Home Assistant 2026.8 says goodbye to 8123, while SmartThings goes behind a paywall

Hello and welcome to the Home Assistant Podcast. My name is Rohan and as usual, I'm joined with my friend Phil. Hey buddy. Hey mate, how are you doing? Good. And as usual, this episode is brought to you by Home Assistant Cloud by Nabucasa. If you've ever tried to set up remote access the hard way, dynamic DNS, reverse proxy, self-signed search, Nabucasa is the easy button. Sign up, flip a switch, done. You can access your Home Assistant instance from anywhere. What's more, you'll get secure off-site backups, voice control on the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices, and the ability to supercharge your DIY voice assistant. And here's the part we love. Your subscription pays to developers behind Home Assistant, ESB Home, and the Open Home Foundation. It's the best few dollars a month you'll spend on your smart home. Start your 31-day trial today. Just open your Home Assistant settings, go to the Cloud page, or sign up at Nabucasa.com. We'll put the link in the description for you. This episode is also sponsored by our friends at Apollo Automation, makers of open-source smart home sensors built for the Home Assistant ecosystem. They're an official Open Home Foundation commercial partner, and their devices are built with local control, privacy, and reliability in mind. Almost everything they offer is worked with Home Assistant and made for ESP Home Certified, giving you full control and flexibility right out the box. The best part is that they build in the open, working directly with the community to create sensors that people actually need. If you're deep into Home Assistant or just getting started, definitely check them out at ApolloAutomation.com. Rohan, we're going to be talking 2026.8 today. Before we do, a couple of things we want to get to. First of all, Kieran reached out to us back from episode 89. So, if you want to head back into the archives and listen to that episode, do check it out. It was a great one. Since he was last on the episode, he's reached out to us following up from the 2026.7 episode, where we mentioned there was a Home Assistant meetup in Sydney. He's moved from Sydney to Perth. So, if you live in or are just passing through the Western Australian Southwest, such as the Basilton and Margaret River regions, and your home assistant and other similar technology, the Southwest Tech Meetup has started running every six weeks or so in Basilton. And they would love for you to come out through and join them for a chat. You can find the schedules and the details at the link in our show notes, which we'll put up on homeassist.fm slash HA245. It is perfect. Yeah, hopefully a bunch of folks will go there. SmartThings API. So, Samsung is ending free access to its SmartThings API in October this year, 2026. And basically, they're going to be starting a $4.99 a month individual developer plan and new commercial tiers as well. So, this fee applies to the direct API users and third-party platforms like Home Assistant. Meaning, if you're using that integration for some stuff, and I know a bunch of people do, that means you're going to have to start paying $4.99 a month for it, which is not great. This is, yeah, one of those almost cloud strikes again things, right? Where you've sort of locked yourself in, if you have locked yourself into that SmartThings ecosystem and you're leveraging SmartThings as a bridge into some Zigbee devices. I think you were doing that when you first started with Home Assistant, Rohan. Yeah, it was. Yeah, you're just using it as a bridge, right? Now, to get access to your own devices through that, your own hardware that's running in your home, it's now $5 a month. It's one of the sole reasons for using Home Assistant, right? Keeping it all local, keeping it all under your control. I think the writing's been on the wall for this. Yeah. I don't know. I also feel like at this point, it's like, given that, it's like, okay, $5 a month versus, you know, getting either a USB dongle for Zigbee or Z-Wave radios, or, again, Home Assistant makes, or Nabucasa technically makes some really cool hardware for it. You know, there's, to me, it's more worth it to do that, have that one-time cost, and, you know, you use that through the years, right? Right? Rather than having to pay $5 a month and then channeling it through there. And, you know, sometimes you might, if you're doing this, you might be at an impasse of going, okay, well, now do I pick SmartThings or do I pick Home Assistant, right? Obviously, do what's best for you for your home. Personally, I think Home Assistant's the answer just because it's free at the end of the day, and if I ever did want to connect it to anything else, I don't have to pay those fees. Yeah. I don't know. I think that that's kind of, I don't love that they're charging that for the APIs, right? So, I mean, even with Home Assistant, if you didn't want to pay for the Nelbukasa subscription, don't. Right? Obviously, we like it. We subscribe. We, you know, for all you and I do, and we think that, you know, that's kind of the way to go and offers a lot of value. But, sure, if you don't see that, you don't have to do it. You still have access to the APIs. You still have access to connecting your Amazon Echoes and Google Homes and all of that stuff without having to go through this. It doesn't make it easier, sure. But, again, there's no, you're not forced into a subscription, right? Whereas here, if you want to break out of the SmartThings ecosystem, you are. So, that I don't love. I guess the silver lining to this is they could have, instead of charging that $5 a month, they could have just said, you know what? We're closing down the API completely and you have, because we're putting up that wall and you have to stay within our ecosystem and you can't go out. So, if there is, as I said, a silver lining to this, it is not completely gone. Yeah. But I feel like, as a smartphone platform, that's also, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you did close your APIs, because that kind of defeats the purpose for you. Yeah. Like, to some extent, I see why, like, a device manufacturer or something like that would do it. I don't agree with it, but I could see it. But your whole, the point of your whole thing is integration. So, like, right? So, I don't know. I think that would be kind of silly for them to shut down their API, per se. But, I don't know. I don't love, you're right, it could have been worse, but I still don't love where it went. Again, especially for something that's been free for years. I mean, I think when I moved to Home Assistant and used that, that was 10 years ago, maybe 11. Yep. Right? Using that bridge. So, it's not that they haven't had that API for forever. If these are local devices, there's no reason that I should have to go up to the Samsung's cloud to get access to those devices if they're sitting in my house. Fair enough. Yeah. There could be a local API on the Samsung box if they're sitting in my house. that's true. That could be an alternative. Maybe it's like, hey, if you want a cloud API, you're going to pay, but if you want it locally, who cares? It's not hitting our servers. We don't really care. Here's a direct way to do it, right? Yeah. All right. Getting into some other feedback this month on YouTube, Sepideep said, I have a proof of vision wall socket stand and charger for my toothbrush, which is controlled by a Sonoff Zedby Mini L2 smart switch module. When the toothbrush is low, has a low battery, I just hit an Akara Zigbee button mounted in the back. This then leaves the toothbrush on charge for approximately 12 hours, which is usually enough to fully charge it, and then it will switch that off. I imagine with Bluetooth one, you could automate the Zedby Mini even further and do away with the button. This is a great little automation for just charging batteries ad hoc and you don't want to leave them on charge. I do something similar with my e-bike, so I have a smart socket on my e-bike charger. I don't like the idea of leaving it on charge for too long, especially once it's fully charged. So once I've got a Zigbee smart switch on it, once that detects that the e-bike is charged, like the voltage drops or the power usage drops on it, I then turn that smart switch off and cut power to the e-bike. So yeah, I do the same thing for my snowblower batteries and it's the same brand I use for lawnmower and snowblower, so it's the same set of batteries, but yeah, I do the same thing for those batteries too. I have a smart switch there and same thing, it measures the voltage drop and once I start seeing that it's not really charging, I turn it off, right? So there's an automation that turns it off. So yeah, that's actually a great tool to automate to 70 so that's great. Again, enhancement might be just, you know, measure the voltage there and you don't need to do it. You're pressing a button that just turns off automatically. 10cheyenne says, I have an Ikea Matter over thread 15 leak sensors and almost 20 light bulbs and some buttons that I've been using for more than three months and not a single drop yet, all working perfectly and perfectly fine using Home Assistant. That's actually really cool. It's good to know because again, I know Ikea's quality has been, you know, it's great when it works and when it does it, it's not so great and Ikea does the, like again, I've had their GU10 bulbs in my range hood and it's like, I've gone through a few of them, right? Like way more than I've gone through any other types of light bulbs. So they have, I don't know, at least in what I've seen a far smaller or far shorter lifespan compared to a lot of the other smart bulbs and stuff that I've used and to reset it because occasionally, I don't know, it might do something weird or so to reset it, you have to turn it off and on like six times or something like that. You have to kill the power and turn it off. So it's like, but my, my, my button on my range hood's been broken. So I have to manually like twist, twist, twist, twist, twist, twist. And it's like, and it's like, at some point, like how many, how many did I do today? Five, six did I do? Right. And yeah, so it's good to know that, you know, especially with this many devices and it's all working great. So thank you for that feedback. Yeah. The matter of a thread stuff, I still haven't started a matter network yet. That's my next, one of my, my to-do list somehow. But yeah, good to know that those leak sensors matter every thread. I do need some new leak sensors. I've had a whole bunch of Akara Zigbee ones that just randomly will drop off the Zigbee network and then have to repair them. Yeah. I don't know what it is. If the battery just runs out and they just get marked as unavailable or what it is. And for water leak sensors, I'd rather have something that's rock solid. So if these Akara ones are cheap enough, maybe that's something to look at. I've actually found that my, my battery automations don't trigger as well as I thought they did. And maybe it's because the drop off might be like pretty severe at the end there. So it's like, you know, I typically have them, I think, notifying me at 5% or something like that to replace the battery. So I might have to bump that up to like 10. Because again, as, as we're moving all this stuff, I actually, I was actually looking the other day. I think one of my like five or six leak sensors are working. And I was like, I should probably do better with that. Kind of a piece of purpose, knock on wood, luckily I haven't had anything. So it's, yeah, so I'll have to see that. Any, any suggestions I'm open. Yeah, well, I'll give you a couple. I have random web devices that just report 100% battery all the time. Even when they don't have any battery left. The, there's a great hacks component batteries, battery level plus battery plus. plus. What that does is it will not only record a battery level event as another battery sensor, it will also check when that device last reported into home assistant. So if you've got a water leak sensor, so typically battery devices will wake up once every 12, 24 hours to report their status on the network. Battery plus will monitor. And if it hasn't heard from that device for, I think it can figure if I haven't heard from this device for two days, assume the battery is dead and it will raise, I don't think it's a repair, but it will raise a notification or you can configure a custom notification for yourself to say, hey, this device has dropped off. Have a look at it. Interesting. So does it replace battery nodes as well? The other hacks or do you still use that too? Maybe. I think battery nodes is separate or maybe I'm getting confused now. Now you've got me thinking. I'm going to have to, let's, you know what, let's do it live. I didn't see it in battery nodes. So I'm guessing what you're saying. I think it is battery plus. So let me have a quick look. So I have a whole bunch of these. The device has not reported battery for level for 14 days. Here we go. No, it is part of battery nodes. So notifications automation, so battery low, replaced and not reported are all exposed via events and actions. Using those, you can create your own automations to generate notifications or other actions. And there are some predefined ones from the community. So that's all from battery nodes. I haven't looked at it in a while. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's perfect. So that's exactly what you need. Just get that from hacks and you're sorted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's perfect. Okay, I think I'll have to have a look at what it offers again, because clearly I've been using battery nodes for years and I've never noticed that. So that's excellent. All right, let's move on to some new features. 2026.8. This is something, the first one we've got and is a big one moving forward for new users coming to Home Assistant as from today. Something that we talked about when Home Assistant announced their public roadmap on GitHub is port 8123. The magic port of 8123 will no longer be the default for Home Assistant OS installations moving forward. That port will now be port 80. This means that new users who install Home Assistant OS from today can go to homeassistant.local in their browser instead of having to go to homeassistant.local colon 8123. So the goal is to remove the magic number from that onboarding experience. So some things to note, this applies only to Home Assistant OS installs only. It does not apply to Home Assistant container installations. If you are already a Home Assistant user, chances are if you listen to this podcast, you are a Home Assistant user already. Your Home Assistant installation, no matter if you're already on OS or container, wherever you are, it will stay on port 8123. Home Assistant container and Docker installs will not be affected. Existing users, if you do want to move away from port 8123 and have that port 80 experience, you can change the port number in the user interface where the settings have now moved. So previously, configuration for things like port numbers, host names and proxies, SSL certificates were done via YAML. This is now being moved to the UI and there's a breaking change we'll mention later. If you try and update your port number from say 8123 to port 80 in the UI and it doesn't work for whatever reason, perhaps you haven't configured your container to port forward correctly, a failsafe rollback does exist. So if you change the port and don't confirm access within a few minutes, Home Assistant will roll back to the previous HTTP port. So going from 8123 to 80 and you don't access Home Assistant on port 80, 8123 will roll back so you can then get back into the interface. This is a little bit of a, like 8123 has always been I know, it's kind of nostalgic. It's like, yeah, you, every time you saw it, you're like, okay, you know, this is almost an install. Yeah, I mean, I think it makes more sense doing it on port 80 rather than 8123, but, and, and again, the big thing where it would matter is on the container installs and stuff, which is not affected here. So, yeah, it's too bad. Kind of liked it, but I totally agree with the change with that said, but, yeah. Again, and, and like you said, Phil, it's, if you want to change it or whatever, and if you like that nostalgia of 8123, go into your install and change it to 8123. You can, you can do that. Yeah, that's true. You kind of touched on this as well. So the HTTP server settings are now configurable by the UI. So the settings that moved are things like port config, SSL, or TLS settings, reverse proxy settings. These all used to be manually done via YAML. So there's one more thing that's now taken out of the YAML that you don't need to have in there. And in theory, when you boot up 2026.8, they should move, if you have them in YAML, they will move over to the UI, and then you can update your YAML files and remove them out of YAML, so they'll get imported automatically. Some more changes under the hood being introduced. The words advanced, expert, and developer, those words are being reduced throughout the interface of Home Assistant. So Home Assistant is removing or renaming the language that implies a feature is only for technical users. So developer tools is being renamed because these tools are useful for everyone, not only developers. Advanced options have been renamed in places where the actions are not really advanced, such as restarting Home Assistant. Around 43 places have been changed in this release, and I suspect as releases go on throughout the year, more of these little touch points will be updated. Some wording remains where it mirrors terminology used by a device manufacturer to avoid confusing people who are following vendor documentation. So if you're following a documentation and it says you need to update an advanced setting somewhere, that will also still be reflected in Home Assistant as an advanced setting or configuration. Makes sense. I mean, there's no one clear to change at the end of the day. Home Assistant Cloud Settings page redesign. So before it was a big long page with a bunch of toggles. Now it's got more kind of clearly defined sections like remote access, cloud backups, voice assistant setup, and Google Assistant and Amazon Echo setup flows. And if you've never done it before, there's also a guided setup experience now, which is nice because why not? The wizard's always nicer than clicking a bunch of random buttons and figuring it out. So yeah, that's nice. Now, a few releases ago, Home Assistant started introducing or changing the structure of entity IDs being named in Home Assistant. A new system-wide entity ID format is now being setting, now exists, so you can customize how Home Assistant will generate entity IDs behind a device. So you can decide the order of components. For example, you may prefer that your entity IDs have the floor or area prefix before the device name or the entity name. Perhaps you prefer it in the complete opposite order. It will only affect new entity IDs, any existing entity IDs are not automatically changed. If you reset an entity ID, it will use the new format though. Some integrations such as MQTT may set their own entity ID format and won't be affected by this setting. I appreciate the ability for people to customize this. I know entity ID naming can be very personal, like everyone has their own flavor to that. So yeah, I appreciate that this can now be customized on a global scale. Yeah, I feel like a little bit of criticism here. I wish this was introduced with that global change because now it's, you know, you had the original way of naming it and then there's a new way of naming it and now there's a new customizable way of naming it and it only affects newer entity IDs, right? So which is, which I do like that it only affects newer entity IDs because otherwise all your dashboards break or whatever. Yeah. But, but at the same time, it's like, I, yeah, I wish all of those were done kind of at once. So it's one change into how your, your stuff looks and then you don't have to start customizing again and then you don't have like this mixed, okay, here, these are old entity IDs, they ran this way, these are new ones and, you know, it's, it's either manual work to, to, you know, update these or it's, um, something, uh, you know, you have two different formats, right? Potentially if you, if you have a preferred way. And so I think, uh, yeah, I wish it wasn't, uh, again, love, love the feature. Just wish it was brought in at the same time as the other changes. That makes sense. Yeah, I can see that. Um, so vibration and moon. So we now have support for vibration sensors. Um, so if, for example, if you put a vibration sensor on a washing machine, which I actually had done, didn't work too well for me in my case. Um, but, uh, and you can say like, Hey, when that vibration sensor is on the washing machine, you wait a couple of minutes, uh, for no vibration, and then you send a notification saying, Hey, the watch is done. Between a cycle or between different stages in the wash in this case. Um, so the trigger can account for a period of no vibration. So that's a neat way to, uh, build an automation like that. And you can do that before as well. You just have to manually kind of do that, um, on the moon side of it. So moon phase support has been added to automations. So you can have like a full moon notification or, you know, maybe doing like a howl to speakers. Um, or a tarot or like witchy kind of automations, which might be kind of fun. Um, stuff for planning like photography, um, and, you know, combining that with aurora forecasts since, uh, having a brighter moon could affect visibility there. So those are some cool, uh, cool things you can do with moon phase automations, right? And obviously there are a lot of like religious use cases and stuff there as well, depending on phase of moon and so on and so forth. Um, depending on if you follow a certain faith, uh, you might be able to integrate that in for those as well. So nice, uh, nice to see that's there. Uh, now, this is one that's probably going to be the biggest frustration for 2026.8. Um, I suspect, uh, there may be some feedback coming home since away. I haven't, I wanted to, uh, run the beta before we've recorded. I haven't had a chance this weekend unfortunately. Um, but integrations no longer will share or merge the same device. Historically, if multiple integrations provided the same physical device, home assistant could merge them into one single device. So if, for example, if you've got, um, something on your Wi-Fi network that is connected, um, to home assistant, you may have it come in from your routers integration, um, for example Unify, and you may also have it from the actual, uh, maybe shifts a Shelly device with from Shelly. So, um, yeah, so a Shelly device could be seen by Unify and Shelly. Uh, previously it would be, so previous to 2026.8, it would appear as one merged device. Now it will become two separate devices, one from Shelly and one from Unify, uh, which to me, I really liked the merged devices. Um, so yeah, why the change? So this will be laying groundwork for future device management improvements and it creates more ownership and integration boundaries between the integrations providing those devices. So what you may see moving forward from 2026.8, some old devices are replaced by two new devices. automations using the old device will continue working in the back end. The UI may show a replaced device and ask the user to choose the correct replacement. Repairs may be raised where manual selection is required. I have a lot of devices that are picked up by my Unify integration so it can track its IP address home, not home, as well as the actual integration itself. Well, we were just talking about battery nodes too, right? Another perfect example of something that kind of uses a merge device functionality. When you look into one one of the notes that we have here is that automations using the old device will continue working in the back end. Now, if you're using home assistant UI for the automations and you're doing a device target picker, you're actually in YAML, if you switch back to YAML, the YAML will be using a device ID as opposed to an entity ID. So they will continue working. I guess if you then have to select a new replacement device, maybe those device IDs will change which could break some automations. I would be very interested to see those sort of edge cases. But for me, I'm very, I think I'm going to need to, like, usually I just upgrade to the beta and everything's fine. But for me, I think this one's going to be like, you know what, I'm going to dedicate an hour to this upgrade just to see what the fallout from this change is going to be. I think this, I'm hoping it's not too big, but this one could be a big deal for me at least. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I liked that kind of unified view, right? Like, for me, it's like, I personally, this is at least my view is I care less about which integration owns it because I typically have an idea, right? Like, yeah, if it's something like against this company coming from Zigbee and it's a battery notes integration, I know battery doesn't own a device, it's fine, right? Like, so from an ownership perspective, I think that's less of an issue. But I kind of liked having everything in that one view, right? Like when I see, hey, this is the device and everything is here. Now, if I care to look at different views of that device, like how, in your case, you were using the example of Unify, how Unify sees the Shelly device versus how Shelly sees the Shelly device, those are two different places to go to now, right? I kind of liked it better when I go to one place and all the stuff is in the same place. So even if I'm comparing, I don't know, whatever, comparing statistics or comparing something like that, or perfect example, I'll go back to my battery notes example, I can say, okay, what's the battery level here? Okay, great. And when was the last time I replaced the battery in battery notes, right? So again, that's me referencing two things from two device entries technically here in this case, or two integrations rather, that I would have to go back and forth for, or things like battery notes would have to build duplicate entities to do the same thing so I can still have that, which at that point, it's just wasteful to me. I'm sure there is a master plan happening here, so there is groundwork for future device management improvements, so maybe this is just some short-term pain for the long-term gain. I hope that's what it is, right? Yeah, so let's see where that goes. Template editor is getting a little bit of love too, so it's getting a split layout, so now users can resize the editor and the result panes, you can switch between vertical and horizontal layouts and see the templates rendered and that output more comfortably. That's nice, I think I like that, you can kind of see what's going on and what actually happens as stuff is happening, right, and you kind of adjust it to your view, which is nice here. Well, the template editor has had an upgrade, but if you're looking to upgrade your smart home, you really can't go past Zeus. Their new 800 series Z-Wave long-range motion dimmer, the Zen 12-800 LR, combines three smart home devices into a single wall switch. It's a full featured Z-Wave dimmer with a built-in motion sensor and ambient light sensor, so your lights can automatically respond when someone enters the room while also taking the current light level into account. That means you can create smarter lighting automations without installing separate motion and luxe sensors around the room. The Zen 12 also supports scene control using multi-taps, holds, and release actions, giving you plenty of ways to control lights and scenes directly from the switch. And with smart bulb mode, it can also work with smart bulbs like Philips Hue without cutting power to them at the wall. Zeus are an official works with home assistant partner and they've also helped Nabucasa test the home assistant connect Z-Wave 2 by providing Z-Wave long-range devices so you know their products are designed with home assistant users in mind. And if you need more control over your plug-in devices, Zeus also has the Zen 20 800LR Z-Wave long-range power strip which turns a single outlet into multiple individually controllable smart sockets. It's perfect under a desk, behind your TV, or in a server rack for controlling and monitoring network gear, charges, lamps, game consoles, and other always-on devices. Zeus products are backed by US-based technical support and an extended five-year warranty where you register your device within 30 days of purchase. For the best prices on the Zen 12 motion dimmer, the Zen 20 power strip, and the full range of Zeus smart home products, head over to thesmartesthouse.com. That's the smartesthouse.com. Yeah, let's keep going with what else is new in 2026.8. So media browser search. So if you're, if you use the media browser, which is pretty nice, so there's now a search that works across more sources and integration provided media. So that means basically it should be easier to find your music, images, and whatever other media that's exposed by other integrations, like potential cameras or anything like that. Yeah, that's cool. I, yeah, I've always found like searching for media like frustrating, even with the new updates we have, new, like since, you know, it was recently had some love to it. So I'm looking forward to trying that out. Yeah. One I'm really looking forward to seeing is there is now a new loading screen animation. So if you don't have a fast home assistant or, you know, if you've got a slowish, sluggish system, maybe you've got a few hundred devices that, you know, take a while for home assistant to load. It's a new loading screen with a nice little animation there. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing it. So it's just a visual polish improvement. There's, if you do have a fast system, you probably won't even notice it, but it's there just under the hood change. Favorite cards in the dashboard. So you can now, there's now a picker that allows you to pick your favorite cards for different dashboards or like, you know, use like star cards or whatever. And that will show up at the top of the card picker. So if you, if there's cards that you use more frequently, that'll show up in, you know, kind of higher up or whatever, right? So you don't have to go scroll through or search. I think you have to star them. It won't you just star them and then that will put like any new section where you can get them. Yeah. Which is great because again, there's some places where I use custom ones, right? And it's hard to find it. So yeah, it'd be great actually. Reolink now has three siren entities and a motion device class on its AI detection binary sensors. Motion device class on its I already thought they had motion device classes on those sensors. Perhaps I'm wrong. It might have been binary sensors standard. Yeah. There you go. Switchbot. So they added support for the candle warmer lamp and the RGB IC neon rope light plus some fan and select controls for the standing fan. Switchbot Cloud can now trigger their AI art frame via webhooks as well. Nice. Roborock, if you have a Q10 Roborock vacuum cleaner, you've had some love of this release. It's got a do not disturb switch. There's some more switch entities. There's a map image as well and you can also control the volume of that device. MQTT now has support for the infrared platform that we talked about one, two releases ago, something like that. So now you can send infrared commands over MQTT. So that might actually be a cool way if you're building your own infrared device there so you can actually leverage that too. Portainer has added an update platform and container health status entities into our system as well so you can see the health and update status of your containers around your Portainer networks. OpenAI conversation now supports GPT 5.6. And just a couple of days before we started recording this there was some price discounts on 5.6 as well if you're an OpenAI user. That is a timely little addition there. Unifier Protect now supports the USL smart sensors so the USL entry, environmental and glass break sensors on Unifier Protect 7.2 and newer. Cameras also gained motion detection, smart detection and sound detection event entities that fire for any detection the camera reports such as a person, package or a barking dog with the detected type as an attribute. That sounds I do love my Unifier network products so I can only imagine how polished their protect products would be and these sensors here just prove that. Let's talk about some new integrations that have come into this release. First and foremost fuel prices dot dk so if you're in Denmark and you want to track those your fuel companies there yeah you can bring it at home system. It's actually kind of handy. It's what I didn't know existed. Gatus, Gatus, I'm not sure on the pronunciation there but it looks like it's similar to an uptime kuma, uptime robot, like a service monitor pingdom so you can bring the health of your services into home instance from your Gatus monitoring instance. Each monitored endpoint shows up as a binary sensor so you can put service status on a dashboard or trigger automation when something goes down or comes back up. There is a self-hosted option. It looks like it like a SaaS product and have them host it for you. Looks pretty clean, a little bit like a nicer UI compared to uptime kuma from what I could see from their screenshots but yeah I would check it out if you're interested. Google health. So you can now bring your health and fitness data into home assistant from Google health and the Fitbit API as well and our web API. So after you connect your Google account you get sensors like steps, distance, weight and resting heart rate and you can run it alongside the existing Fitbit integration. So that's cool. Again, especially if you're monitoring those kind of things, you have different weight scales, you have all that so you can actually bring all that into one place now. It's nice. If you have a Harbor Sleep Baby Monitor you can now integrate that with home assistant. The integration will connect to the device on your local network and it exposes sensors including temperature, the Wi-Fi strength and the stream quality. I wonder if it actually brings in the camera entity as well to stream it. That would be kind of cool. Harman Luxury Audio so you can control network streamers built on their platform like the RCAM Radia ST5 and ST60 and equivalent JBL and Mark Levinson streamers. So the integration talks to the device directly on the local network so you don't need a cloud account. So there you go. If you're looking for something else to self-host or maybe you're already self-hosting this Kara Keep you can connect your self-hosted Kara Keep bookmarking service to Home Assistant to help keep track of your bookmark statistics. Rahman are you using that before? Have you used that before? No I installed it once a while ago. I set it up and I was like I don't think I'm not good at going back at a bookmark or a read later or doing any of those things and following up. I'd rather leave the tab open and eventually it will frustrate me. I'm not one of those if it's hidden away like this it's gone. I really like the tool. I like what it offers and everything. That's not how my brain organizes itself. I decided to not run it anymore. I appreciate you being so honest because that is exactly the way I work too. I don't think I've looked at my browser bookmarks for years. I know there's bookmarks on there and I just leave a tab open. If I want to get back to it, I'll leave the tab open. To the point where my phone browser will have over 100 tabs open and then it will eventually be like, nope, you've had too much. I'm closing all of them down. On my computer, I will be that guy with 50 tabs open because I know I want to go back to that tab at some point. I don't want to lose it. I know I could bookmark it, but bookmarks I will never see again. The only bookmarks I use are ones that I access often. Those are bookmarked. Everything else stays in tab. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If I forget, I forget. If you do use Karakeep and you're listening to us being like, guys, you should use it. Give us some use cases. Feedback home is dot FM or comment wherever you're listening. Let us know. I would love to make that process better for myself. LED infrared. There is now an LED integration which allows you to control LED lights through any infrared emitter you already have set up in Home Assistant. It supports many brands and unbranded bulbs and strip controllers that use generic infrared remote controls. Communication is one way, so the integration will use the assumed states of a light. If you send a command to turn a light on over an infrared connection, it will assume that that command worked and the light is on. Home is no way of knowing if that command was successful or failed. So we'll just assume it worked. Light LLM is also another self-hosted tool you can run if you're doing any AI kind of stuff. You can now use Light LLM proxy as a conversation agent directly in Home Assistant. So Light LLM will put an open AI compatible API in front of a lot of model providers so you can reach any other model you want through a single endpoint or self-hosted. So Home Assistant creates a conversation agent for each model that you can figure that way. I already had Light LLM configured into it but it was also coming in as an open AI provider rather than its own kind of thing. So if you have it configured again it might give you a little bit of advantage just to sort out stuff. But I basically use Light LLM where any different model I want goes through Light LLM and then Light LLM will kind of break it out and I can give different permissions to different API keys to say okay Home Assistant has access to these three models for maybe different things they care about or want to do versus my open web that you can give it a lot more models so yeah that's Light LLM is a pretty neat tool and I love that it's in Home Assistant A similar tool is llama.cpp and that is also now available so you can use any local llama.cpp server or any open AI compatible endpoint as that conversation agent for Home Assistant Yeah there you go Medea LAN so now if you have devices that uses the Medea protocol like air conditioners air purifiers and so on into Home Assistant you can bring that in the integration provides information on the connected devices and lets you control their main features Neopool you can now monitor and manage pool controllers built on the Neopool system which was originally from Sugar Valley and was sold under many brands like Hydro Life Aquarite and Oxylife it talks to your controller locally over Modbus TCP and will expose things like water chemistry filtration and hydrolysis data with no cloud needed Scorpion Track so now you can follow vehicles that are shared through a public Scorpion Track location share link onto your home system map integration reads shared vehicle feed and creates a device tracker for each vehicle without needing your private account credential I don't know what Scorpion Track is but that's either great or creepy so one of the two I haven't figured that out yet so all right breaking changes I'm just going to run all these off because we've basically talked about these three ones the HTTP server YAML settings have moved to the UI so be sure to check out that manual port changes can affect reverse proxy setups so existing users won't be moved automatically to port 80 however if you do manually change your port from port 8123 to port 80 with complex setups you may break your reverse proxies so just watch out for that if you have your own reverse proxy the device registry separation may require some action from you which I spoke about before existing merged devices may be replaced automations should continue working but the UI may need to update automations or helpers through repair flows so if something is not being merged correctly or separated out you may get repairs that an automation or a group or somewhere is referencing a broken entity there should be a repair created for that and you need to go through that flow to resolve it custom integrations that interact with the device registry incorrectly may need to be updated so if you just be sure to hit update on those components maybe sit this .0 release out for a little bit while those custom components get their heads around this new device registry changes and mark their components compatible with 2026.8 upwards that is 2026.8 now we've got some I want to talk about something I've been doing but first something you have been doing or currently in the process of which we alluded to in the episode today is you are moving house we have an episode out about your house moving I believe they that will be out for Patreon members and subscribers at the moment I this is technically the last recording we have recorded a couple of other episodes in this house but today is the last recording in this house for you today so a bit of a big change hopefully last day we'll have this what is the last recording we'll have your headphones microphones obviously being packed up so audio quality videos being a bit off are you all sorted now are you ready for the move not even remotely so it's as as to be expected by pretty much every move no demand right so yeah we'll figure it out yeah we'll be taking a couple of weeks off to let run move house get set up so yeah we will where we've got a break for to move house and get a whole new studio set up ready in his new place yeah don't don't expect you to set up proxmox on that new computer and had home assistant os running there I was ready for the whole kit and caboodle I think we had discussed you know do I start again do I just migrate I bit the almost so what was the so couple of weird things so first of all ZHA so I have the home assistant the ZBT2 I think it is radio the Zigbee stick I moved that from the old computer onto the new computer plugged it in I before I did that though I actually got and I had great success with hooking up my Hermes profile I gave SSH access onto the Proxmox box and by extension also gave SSH access into the home OS container running on Proxmox and it tell of home business, which included that. But I followed the migration wizard, and it must have used a cache file somewhere on the machine or something, but it came back like things. For the most part, my Zigbee devices are working. I think, once again, my Akara FP1 sensors are hit and miss at the moment for whatever reason, but everything else is fine, Zigbee-wise. For Z-Wave, I was using the Z-Wave.js UI as a Docker container. Once again, you still can't go into Z-Wave.js settings and just change in the UI the IP address of where that container is running. So I could have gone into the .storage folder and updated the IP address. But once again, I got my Hermes agent onto it, and it guided me through the process of migrating to the Z-Wave.js app in Home Assistant OS. So we installed Z-Wave.js app on Home Assistant. We then took a backup of the Z-Wave network. We then ran a migration path to move over to Z-Wave. I really can't remember the flow too much because Hermes did a lot of it. But Z-Wave was, yeah, a little bit tricky. I then had to port in... I had to set up the keys, like the security keys, from my old instance into the new instance. That was fine. That was just copy and paste the keys over. And then they eventually came back. I had to import the names from the old instance into the new instance. So otherwise, it was all just... Everything came through as an unknown device. So when Home Assistant booted up, all my Z-Wave entities were unavailable because they just didn't exist. They weren't being provided by... So I had to wait. I had to do a repair on the network for it to go out and find them all. It eventually did. It took a couple of hours, but eventually it has found them all. There is one battery motion device that hasn't come back, which once I plug some batteries into it and wake it up, it will probably come back. There was another clutch where I found, though. My locks. So I have some Yale Assure locks with Z-Wave radios built into them, plugged into them. And I have my own personal access code and my wife has her own personal access code against those locks. I didn't realize, but when the Z-Wave network reset with this move, it removed those access codes from Home Assistant, from those on the locks itself. So... That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually had the automation to lock our front door disabled and it wasn't until I came home and I was like, I went to put in my code and my code didn't work. I was like, oh, well, this is awkward. Why isn't my code working? Well, it's especially bad if you don't use, if you don't carry keys with you, right? Exactly. I don't carry keys, right? Yeah. Because it's one of those locks. It just doesn't have a key slot on it. So it's like, oh, well, this is awkward. Luckily, there is a master pin on the unit. I was able to use the master pin code that is not controllable by the network. That's like set on the memory of the lock itself. Right. So that was fine. I was able to use the master pin. So then I was like, oh, well, I guess none of our user codes exist anymore. This is a great opportunity for me to go and use a new user credential management that was introduced a couple of releases ago for ZedWave locks. I went to do that and it failed. Unfortunately, my lock. So in Home Assistant, you create a user access code, right? So one, three, four. Yeah. And you hit the save button and it goes and saves that onto the lock. My lock requires that you specify the slot number or the username that that code belongs to, which the Home Assistant UI wasn't exposing. I would hit the save button and Home Assistant would give me an error saying, sorry, you need to provide a username for the passcode. So I was able to get around it. I was able to open up the ZedWave UI, the app, open up the UI for it and ping and actually set a user access code slot manually. But yeah, it wasn't as, it wasn't, you know, there were some teething issues. But for the most part, otherwise, it's been seamless. I think I had to, on my phones, I just had to update the IP address that we use when we're on the Wi-Fi network at home to point to the new computer, which that's fine. MQTT, I think, is broken because I just need to update the devices to use the right MQTT server now because that's also on the same host as Home Assistant. But otherwise, yeah, it was, everything's there, my history is there, all my automations are there and I now have Hermes with right access into Home Assistant. I can now talk to Hermes and say, hey, I've just had an idea for automation and it will go in, SSH into it, create a YAML automation and reload the YAML automation. So I'm a very happy camper at the moment. Nice. Would, would it make sense to give Hermes access to Home Assistant's API instead of YAML or instead of SSH so that, you know, it can create automations in there that's now not YAML based, it's now, you know, the current UI kind of methodology based, right? Like, would that... I thought so too and I am still very early days in this. I have enabled the MCP server for Home Assistant. It has a long-lived access token so it can control all my entities. Yeah. It can see everything. I was hoping it would do what you're saying, like use the UI to create these things but for me so far it's not doing that. It's only purely doing it by YAML. I haven't really pressed it to go further. I don't really want it to edit automations.yaml and break that and then it break all the automations that are configured by the UI and I don't know if there is an API that it knows about yet to do the UI style automations. So, maybe next month maybe I'll come back with you and tell you another if I've been able to have success with that. That'd be fine. But otherwise, yeah, Hermes have been very impressed with it as well and I have my other Hermes profile that now has SSH access to a whole bunch of my different servers. So, another problem I had, remember the original problem I wanted from moving over to this system was that I was away on holiday and randomly the box lost its network connection and a lot of people said you need to get a KVM which would have solved the issue. Within 24 hours of running on the new box, I had the exact same problem. The network completely lost connection but the box was up. It was communicating over Z-Wave and Zigbee perfectly. What I found fixed it, or I should say Hermes found it. I said Hermes, I can't remember what I promised the problem like I've lost complete access. So, we did an incident response plan basically. It told me to hard reboot the box. I did that. As soon as it came back up, SSHed into the box, it checked the logs on the system, and it identified a network driver issue. It then flicked some settings randomly under the hood and said let's leave that for the moment, let's just leave it and see how it goes. And it's been up for a few weeks now, no issue. So, we've permanently set that new driver setting somewhere. It's basically false to true somewhere. And we're rock solid. And now if it happens again, I will be able to raise another incident with my Hermes profile, and we'll go through the process again, check error logs, and find what's going on. That's very neat. I love using an agent for that kind of stuff. Hey, I don't know what's going on, go fix this, and then just give me a report of what happened, you know, kind of you're taking more of an executive approach rather than an admin approach, right? Like, hey, do what you got to do, tell me what's up, right? And then how do we prevent this from happening again, right? So it's yeah, I love that. All right. That's all my projects. You obviously, apart from packing boxes, I'm guessing you don't have any other projects going on. No, no, everything is on hold right now. What I gotta give a shout out to is a few people have messaged me now about the frame that I'm building, like the picture I know a couple of people have emailed in. I've gotten messages on different social media accounts talking about that and a lot of interest in it. So that's going to be a higher priority for me now. Just, again, putting it out there, people are interested, so I definitely want to make sure people can get at it. I've updated, you know, while I don't have, I've already packed away the device itself. I've also, but I've, you know, I had my blog post written one way and then, you know, we made a bunch of changes architecturally, so it's like I have to rewrite. So that's all caught up now. Now I have to re-redo it just to deal with any home assistant updates. But other than that, it should be mostly good to go. And I'm trying to figure out ways that people can do this cheaper as well, right? Because there is a pretty big barrier to entry there from a cost perspective. Again, I know for some people it's not a barrier, but some people it is. So, you know, what is the absolute cheapest way you could build one of these things, DIY? So that might be like a part two or something like that. Right now I'm focused on, well, right now it's moving. Once I move and actually have a desk I can work on, that's kind of, I have my desk right now, but once everything is set up and I have all my stuff mostly unpacked, I can go back to tinkering with it and getting it where I want to get it and release it that way. So I think that's where I'm going with that from a project perspective. Other than that, I'll have to do a full rebuild, but I'm also learning a bunch of different systems and stuff like that for my, at that new house. So I'm going to slow roll it. I want to make sure everything is done properly the first time. I'd rather not go back and do a second visit. Those of you that have been, when I say second visit, I mean second iteration of the thing that could have just been done right the first time. Those of you that have been listening long enough know that when I moved into this house, that was kind of how I did it in here, where it's like I started, I'm like, I just need something. At the time, I was living alone and I was traveling a lot for work and stuff like that. So it's more safety, security kind of things, auto lights and all that stuff. So I just threw something together just to have that so I can go and then I'm like, okay, I'll come back to it. Now, that's not my case. Again, obviously, I live with my family, so I have a little more flexibility in being able to do that and do it properly. So that's the goal. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, I think a lot of people are excited to see how you get on with that and I would like to see some part lists too, and get a cost behind it because I'm certainly interested as well. 100%. And there's going to be, again, we have that episode released to Patreon already about where I go a lot more in depth with it. It'll be releasing at some point soon. I think it's next week. Yeah. There you go. Well, speaking of which, shout out to our Patreon members, including our executive producers, Benny and Jason. You can help support the show and get early access to episodes all in and at free feed. To support the show, check out homeassistant.fm and click Patreon in the menu. We would love if you can share this episode or give us a rating wherever you're listening to us today. It helps feed all of those algorithms. If you want to come on the show to share your story or to submit your mailbag questions, feedback at homeassistant.fm or check the website at homeassistant.fm. Rohan, I'll see you for 2026.9. Good luck with the move. Thank you so much. Take care, everyone. Cheers. Cheers.