely, we couldn’t be more grateful for your support and efforts in these spaces.
Here are some fun stats from our GitHub contributors (commits on our Core repo):
A SPECIAL CONGRATULATIONS to bdraco, who just last week surpassed balloob (the founder of Home Assistant) as the contributor with the most commits!
The top 8 contributors of all time in home-assistant/core👏🏻
This is just a small peek into all the hard work that goes into maintaining Home Assistant - we have more repositories than just Core, and every single contribution is valued.
Honorable dev mention from the submitted community stories - I couldn’t leave Joostlek’s (joke) submission out. 🤣
Community is the core of what we do and the heart of Home Assistant. We thrive because you care and contribute your valuable time to support our collective success. Whether you found our platform because you wanted more privacy from big tech, were intrigued by the number of choices implemented into a single app, or needed something to track your sustainability efforts — you support our values every day. Thanks for choosing us, and thank you for all you do to help support the foundation and the projects we maintain.
A very special thanks to all our Home Assistant Cloud subscribers and anyone who has purchased our official Home Assistant hardware. These support the full-time development of Home Assistant (along with ESPHome, Music Assistant, and so much more), and are the easiest way to ensure these projects keep getting cool new features!
We have more things coming down the line for you. In the near future, we plan on announcing a new merch store 👕. In the first half of next year, I’ll announce when Home Assistant Community Day 2026 will be. We’re already working with Nabu Casa on the next exciting hardware announcement (no spoilers…for now). And that’s not even touching the industry events we plan on attending, the State of the Open Home, and so much more. I’m excited to take you all on the journey we’re already working on over the next 12 months, and I’m always looking forward to another year of amazing contributions. 😌
Last year, we laid out our vision for AI in the smart home, which opened up experimentation with AI in Home Assistant. In that update, we made it easier to integrate all sorts of local and cloud AI tools, and provided ways to use them to control and automate your home. A year has passed, a lot has happened in the AI space, and our community has made sure that Home Assistant has stayed at the frontier.
We beat big tech to the punch; we were the first to make AI useful in the home. We did it by giving our community complete control over how and when they use AI, making AI a powerful tool to use in the home. As opposed to something that takes over your home. Our community is taking advantage of AI’s unique abilities (for instance, its image recognition or summarizing skills), while having the ability to exclude it from mission-critical things they’d prefer it not to handle. Best of all, this can all be run locally, without any data leaving your home!
Moreover, if users don’t want AI in their homes, that’s their choice, and they can choose not to enable any of these features. I hope to see big tech take an approach this measured, but judging by their last couple of keynotes, I’m not holding my breath.
Over the past year, we’ve added many new AI features and made them easy to use directly through Home Assistant’s user interface. We have kept up with all the developments in AI land and are using the latest standard to integrate more models and tools than ever before. We’re also continuing to benchmark local and cloud models to give users an idea of what works best. Keep reading to check out everything new, and maybe you can teach your smart home some cool new tricks.
Local AI is making the home very natural to control
Big thanks to our AI community contributor team:
@AllenPorter, @shulyaka, @tronikos, @IvanLH, @Joostlek!
We were doing voice assistants before AI was cool. In 2023, we kicked off our Year of the Voice. Since then, we’ve worked towards our goal of building all the parts needed for a local, open, and private voice assistant. When AI became the rage, we were quick to integrate it.
Today, users can chat with any large language model (LLM) that is integrated into Home Assistant, whether that’s in the cloud or run locally via a service like Ollama. Where Assist, our home-grown (non-AI) voice assistant agent, is focused on a predetermined list of mostly home control commands, AI allows you to ask more open-ended questions. Summarize what’s happening across the smart home sensors you’ve exposed to Assist, or get answers to trivia questions. You can even give your LLM a personality!
Users can also leverage the power of AI to speak the way they speak, as LLMs are much better at understanding the intent behind the words. By default, Assist will handle commands first. Only questions or commands it can’t understand will be sent to the AI you’ve set up. For instance, “Turn on the kitchen light” can be handled by Assist, while “It’s dark in the kitchen, can you help?” could be processed by an AI. This speeds up response times for simple commands and makes for a more sustainable voice assistant.
Another powerful addition from the past year is context sharing between agents. So your Assist agent can share the most recent commands with your chosen AI agent. This shared context lets you say something like “Add milk to my shopping list,” which Assist will act on, and to add more items, just say “Add rice.” The AI agent understands that these commands are connected and can act accordingly.
Here is an excellent walkthrough video of JLo's AI-powered home, showing many of these new features in action
Another helpful addition keeps the conversation going; if the LLM asks you a question, your Assist hardware will listen for your reply. If you say something like “It’s dark”, it might ask whether you’d like to turn on some lights, and you could tell it to proceed. We have taken this even further than other voice assistants, as you can now have Home Assistant initiate conversations. For example, you could set up an automation that detects when the garage door is open and asks if you’d like to close it (though this can also be done without AI with a very clever Blueprint).
AI pushed us to completely revamp our Text-to-Speech (TTS) system to take advantage of streaming responses from LLMs. While local AI models can be slow, we use a simple trick to make the delay almost unnoticeable. Now, both Piper (our local TTS) and Home Assistant Cloud TTS can begin generating audio as soon as the LLM produces the first few words, improving the speed of the spoken response by a factor of ten.
Prompt: “Tell me a long story about a frog”
| Setup | Time to start speaking |
|---|---|
| Cloud, non-streaming | 6.62 sec |
| Cloud, streaming | 0.51 sec (13x faster) |
| Piper, non-streaming | 5.31 sec |
| Piper, streaming | 0.56 sec (9.5x faster) |
Ollama gemma3:4b on an RTX 3090, and Piper on an i5
People built some really cool voice hardware, from landline telephones to little talking robots, but the fact that it was so DIY was always a barrier to entry. To make our voice assistant available to everyone, we released the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. This is an easy and affordable way to try Home Assistant Voice. It has some seriously powerful audio processing hardware inside its sleek package. If you were on the fence about trying out voice, it really is the best way to get started.
Voice Preview Edition is not only open and powerful, but it looks and feels great too!
It’s now easier than ever to set up your Assist hardware to work with LLMs with our Voice Assistants settings page, and you can even assign a different LLM to each device. The LLM can recognize the room it’s in and the devices within it, making its responses more relevant. Assist was built to be a great way to control devices in your home, but with AI, it becomes so much more.
Last month, Home Assistant launched a new opt-in feature to leverage the power of AI when automating with Home Assistant. The goal is to shorten the journey from a blank slate to your finished idea.
When saving an automation or script, users can now leverage the new Suggest button: When clicked, it will send your automation configuration along with the titles of your existing automations and labels to AI to suggest a name, description, category, and labels for your new automation. Over the coming months, we’re going to explore what other features can benefit from AI suggestions.
To opt-in to this feature, you need to take two steps. First, you need to configure an integration that provides an AI Tasks entity. For local AI, you can configure Ollama, or you can also leverage cloud-based AI like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Once configured, you need to go to the new AI Task preferences pane under System -> General and pick the AI Task entity to power suggestions in the UI. If you don’t configure an AI Tasks entity, the Suggest button will not be visible.
Enabling AI Tasks does more than quickly label and summarize your automations; its true superpower is making AI easy to use in templates, scripts, and automations. AI Tasks allow other code to leverage AI to generate data, including options to attach files and define how you want that data output (for instance, a JSON schema).
We have all seen those incredible community creations, where a user leverages AI image recognition and analysis to detect available parking spots or count the number of chickens in the chicken coop. It’s likely that AI Tasks can now help you easily do this in Home Assistant, without the need for complex scripts, extra add-ons, or HACS integrations.
Below is a template entity that counts chickens in a video feed, all via a short and simple set of instructions.
template:
- triggers:
- trigger: homeassistant
event: start
- trigger: time_pattern
minutes: "/5"
actions:
- action: ai_task.generate_data
data:
task_name: Count chickens
instructions: >-
This is the inside of my coop. How many birds (chickens, geese, and
ducks) are inside the coop?
structure:
birds:
selector:
number:
attachments:
media_content_id: media-source://camera/camera.chicken_coop
media_content_type: image/jpeg
response_variable: result
sensor:
- name: "Chickens"
state: "{{ result.data.birds }}"
state_class: total
This template sends a snapshot of the camera to the AI, asking it to analyze what is going on. It defines that the output should always be a number, since we want to use that information in Home Assistant. All of this is embedded in a template entity that automatically updates every 5 minutes. An AI Task could also be embedded in an automation, a script, or any other place that can execute actions.
An automation triggers an AI Task to identify what caused motion on a camera.
Lastly, users can set a default AI Task entity. This allows users to skip picking an entity ID when creating AI automations. It also lets you migrate everything that uses AI Tasks to the latest model with a single click. This also makes it easy to share blueprints that leverage AI Tasks, like this blueprint that analyzes a camera snapshot when motion is detected:
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a thin layer allowing LLMs to integrate anything. When the specification was announced, we quickly jumped on it and integrated it into Home Assistant. Effectively, these servers give Home Assistant’s Assist conversation agent access to all sorts of new tools. You could connect MCP servers that give Assist access to the latest news stories, your to-do lists, or a server that catalogues your vinyl collection, allowing you to have richer conversations (“Okay Nabu, which Replacements albums do I have, and which aren’t on my Vinyl-to-Purchase list?”).
On the flip side, you can also turn Home Assistant into an MCP server, allowing an AI system to access information about your home. For instance, you could create a local AI that’s great at making Home Assistant automations, and it could include all your entity names or available actions. MCP keeps gaining more support, and there are some great cloud and self-hosted solutions available.
There are a lot of models available, it’s hard to know where to start. Luckily, Home Assistant’s resident AI guru @AllenPorter is here to help. He has put together an incredibly useful Home LLM Leaderboard. This dataset includes his extensive tests of cloud and local LLM options, and even has tests that give small local LLMs a fighting chance (see assist-mini).
Currently, the charts show the big cloud players’ most recent models ranking pretty close to each other, while recent local models that use 8GB or more of VRAM are nearly keeping up. In the past, there was a big disparity between most models, but now it’s hard to go wrong.
This is especially helpful as the options for LLMs in Home Assistant have just grown exponentially with the addition of OpenRouter, a unified interface for LLMs. With OpenRouter, users can access over 400 new models in Home Assistant, and it supports AI Tasks right from day one. We really are spoiled for choice.
Home Assistant is open. We believe that you should be in control of your data, and your smart home. All of it. Local LLMs and the way we have architected Home Assistant extends this choice to the AI space, all while maintaining your privacy.
Most crucially, we’ve made all of this open source. We are community-driven and work on this together with our community. The Open Home Foundation has no investors and is not beholden to anyone but our users. Our work is funded through hardware purchases and Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions, allowing us to make all the technology we build free and open.
Home Assistant 2025.9! 🎉
But before we dive into this release: Did you see we launched a new product? 👀
We’ve introduced the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2, the ultimate way to connect Z-Wave devices to Home Assistant. You can read all about it in our announcement blog 📰 or re-watch the product launch live stream on YouTube 📺.
It was a busy month, as we also had two new Works with Home Assistant program partners joining this month as well: AirGradient and Frient! 🎉
While the above was happening this month, as if the project wasn’t already busy enough, we kept on pushing to prepare for this release; and it is an absolute massive one! 🤯
This month introduces a new experimental Home dashboard, which aims to become the new default dashboard for Home Assistant in a future release. A first iteration, of which we love to see your feedback and input on. As you know, we develop and iterate in the open. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
Talking about dashboards, my personal favorite card is definitely the tile card; it is just so versatile. And this release brings in a staggering amount of new features for it! Most notably, the ability to add a trend graph to the tile card! 📈
I’m the most excited about the visual changes to the automation editor this release brings: a sidebar. It is a huge and very visible change, that just makes so much sense. This release denotes the start of a whole series of improvements to the automation editor in this, and upcoming releases. As automations make a smart home feel magical, I personally can’t wait to see how this evolves. 🤖
Enjoy the release!
../Frenck
On this year’s Home Assistant roadmap, we have set the goal of making automations easier to create. We have big plans, all based on tons of research, and with this release… we are shipping the first part of all this work, with the intent to gradually add more improvements over multiple releases!
This release tweaks the automation editor user interface experience by introducing a sidebar! If you select an item in your automation, instead of that item expanding, it will open a new sidebar to the right with the settings for that selected item.
This allows you to keep an overview of your automation on the left side of your screen, while you can tweak its behavior on the right. Of course, we have thought of smaller screens as well. On mobile, instead of the sidebar, a sheet will pop up at the bottom of the screen. This pop-up is also resizable, making it easier than ever to edit an action while reviewing your triggers.
Besides the sidebar, we have made tons of other little improvements as well. Tiny layout and styling changes that you will definitely notice as they really help with the overall readability. For example, small lines and borders around grouped elements have been added, making it easier to distinguish between different parts of your automation. Oh! And drag-and-drop support is now available on mobile! 🎉
Tip
One of Home Assistant’s greatest strengths is our community. We’re building the changes to our automations together, and your input will shape where it goes next. There are two ways to get involved:
Over the past year, we have focused on dashboards and their capabilities a lot. We’ve looked at a lot of your dashboards you’ve shared on socials, and talked to many of you about how you organize all your smart home devices and services. The goal? Making dashboards faster and easier to create, while still making them very customizable.
With this release, we’re introducing a brand-new Home dashboard. The purpose is simple: to give you easy access to the right information at the right time.
The dashboard adapts to your Home Assistant experience level: powerful enough for advanced users, yet approachable for newcomers. We’re working to have it earn its name, and hope it will eventually become your new Home page. As always, it’s optional; you can always pick your own dashboard. This is the first iteration, and we’ll continue developing it in the open.
When you first open the Home dashboard, it gives you a quick way to navigate to useful summaries for your light, climate, security, and media devices. You can also browse by areas, getting an overview of all the devices and services associated with that part of your home.
We’re also introducing Favorites. You can pin any entity to the top, whether it’s a light, climate, or a person. We’d love to see what you choose (more on this in the future).
The Home dashboard is not just about quick control. It also brings insights and information about your home. This first release includes weather and energy cards. It’s a simple start, and we have a lot of ideas to explore with you. For example, helping you create your first automation, or show discovered devices.
For now, the Home dashboard is considered experimental. Configuration options are limited, and it’s guaranteed to evolve. It won’t appear automatically, and if you want to try it you’ll need to add it manually in the dashboard settings, by adding a new “Home” dashboard.
Tip
One of Home Assistant’s greatest strengths is our community. We’re building this dashboard together, and your input will shape where it goes next. There are two ways to get involved:
The tile card is the most versatile card we have in our arsenal of cards for our dashboards.
One superpower of the tile card is its “features”, which are small additions where you can add quick interactions to these cards. For example, a slider to control the brightness of a light or buttons for the speed presets of a fan. Features have been extended quite a bit in this release by a dedicated group of community members.
This release, an absolute banger is the addition of the trend chart features for tile cards created by @MindFreeze.
This feature adds a handy quick graph to the tile card, showing the history of a specific entity over time. For this initial version, the time window shown is 24 hours.
@timmo001, added tile card features for media player controls and volume! This makes the tile card now a viable alternative to the media player card. Awesome!
A new tile card feature, made by @MindFreeze: The bar gauge!
For this initial version, it works with sensors that use a percentage (%) for their unit of measurement.
This makes the card great, for example, for a battery overview dashboard. Nice work!
Thanks to @pcan08 we now have a tile card feature to control fan direction and oscillation!
Thanks to @dhoeben we now have a tile card feature for buttons! He added these buttons for automation, script, and button entities. The text can be changed to display standard button text or custom text.
Thanks to @timmo001 we now have a tile card feature to control the open/close and the position of valves.
@timmo001 continued and also added a new tile card feature to support date and datetime entities (including the input datetime helpers). It allows you to add a feature that allows for setting a date.
Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰
We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:
One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.
This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:
2 integrations reached platinum 🏆
1 integration reached bronze 🥉
This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.
A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏
While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.
The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:
The following integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] is no longer available as of this release:
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes:
m³/min as a volume flow rate unit. Nice addition @fetzerch!In Home Assistant 2025.4, we introduced the clock card, which provides a digital clock display for your dashboards.
For this release, @timmo001 made this card more feature-rich by adding support for displaying the clock in a customizable analog clock style. Nice!
Disk almost full? You might wonder where your storage space has gone…
This release adds disk metrics to the storage configuration panel, letting you see usage at a glance, helping you identify what is taking up space.
You can find these metrics by navigating to Settings > System > Storage, or by selecting the My Home Assistant button down below.
We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.9 in September. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release once a week, aiming for Friday.
native_visibility property instead of visibility for OpenWeatherMap weather entity (@bieniu - #151867)accuweather to version 4.2.1 (@bieniu - #152029)Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker to get it fixed! Or check our help page for guidance on more places you can go.
Are you more into email? Sign up for the Open Home Foundation Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community, and other projects that support the Open Home straight into your inbox.
We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.
We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:
The encoding for some units that contain the μ character has been changed. Users that consume state data from sensors that have changed units will be impacted (such as exported state data to InfluxDB). The units with a changed encoding are:
μSv/h for the aranet integration as a unit for radiation rateμS/cm for UnitOfConductivity.MICROSIEMENS_PER_CMμV for UnitOfElectricPotential.MICROVOLTμg/ft³ for concentration in micrograms per cubic footμg/m³ for concentration in micrograms per cubic meterμmol/s⋅m² for the fyta integration as a unit for lightμg for UnitOfMass.MICROGRAMSμs for UnitOfTime.MICROSECONDSThe raw_value attribute was previously deprecated and has now been removed.
The sound list has been updated to match the one used by the Alexa Mobile app.
The variant parameter is no longer required.
Check your automations to ensure the selected sound is still present.
(@chemelli74 - #151317) (documentation)
The integration now requires the Automower PIN when being set up. This ensures Home Assistant can communicate with more models of mowers and with higher security levels.
(@alistair23 - #135440) (documentation)
KNX scene entities now also change their state when a scene was activated externally (from bus). Previously they only updated when activated from within Home Assistant.
(@farmio - #151218) (documentation)
SIA alarm status code CF (armed with malfunctions) is now mapped to armed_away instead of to armed_custom_bypass.
(@etnoy - #132628) (documentation)
The battery property on vacuum entities is being removed in Home Assistant. Therefore, this property is now removed from this integration and is replaced by a battery level sensor.
Please review your automations, scripts, and dashboards using the battery property and update the code to use the battery sensor instead.
The August integration now uses OAuth authentication with Yale August’s official API. This is a required one-time breaking change as the unofficial authentication method will stop working soon. This migration helps reduce unnecessary load on Yale August’s servers while ensuring continued access for all users.
When you update Home Assistant, you’ll be prompted to re-authenticate your August account:
We’re grateful to Yale August for officially supporting Home Assistant with dedicated API access!
(@bdraco - #151080) (documentation)
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following changes are the most notable for this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2025.9
We’re making new frients this week, and they’re bringing an extensive line of Zigbee devices to our Works With Home Assistant program. Each device is tested by our team, ensuring they provide the best experience possible for Home Assistant. Frient is widely available across Europe, and are well-known for their sleek, unobtrusive designs that its customers love for their high Home Approval Factor.
Based in Denmark, the frient brand was developed by Onics, (formerly Develco Products), and they have years of experience with Zigbee devices. Frient is bringing its proven technology to the Works With Home Assistant program, as well as their Danish design that easily blends into almost any home.
Recent Works With partners have brought Z-Wave, Matter, and even Bluetooth devices to Home Assistant, but it’s been a couple of years 😅 since Zigbee-specific devices have joined the program. Zigbee is one of the most popular open protocols that is used with Home Assistant, with hundreds of thousands of users making use of it today. It’s a proven technology that connects directly to Home Assistant, no cloud or Wi-Fi connection required. Zigbee is a mesh protocol, where some devices act as repeaters, strengthening the network as more are added. It was built from the ground up to power the smart home, and has been optimized to give devices really long (sometimes multi-year) battery life.
"Joining the Works With Home Assistant program is a proud milestone for frient. It reflects our strong commitment to open, user-centric smart home experiences and ensures that our products seamlessly integrate with one of the most trusted platforms in the market. For Home Assistant users, it means more choice and flexibility — and for frient, it strengthens our position as a key player in the connected smart home space."
- Martin Langballe, International Business Development Manager at frientAll you need to get started with Zigbee in Home Assistant is a Zigbee adapter or ‘stick’, such as the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (wow, we released this in 2022, I wonder when we’re finally going to build a successor? 😉). By plugging the adapter into a USB port on your Home Assistant system, it should then discover the device and add the ZHA integration. After that is set up, you can start adding devices to your Zigbee network. We’ve even added in a cool new visualization so that you can see how your Zigbee devices interact with each other.
ZHA is built with the support of the Open Home Foundation, and it even has a full-time developer (@puddly) dedicated to improving it and helping certify new Works With partner devices. Your support makes this possible, whether through a Home Assistant Cloud subscription or by purchasing official hardware.
When your energy company won’t provide your raw usage data, there’s always another way 😉
In case you didn’t know, Works With Home Assistant differs from other certification programs as products are rigorously tested in-house to ensure they work seamlessly out of the box with Home Assistant. Any company joining also commits to providing long-term support and firmware updates while being a positive force in the Home Assistant community. Works With Home Assistant is operated by the Open Home Foundation, and the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers funds this work.
Our team has worked extensively with frient to ensure that the following items work seamlessly with Home Assistant.
This is a big portion of frient’s product line, and provides energy monitoring, device control, safety, and security sensors. The frient IO Module is the first certified Zigbee module that can be used to turn low-voltage dumb devices like electric blinds or garage doors into devices that can be controlled by Home Assistant.
There are some great devices here for building a more sustainable smart home. The Electricity Meter Interface 2 LED allows you to get the data off your energy meter and record it into Home Assistant. Another win for sustainability is their use of AA and AAA batteries wherever practical, meaning you can use rechargeables instead of constantly buying and recycling coin cells.
I also selfishly love to see some great UK-specific devices being brought into the program with the frient Smart Siren having both UK and EU versions.
It’s great to see Zigbee get some high-quality certified Works With Home Assistant devices after a multi-year wait. Frient has put a good deal of work into this launch and are big fans of our work and the community. There are more exciting Zigbee developments to come, so stay tuned!
Q: If I have a device that is not listed under “Works With Home Assistant” does this mean it’s not supported?
A: No! It just means that it hasn’t gone through a testing schedule with our team or doesn’t fit the requirements of the program. It might function perfectly well but be added to the testing schedule later down the road, or it might work under a different connectivity type that we don’t currently test under the program.
Q: Ok, so what’s the point of the Works With program?
A: It highlights the devices we know work well with Home Assistant and the brands that make a long-term commitment to keeping support for these devices going. The certification agreement specifies that the devices must have full functionality within Home Assistant, operate locally without the need for cloud, and will continue to do so long-term.
Q: How were these devices tested?
A: All devices in this list were tested using a standard HA Green Hub with the ZBT-1 and with the ZHA integration. We haven’t tested these devices with Zigbee2MQTT, so we would recommend checking their device compatibility documentation. If you have another hub, Zigbee adapter, or integration, that’s not a problem, but we test against these as they are the most effective way for our team to certify within our ecosystem.
Q: Will you be adding more frient devices to the program?
A: Why not! We’re thrilled to foster a close relationship with the team at frient to work together on any upcoming releases or add in further products that are not yet listed here.
We’re excited to announce that AirGradient is the latest manufacturer to join the fast-growing Works With Home Assistant program! They bring their air quality monitors to the program, with both indoor and outdoor models.
AirGradient is the first partner in the program focused on building advanced indoor and outdoor air quality monitors. They are also well known within our community for their powerful tech, and for their focus on open source and dedication to local air quality projects around the world.
AirGradient is the first partner to join that operates out of Thailand, and they initially started making their air monitors to help their local community. They actively support air quality improvement projects both in Thailand itself, but also globally. AirGradient donates monitors and has partnered with a variety of different organisations and NGOs, including UNICEF. These monitors are often placed in schools, helping young people to better understand and work to protect their air quality.
An Open Air Monitor in Vietnam
Community is central to our work with AirGradient. Their hardware and software are open source, just like our own. Plus, they’ve taken an active role in integrating into Home Assistant, bringing their local Wi-Fi integration up to not just the gold, but the platinum tier on our integration quality scale. Like all of our Works With partners, the devices work completely locally with no need for a cloud connection. What’s more, they really embrace the DIY aspect of the smart home, with their devices available fully assembled or as a build-it-yourself kit!
AirGradient’s open approach even extends to the data collected by their community of users. Whilst completely optional, users can share their air quality readings with the world (which they visualize into an amazing map). This helpful air quality map grows every time a user opts to share their data, and is a fantastic open resource for climate researchers, students, or anyone concerned about air quality in their local area. If your area is a blank spot on this map, that is all the more reason to buy an AirGradient outdoor monitor.
Each kit comes with a screwdriver and is designed for easy repair. Broken sensor? Swap it out. Firmware update needed? Flash it yourself. Sustainability is one of the core guiding principles of the Open Home Foundation, and we love that repairability is built in. AirGradient also donates at least 1% of annual sales to non-profits and community direct donations. In fact, they asked us to include in this blog an open invitation to our community: If you have a local project that you think would benefit from open source air quality monitors, get in touch through this link.
"We're excited to join the Works With Home Assistant program because it aligns perfectly with our open-source philosophy. Home Assistant represents the same values we believe in - local control, privacy, and community-driven innovation. Together, we're proving that open systems don't just work better for users, they create better outcomes for the planet."
- Achim Haug, Founder and CEO of AirGradientIn case you’re new to Works With Home Assistant, unlike some certification programs, it’s not just a badge. We rigorously test items in-house and provide feedback to the manufacturers to ensure that products work easily out of the box and provide a seamless experience. The Works With program is operated by the Open Home Foundation and funded by the support of Home Assistant Cloud Subscribers.
AirGradient has certified the following devices with us:
Finally, a metric to show precisely how badly you burned your dinner
When we talk about sustainability in relation to the smart home, it’s easy to focus on energy management and reducing our carbon impact. However, with AirGradient, you can deep dive into the impacts of the release of CO2 and other air pollutants, better understanding what you, your family, and friends breathe in every day. With an in-house science team of atmospheric chemists and public health experts, they ensure that the monitors are accurate and each of the fully assembled monitors are tested in a dedicated test chamber.
Whether you want to see if your new furniture is putting dangerous VOCs into the air, or if a smelly candle is going to aggravate any allergies, the use cases are endless. The AirGradient One also has a built-in display with both detailed data and a set of LEDs to show general air quality at a glance. Both devices measure carbon dioxide, VOCs, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, temperature, and humidity. AirGradient also provides helpful documentation on their website that helps you understand these measurements and the impact they can have on your household.
These devices can not only give you in-depth information about the air in and out of your home, but they can also unlock powerful automations. We often see these devices paired with door or window open/close sensors, air purifiers, dehumidifiers, or air conditioners to reduce particulates in the home from pets or carpets.
We’re so excited to be partnered with AirGradient. Their mission is important, and their open and sustainable approach is precisely what we love to see. Partnerships like this are only possible with the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers. Many of us at the Open Home Foundation have picked up AirGradient monitors and are sharing our air quality data today, and we’d love for you to join us on the map!
Q: If I have a device that is not listed under Works With Home Assistant, does this mean it’s not supported?
A: No! It just means that it hasn’t gone through a testing schedule with our team or doesn’t fit the requirements of the program. It might function perfectly well, but be added to the testing schedule later down the road, or it might work under a different connectivity type that we don’t currently test under the program.
Q: Ok, so what’s the point of the Works With program?
A: It highlights the devices we know work well with Home Assistant and the brands that make a long-term commitment to keeping support for these devices going. The certification agreement specifies that the devices must have full functionality within Home Assistant, operate locally without the need for cloud and will continue to do so long-term.
Q: How were these devices tested?
A: All devices in this list were tested using a standard HA Green Hub with the local AirGradient integration and a Wi-Fi network. HA will automatically discover them after they join your network (following the device’s instructions to add it to the WiFi). If you have another setup, that’s not a problem, but we test against these as they are the most effective way for our team to certify within our ecosystem.
Q: Will you be adding more AirGradient devices to the program?
A: Why not! We’re thrilled to foster a close relationship with the team at AirGradient to work together on any upcoming releases or add in further products that are not yet listed here.
