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Luminate aims to make hair loss from chemotherapy a thing of the past

Hair loss resulting from chemotherapy is one of the most recognizable side effects in all of medicine, and for many is an unwanted public announcement of their condition and treatment. Luminate Medical may have a solution in a medical wearable that prevents the chemical cocktail from tainting hair follicles, preventing the worst of the loss and perhaps relegating this highly visible condition to the past.

When Luminate CEO Aaron Hannon and his co-founder Bárbara Oliveira were asking patients and doctors about areas of cancer treatment that they could perhaps innovate in, “we were just astonished at how much hair loss dominated the conversation,” said Hannon. “So from then on out we’ve just been laser focused on making that something that doesn’t exist any more.”

When a patient is undergoing chemotherapy, the cancer-inhibiting drugs course through their entire body — anywhere the blood goes. This has a variety of side effects, like weakness and nausea, and on a longer time scale hair loss occurs as the substances affect the follicles. Luminate’s solution, developed in partnership with the National University of Ireland Galway, is to prevent the blood from reaching those cells in the first place.

Image Credits: Luminate

The device that effects this is a sort of mechanized compression garment for the head. If that sounds a bit sinister, don’t worry — it uses only soft materials to achieve the pressure; Hannon says that it isn’t uncomfortable and pressure is carefully monitored.

There’s also no risk of damage from lack of blood flow in those cells. “Compression therapy has been really well studied,” he said. “There are years of literature around how long you can apply these therapies without damaging the cells. There’s a certain amount of mechanical engineering involved in making it both comfortable and effective.”

The patient wears the cap during and after the whole chemo session. By restricting blood flow to the skin of the scalp only, it allows the drugs to flow unimpeded to wherever the tumor or cancer site is while saving the hair follicles from damage.

Tests have been done on animals, which saw strong hair retention of around 80% with no adverse effects — and while full human trials are something that will need some time and approval to set up, initial tests of the headset’s bloodflow-blocking effects on healthy patients showed that it works exactly as expected on people as well.

“We’re really excited about the efficacy of this therapy because it works with lots of hair types,” said Hannon. That’s a real consideration, since a tech that only worked with short hair, straight hair or some other subset of hairstyles would exclude far too many people.

Image Credits: Luminate / Wild Island Pictures

As for competition, although there are some new treatments that cool the scalp instead of compressing it, Hannon noted that the most money is spent by far on wigs. An average of a thousand dollars per patient who opts for a wig means there’s considerable leeway for a device in that neighborhood.

Although hair loss is considered a medical condition by many insurance companies and other methods of reimbursement, and wigs are often covered, it will take time and lots of evidence to get Luminate’s device approved for those processes. But the team is confident that at around $1,500, the device is within the means of many as long as other costs are being picked up by insurance. People do, after all, spend that much and more not just on wigs but on other hair retention products and methods. If there was a checkbox for “don’t lose hair” on the chemo forms with a $1,500 price tag, a whole lot of people would check it without a second thought.

Image Credits: Luminate

Ultimately, however, Luminate wants to be able to offer the device also to those who can’t afford the cost out of pocket, so they are progressing toward FDA approval and a U.S. launch, with Europe and others to come.

So far Luminate, just graduating from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, has been lucky enough to operate on funds provided through grants from the Irish government, which are of course non-dilutive. While more capital will almost certainly be required come time for scaling and international launch, right now the team is focused on getting the device into the hands (and onto the heads) of its first set of patients.

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Boox tablets are welcome options in the growing oversize e-reader niche

When it comes to e-paper devices, the Kindle is of course the first brand people think of, though I’ve done my best to spread the Kobo and reMarkable gospel as well. Chinese e-reader maker Boox is a relatively new entrant to the space, and its devices are experimental but useful options in the niche market of monochrome tablets. In fact, they make my new favorite small device.

A brand from parent company Onyx, Boox has a wide array of devices, some might say too wide, ranging from pocketable to medium-sized e-readers to A4-sized tablets. Its branding is not particularly memorable and slightly updated versions come out quite regularly — one device I hoped to test was actually being replaced by the time I got around to writing this article.

The unifying aspect is the OS, a modified version of Android 10 with a few special-made apps for reading and productivity. Made with Chinese consumers in mind, the services probably aren’t ones you will have heard of.

I tested several devices from Boox, the simplest being the Poke 3 e-reader, then the larger and more complex Note2, followed by the svelte Note Air and enormous Max Lumi. Most recently I have been looking at the Nova3 Color, which uses E Ink’s latest Kaleido Plus color screen.

The truth is if you didn’t turn them on you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that these devices were all from the same company. They have quite different hardware styles, though of course there’s only so much room for expression in a black tablet with a screen in shades of grey.

Little and big

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Let’s begin with the simplest and most familiar format, the 6-inch e-reader. In this category we have the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Clara HD. The former is probably the best one Amazon makes, but I prefer the latter, even though its build quality is, frankly, poor.

Boox in this space has (among others) the Poke 3, not exactly the catchiest name, but it makes up for that with its form factor: pretty much the platonic ideal for a small reader like this. I liked it so much I broke it out into a separate review, but here are the basics.

The Boox Poke 3 is my new favorite e-reader

The 6-inch, 300-PPI screen is of equal quality to the Kindle and Kobo, and like the Clara HD has a temperature-adjustable frontlight. The front of the device is completely flush, just the way I like it, and has just enough bezel to grip without it becoming too much or too little. The seamless design makes it pocketable and resistant to crumbs and spills (though it makes no water resistance claims). There’s a power button up top (thank you) and a single USB-C port at the bottom.

Regarding the hardware, I find it difficult to come up with any criticism at all. It could, I suppose, be lighter, but its dimensions could not be smaller than they are without adversely affecting the ergonomics; a millimeter could conceivably be shaved off the thickness but it would be barely noticeable.

The OS is a highly customized version of Android, with all the pros and cons that comes with. I have always enjoyed the simplicity of Kobo’s interface, though they seem bent on complicating it. Boox’s OS is powerful but busy, uneasy in its decisions of what options to make available and prominent to the user.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The reader app, NeoReader, supports tons of file formats and has a huge set of controls for changing your view, highlighting and notating books and PDFs, and so on. This is more for the larger devices than the small ones, which really only need font adjustment and other basic stuff.

If all you want to do is read e-books you already have sitting on your computer, it’s as easy as dragging them into the “Books” folder on the device’s storage. That tab is what you’ll see when you turn on the device, and it’s always easy to get to. There’s a built-in store that takes up a whole tab, though it isn’t available in the U.S. — then a file manager tab for rooting around in directories — and a tab each for your apps and settings.

The apps are another custom situation: This being a Chinese device, it comes without the usual Google-authenticated App Store, whatever it’s called these days. Instead, it has its own store with dozens of the most-used reading apps, from Pocket and GoodReader to the Kobo and Kindle apps. But these are essentially side-loaded: for instance, the Kindle app is a few months old. That’s far from a disaster, but you do need to commit to a certain amount of trust in Boox and its proxy app store in order to use the device as-is.

Kobo Elipsa review: A sized-up e-reading companion with clever note taking

Of course, you can also enable Google Play services in the settings, which adds the official store into the mix. But for most people this is already far too much work. We are both spoiled and deprived in our e-reader selection in that they are generally simple and extremely straightforward to use. Someone who is not familiar with Android, using this device and a Kobo or Kindle, would probably opt for one of the latter.

Yet the possibilities are many for those who wish to take the plunge. For my part, I like the form factor of the Poke 3 so well that I will brave any OS to use it. Besides, you spend 99% of your time on these things in a book, so as long as that part works, the rest is just icing on the cake.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

At the 6-inch scale, this all seems like way too much. But on Boox’s larger devices, the flexibility starts to make more sense. The idea with the Note 2 (now 3), Note Air and Max Lumi is to provide almost all the capabilities of an Android tablet, but with the benefits of an e-paper screen. Admittedly that makes playing racing games something of a non-starter, but it could be very attractive to the types of people for whom their reMarkable is used more than their iPad.

If you read a lot of documents, doing so on a bright tablet screen — or a dim one, for that matter — sucks. An e-paper screen is better for the task, but the best device for that, the reMarkable, is also very deliberately limited in what it can accomplish, since the whole philosophy of the company revolves around focus. So there are definitely people who want the capabilities of an Android device with the readability of an e-paper one. Or at any rate Boox thinks so.

The Note 2 and Max Lumi seem related: They’re unremarkable black tablets of impressive dimensions and, in my limited explorations of their hardware, what seemed to me excellent build quality. The Note Air, it must be said, is the opposite of unremarkable — in fact, when I saw it, I thought it was a clone of the reMarkable 2!

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

This first impression turned out to be less than generous on my part, as while the two share some significant design elements, they are in fact quite different and Boox’s facility in creating other devices has led me to give them the benefit of the doubt here. The blue and orange motif isn’t the greatest, but it does help set it apart, and all the devices (especially the Air) are thin and well designed.

All the tablets feature frontlights, and I’m happy to say that my skepticism that it could be done with such big screens was needless. It works well and like the Poke 3 the light is adjustable in both brightness and temperature (though it’s a bit fiddly).

Color e-paper still isn’t quite there

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey

The Nova3 Color has a 7.8-inch screen with the latest color e-paper tech from E Ink. I’ve always been excited for the possibilities of this side of the technology, but color e-paper screens have always suffered from poor contrast, low refresh speeds, ghosting and other shortcomings. While this latest iteration does go some way toward amending those (and a software update helped further), it is still unfortunately too much of a compromise.

The hardware is similar to the other Boox devices, solid and unassuming. The difference is all in the screen, which shows in color even when the device is off. Color e-paper works by combining the microscopic black and white beads that form images with a layer of color filters that can be changed. This one, like the others, has a frontlight and it helps a lot with making those colors pop, since without it they’re all rather muted.

There is still the issue of ghosting, though if you’re reading, say, a comic, you can easily set it to refresh every page (it takes only a fraction of a second) and the problem is gone. It’s less easy to do this with more dynamic content like a webpage, though of course navigating the web on an e-reader is already something of a novelty.

The color e-paper display still lacks saturation, if not contrast. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey

More troubling to me is the decrease in contrast and effective decrease in resolution that the color layer brings. When color content is shown, there’s a distinct screen door effect to it, not quite like ordinary LCD aliasing but still visible. And when you have greyscale content you sometimes see moire and other interference patterns in mid-tones.

Books look all right but not nearly as clear as an ordinary monochrome E Ink display; the screen door effect is always present and reduces contrast. It’s still very readable, but when cheaper devices do the job better, it’s hard to justify.

Text is less clear and high contrast on the color screen than on the monochrome one. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey

I appreciate Boox making the latest screen from E Ink available, and it may be useful to some who want a little more tablet DNA in their e-reader (at this point the two categories are not very distinct). But for most people the color does not add enough, and subtracts too much.

Does it all, or stretched too thin?

The OS is the same on all of these as far as I can tell, but on the these devices the focus shifts to interactivity rather than simply reading. Boox makes a Wacom-like pen that can be used to write on the surface of these larger tablets, and it serves its purpose fine, though with nowhere near the responsiveness or accuracy of reMarkable’s.

That said, the final result when sketching or writing was a pleasing one, though the OS takes a moment to catch up and anti-alias the marks. I thought the brush in particular had nice gradations.

One thing the Boox tablets have on others like them (that is to say, the reMarkable, the defunct Sony Digital Paper Tablet and a handful of other niche devices) is in the PDF handling. The Boox devices let you navigate and mark up PDFs with ease, and the original files are simply saved over with your doodles and notes added. Though marking up a document is easy on the reMarkable, its slightly clumsy app makes sharing and sorting them a bit of a chore. I prefer the simple approach: modify the original file (there’s always a copy somewhere) and email it directly from the device. It’s that simple!

Besides the reader and notebook, there are a handful of included apps that any tablet user might find useful. There’s a browser that’s about as functional as you’d expect — it’s Chromium-based and renders well but ghosts terribly; a voice recorder, a music player, a calendar… and of course you could download plenty more from the built-in or Google app stores. If you wanted to, you could make these quite well-rounded devices.

I’m not entirely sure just how large the market is for this kind of e-paper tablet. But I feel these devices offer something interesting and unique, even if they’re also… well, it’s hard to get around the fact that you can get an iPad for half the price of the larger Boox tablets, and then do most of the same stuff and more.

These e-paper devices have a certain draw, though, and if you plan to read and mark up long documents, it’s way better to do so on one of these than on an iPad, for a number of reasons. With Boox’s lineup in the mix there are more options than ever, and that’s definitely a good thing.

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Kanye wants to sell you a $200 music gadget

Kanye (or “Ye,” as it were) is going all out in the promotion of his upcoming tenth studio album, “Donda” (named for his late-mother, Donda West). In July, there was a massive listening party at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium (where he also took up residence in a locker room). For an upcoming listening party in his native Chicago, meanwhile, the rapper is rebuilding his childhood home at Soldier Field.

The forthcoming LP also sees West launching a 0 music gadget called,Stem Player, under his Yeezy Tech brand. The product is designed to isolate stems — specific elements like vocals, bass, samples and drums. It can add effects and remix the song elements according to the site.

The device reportedly ships with a copy of the new record pre-loaded. A FAQ on the site helpfully adds, however, while the product is being released in conjunction with “Donda,” it can also be used for other music.

Image Credits: Kanye West

Interestingly, the device was created in tandem with Kano, a London-based startup known for a different kind of STEM product. The company creates educational devices to help children learn things like programming. In 2019, Kano struggled through layoffs, in spite of releasing a number of Disney-branded devices.

It seems the company’s found an interesting new bit of life here, and the product even goes so far as crediting Kano on the back of its silicone skin exterior with a Yeezy Tech x Kano branding on the rear.

West name-checked the device (or its predecessor) during an interview around his previous album, “Jesus Is King” in 2019. At the time, it appeared to be a collaboration with design firm Teenage Engineering. “This portable stem player that we designed with Teenage Engineering for this album and the albums before it, is to spread the gospel,” West told Zane Lowe at the time.

The product is set to ship this summer.

Supervisor update

Renaming snapshot to backup

“Snapshot” is a term that we have been using in the Supervisor since the beginning,
but it’s not very descriptive for those that do not know what it is.
Over the next few weeks, we will start using “backup”
in all our software and documentation.

The functionality of it does not change, this is just a rename to make it more understandable.

Supervised installations

Having a supervisor does not make it a supervised installation, Home Assistant Operating System also has this, the information below does not apply to Home Assistant Operating System.

While we try not to break supervised installations, we do have a few things we need to change.
These adjustments you have to manually apply to your installation. Without these adjustments you will start to see warnings in your logs, and your installation will eventually be marked as unsupported.

If you are interested to make changes required on supervised installations more maintainable, have a look at the blog on the developer site.

As an alternative to doing these adjustments, you can migrate your installation to Home Assistant Operating System.

Bullseye

Two weeks ago Debian 11 (Bullseye) was released. The upcoming version of the Supervisor will recognize that version as a supported Operating System. This means that if you are running Home Assistant Supervised, you can start upgrading that.

Support for the previous version (Debian 10 (Buster)) is now deprecated and will be removed in the first version of the Supervisor after the 4 months grace period.
This means that within the next 4 months you need to update to Debian 11.

Environment variables

There are a few environment variables that you have to add in order to make the Supervisor work properly with newer versions of the Supervisor.
These variables have to be added to the run command for the Supervisor container, on most installations this is a script called from a service file.

  • SUPERVISOR_SHARE – The path to the directory for the Supervisor data files, typically /usr/share/hassio.
  • SUPERVISOR_NAME – The name of the supervisor container, typically hassio_supervisor
  • SUPERVISOR_MACHINE – The machine you are using. For a list of machine types, have a look here

OS Agent

Recently, we created an OS Agent. OS Agent allows for better communication between the host OS and the Supervisor which will enable new features.
You can find the installation instructions for OS Agent in its GitHub repository.

If you you are interested we have also just published a blog on the developer site.

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Bedrock modernizes seafloor mapping with autonomous sub and cloud-based data

The push for renewable energy has brought offshore wind power to the forefront of many an energy company’s agenda, and that means taking a very close look at the ocean floor where the installations are to go. Fortunately Bedrock is here to drag that mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle and modern cloud-based data service.

The company aims to replace the standard “big ship with a big sonar” approach with a faster, smarter, more modern service, letting companies spin up regular super-accurate seafloor imagery as easily as they might spin up a few servers to host their website.

“We believe we’re the first cloud-native platform for seafloor data,” said Anthony DiMare, CEO and co-founder (with CTO Charlie Chiau) of Bedrock. “This is a big data problem — how would you design the systems to support that solution? We make it a modern data service, instead of like a huge marine operation — you’re not tied to this massive piece of infrastructure floating in the water. Everything from the way we move sonars around the ocean to the way we deliver the data to engineers has been rethought.”

Ocean floor mapping robotics startup Bedrock announces an $8M raise

The product Bedrock provides customers is high-resolution maps of the seafloor, made available via Mosaic, a familiar web service that does all the analysis and hosting for you — a big step forward for an industry where “data migration” still means “shipping a box of hard drives.”

Normally, DiMare explained, this data was collected, processed and stored on the ships themselves. Since they were designed to do everything from harbor inspections to deep sea surveys, they couldn’t count on having a decent internet connection, and the data is useless in its raw form. Like any other bulky data, it needs to be visualized and put in context.

Image Credits: Bedrock

“These data sets are extremely large, tens of terabytes in size,” said DiMare. “Typical cloud systems aren’t the best way to manage 20,000 sonar files.”

The current market is more focused on detailed, near-shore data than the deep sea, since there’s a crush to take part in the growing wind energy market. This means that data is collected much closer to ordinary internet infrastructure and can be handed off for cloud-based processing and storage more easily than before. That in turn means the data can be processed and provided faster, just in time for demand to take off.

As DiMare explained, while there may have been a seafloor survey done in the last couple decades of a potential installation site, that’s only the first step. An initial mapping pass might have to be made to confirm the years-old maps and add detail, then another for permitting, for environmental assessments, engineering, construction and regular inspections. If this could be done with a turnkey automated process that produced even better results than crewed ships for less money, it’s a huge win for customers relying on old methods. And if the industry grows as expected to require more active monitoring of the seafloor along every U.S. coast, it’s a win for Bedrock as well, naturally.

Image Credits: Bedrock

To make this all happen, of course, you need a craft that can collect the data in the first place. “The AUV is a piece of technology we built solely to enable a data product,” said DiMare, but noted that, originally, “we didn’t want to do this.”

“We started to spec out what it looked like to use an off the shelf system,” he explained. “But if you want to build a hyper-scalable, very efficient system to get the best cost per square meter, you need a very specific set of features, certain sonars, the compute stack… by the time we listed all those we basically had a self-designed system. It’s faster, it’s more operationally flexible, you get better data quality, and you can do it more reliably.”

And amazingly, it doesn’t even need a boat — you can grab it from the back of a van and launch it from a pier or beach.

“From the very beginning one of the restrictions we put on ourselves was ‘no boats.’ And we need to be able to fly with this thing. That totally changed our approach,” said DiMare.

Image Credits: Bedrock

The AUV packs a lot into a small package, and while the sensor loadout is variable depending on the job, one aspect that defines the craft is its high-frequency sonar.

Sonars operate in a wide range of frequencies, from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands of hertz. Unfortunately that means that ocean-dwelling creatures, many of which can hear in that range, are inundated with background noise, sometimes to the point where it’s harmful or deters them from entering an area. Sonar operating about 200 kHz is safe for animals, but the high frequency means the signal attenuates more quickly, reducing the range to 50-75 meters.

That’s obviously worthless for a ship floating on the surface — much of what it needs to map is more than 75 meters deep. But if you could make a craft that always stayed within 50 meters of the seabed, it’s full of benefits. And that’s exactly what Bedrock’s AUV is designed to do.

The increased frequency of the sonar also means increased detail, so the picture its instruments paint is better than what you’d get with a larger wave. And because it’s safe to use around animals, you can skip the (very necessary but time-consuming) red tape at wildlife authorities. Better, faster, cheaper and safer is a hell of a pitch.

Today marks the official launch of Mosaic, and to promote adoption Bedrock is offering 50 gigs of free storage — of any kind of compatible map data, since the platform is format-agnostic.

There’s a ton of data out there that’s technically “public” but is nevertheless very difficult to find and use. It may be a low-detail survey from two decades ago, or a hyper-specific scan of an area investigated by a research group, but if it were all in one place it would probably be a lot more useful, DiMare said.

“Ultimately we want to get where we can do the whole ocean on a yearly basis,” he concluded. “So we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

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Samsung’s latest Galaxy Fold adds stylus support, waterproofing and an under-display camera

Behold, Samsung’s latest flagship. With the Galaxy Note out of the way — for this year, at least — the company used today’s Unpacked event to breathe added legitimacy into its foldable line. The original Galaxy Fold, introduced in 2019, represent a sort of experiment for the company (along with all the hiccups that entailed), as the first foldable from a major hardware manufacture, whereas last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 found the company correcting some of the glaring issues with its predecessor.

Today’s event finds the company making the case for Galaxy Z Fold 3 as something beyond an experiment or a curiosity. The task will almost certainly be an uphill battle for the next few generations. Unlike the latest version of the Flip, which starts at a price reduced considerably from its predecessor, the new Fold drops the entry price $200, down to $1,800. Any price reduction is a step in the right direction — and something that should be increasingly feasible as the technology continues to scale. But even in the world of premium flagships, that will continue to be a tough pill to swallow.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

What the upgraded Fold truly brings to the table, however, is a continued refinement to build materials that make the foldable screen a feasible option for day to day usage. This, of course, is precisely what hamstrung the original. Sure, the company did a lot of testing in controlled rooms, but once the product got out into the world (and into the hands of non-Samsung employees), problems of durability began cropping up, resulting in displays that were unintentionally damaged in a variety of imaginative ways.

Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold arrives September 18 for $2,000

The Galaxy Z Fold features a stronger frame made of “Armor Aluminum,” new protective film for the foldable display, Gorilla Glass Victus on the front-facing screen and an IPX8 rating — representing the first waterproof rating for the company’s foldable. Waterproofing has, of course, become something of an industry standard, but obviously things complicate quickly when you add folding mechanisms into the equation.

In fact, that’s why the rating has an “X” stuck in the middle of it. It’s effectively protected from accidental dunks in water, but not dust and debris. This is due to the hinge mechanism created for earlier models that allows some particulate matter through, but sweeps it away with a built in brush that moves as the device opens. That effectively protects it from getting behind the screen, where it could damage the phone with a finger press on the other side.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Of course, the stronger protective film is the thing. It’s what’s (hopefully) standing between you and damaging your phone’s biggest selling point with an overzealous finger press — or, for that matter, a stylus. The Fold, after all, is following in the footsteps of Samsung’s S series by blurring the line with the Note (which handily opted to sit this round out).

In fact, Samsung actually went out of its way to create a special Fold Edition of the S-Pen specially designed to not damage the Fold display. It’s optional, of course, and as with the S21, there’s slot for the stylus in the handset — that’s to be expected, given the relatively fragility of the product. There will, of course, be a case with a built-in S-Pen holster.

The Fold Edition S-Pen is smaller and features a spring-loaded tip designed to retract so you don’t damage the screen by writing/drawing too hard. Certainly the Fold is a clear candidate for stylus functionality, given its 7.6-inch canvas that puts even the Note Ultra’s 6.9-inch screen to shame. Of course, the feasibility of this combination has been severely hampered by structural integrity issues with the screen. It will be interesting to see how the company has managed to navigate that.

At 7.6 inches (2208 x 1768, 374 ppi), the primary screen is largely unchanged. The cover screen, too, is about the same, at 6.2 inches — though it now joins the main screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. 

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Notably, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is the first Samsung device to add an under-display camera. That, along with foldable displays, has been one of the biggest holy grails in the smartphone category for the past several years. Samsung’s not the first to introduce the technology. A handful of Chinese manufacturers, including Xiaomi and Oppo, have either released or plan to release devices sporting the technology.

It’s telling that the company opted to test the water with the Fold. Aside from the obvious aspect of creating a contiguous display, it gives the company the opportunity to test out another mainstream technology. The dirty little secret about the first generation of under-screen cameras is that the picture quality tends to suck. Samsung surely knows this and has opted to stick it on a device that already has a selfie camera above its front display.

The company describes new tech as follows, “the minimum pixels applied on top of the camera hole, Z Fold 3 features an increased viewable area so users get an unbroken canvas for their favorite apps.” The thinking here is that the internal camera simply doesn’t get as much use, save for things like teleconferencing (which is, granted, something we’ve been doing a lot more of in the past year). As currently configured, it’s a bit of a compromise on both ends. Picture quality takes a hit and the camera hole is still semi-visible. So, either the best or worst of both worlds, depending on what you’re looking for.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The under-display camera is four megapixels (when was the last time you saw one of those?), verses the 10-megapixel front/cover camera. The rear camera setup is virtually identical to its predecessor:

  • 12MP Ultra Wide. F2.2, Pixel size: 1.12μm, FOV: 123-degree
  • 12MP Wide-angle. Dual Pixel AF, OIS, F1.8, Pixel size: 1.8μm, FOV: 83-degree
  • 12MP Telephoto. PDAF, F2.4, OIS, Pixel size: 1.0μm, FOV: 45-degree

The battery has taken a bit of a hit, down from 4,500 to 4,400mAh (spread out over two modules, as is the foldable way). The Fold also supports fast charge/fast wireless and Wireless Powershare to use that 4,400mAh battery to power other gadgets. Samsung generally doesn’t offer battery estimates for phones prior to release, so wait on the review for that. The whole thing is powered by a Snapdragon 888 chip (market depending), coupled with 12GB of RAM and either 256 or 512GB of storage.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Like the rest of the devices announced today, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is up for preorder now and starts shipping on the 26th. The $1,800 price tag continues to be a roadblock toward more mainstream adoption, though the company has moved a number of these devices to early adopters already. Preorders get a $200 Samsung Credit.

Life with the Samsung Galaxy Fold

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What to expect from Samsung’s next Unpacked

Foldables! Two, probably! Those are your headliners. Samsung tipped its hand with the event invite, which features a pair of geometrical objects that pretty clearly represent the new Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip.

The other headliner is what we won’t be seeing at the event (Deadliner? Endliner?). The company already confirmed via corporate blog that we won’t be seeing the next version of the Galaxy Note next week. That’s a big break from the device’s long-standing annual refresh cycle.

We still don’t know if this is the end-end of the line for the phablet. Samsung told TechCrunch, “We will not be launching new Galaxy Note devices in 2021. Instead, Samsung plans to continue to expand the Note experience and bring many of its popular productivity and creativity features, including the S Pen, across our Galaxy ecosystem. We will share more details on our future portfolio once we are ready to announce.”

Image Credits: Samsung

Rumors surfaced prior to this revelation that the company may have been forced to put the device on hold, as global supply chain issues continue to hamstring manufacturers. There’s also an argument to be made, however, that Samsung has gradually made the Note redundant over the past several Galaxy S updates.

It seems telling that the company referred to a forthcoming “flagship” in its official Unpacked copy. With the Note out of the picture and the Galaxy S about six months out from a refresh, this appears to refer to the Galaxy Fold gaining the (admittedly ceremonial) title. Whether that means two or three flagships in the company’s Armada remains to be seen.

What we do know, however, is that — like the Galaxy S before it — at least one of the forthcoming foldables will be blurring that Note line.

“I hope you’ll join us as we debut our next Galaxy Z family and share some foldable surprises — including the first-ever S Pen designed specifically for foldable phones,” the company’s president and head of Mobile Communications Business, TM Roh wrote. The executive also promised “even more refined style, armed with more durable, stronger material” on the new Galaxy Z Flip.

Previous — and subsequent — leaks have given us good looks at both the Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Galaxy Z Fold 3. Hell, it wouldn’t be a Samsung event if pretty much everything didn’t leak out prior to the event.

A series of tweets from EVLeaks has given us nearly every angle of the upcoming foldable smartphones, along with (European) prices that put the Fold and Flip starting at €1,899 and €1,099, respectively. Both mark a sizable decrease from the previous generation. That’s nice — if not entirely surprising. Samsung’s plan all along has clearly been a prolonged drop in pricing as foldable technology scaled. We’re still a long ways away from cheap here, but perhaps nudging our way toward the realm of possibility for more users.

Other leaked details for the Fold/Flip include a 7.6/6.7-inch internal display, a Snapdragon 888 processor (both) and 12MP triple/dual cameras, respectively. Interestingly, water resistance is also reportedly on board here.

With a year of virtual events under its belt, the company seems to have a better idea of pacing. Samsung — along with many other companies in the space — took liberties when events went more from in-person to online, meting out announcements event by event. Thankfully, next week’s Unpacked is a much bigger, self-contained event.

The other expected highlights are both wearables. First is the long-awaited fruits of the partnership between Samsung and Google that was announced at I/O. We didn’t get a lot of info at the time, beyond the fact that it will potentially be a boon for users and developers, with the ability to jointly create apps for both the beleaguered Wear OS and Samsung’s custom brand of Tizen.

Image Credits: Samsung

“Samsung and Google have a long history of collaboration, and whenever we’ve worked together, the experience for our consumers has been dramatically better for everyone,” Google SVP Sameer Samat said at a June follow-up to the I/O news. “That certainly holds true for this new, unified platform, which will be rolling out for the first time on Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch. In collaboration with Samsung, we’re thrilled to bring longer battery life, faster performance and a wide range of apps, including many from Google to a whole new wearable experience.”

The company held an (admittedly disappointing) event at MWC focused on the forthcoming watch. There was, however, one key thing missing: the watch. Based on pure speculation, I’d suggest that the wearable just didn’t come together on the timeline Samsung was expecting, but the company went ahead and did a virtual presser at the (mostly virtual) trade show.

The company did, however, announced One UI Watch — a wearable version of its streamlined OS interface. Samsung notes in a press release:

One UI Watch together with the new unified platform will create an entirely new Galaxy Watch experience. As part of the new experience, once you install watch-compatible apps on your smartphone, they will be swiftly downloaded onto your smartwatch. If you’ve customized your clock app on your phone to show the time in different cities around the globe, this will be automatically reflected on your watch as well. And if you block calls and messages from your watch, they will now be blocked on your smartphone, too.

Leaks have also revealed the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic models along with (again) European pricing. They’re reportedly set to start at €279 and €379, respectively, with each featuring multiple sizing options. That last bit was always a sticking point for me with Samsung watches, which have traditionally been fairly massive, knocking out a good number of potential buyers in the process.

The last big piece of the puzzle are the Galaxy Buds 2. The latest upgrade to the company’s entry-level buds are said to be gaining active noise canceling.

Will there be surprises once things kick off at 7AM PT/10AM ET on August 11? Little, ones, probably. These leaks have a tendency to capture things in broad strokes but miss some of the key nuances in the process. And while the company is more than a little familiar with pre-show leaks, it’s still managed to surprise us in the past.

Samsung will announce new foldables on August 11

sspp-tile

$100M donation powers decade-long moonshot to create solar satellites that beam power to Earth

It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface of the Earth. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred million dollars. But this is a real project at Caltech, funded for a nearly a decade largely by a single donor.

The Space-based Solar Power Project has been underway since at least 2013, when the first donation from Donald and Brigitte Bren came through. Donald Bren is the chairman of Irvine Company and on the Caltech board of trustees, and after hearing about the idea of space-based solar in Popular Science, he proposed to fund a research project at the university — and since then has given more than 0 million for the purpose. The source of the funds has been kept anonymous until this week, when Caltech made it public.

The idea emerges naturally from the current limitations of renewable energy. Solar power is ubiquitous on the surface, but of course highly dependent on the weather, season and time of day. No solar panel, even in ideal circumstances, can work at full capacity all the time, and so the problem becomes one of transferring and storing energy in a smart grid. No solar panel on Earth, that is.

A solar panel in orbit, however, may be exposed to the full light of the sun nearly all the time, and with none of the reduction in its power that comes from that light passing through the planet’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.

The latest prototype created by the SSPP, which collects sunlight and transmits it over microwave frequency. Image Credits: Caltech

“This ambitious project is a transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,” said SSPP researcher Harry Atwater in the Caltech release.

Of course, you would need to collect enough energy that it’s worth doing in the first place, and you need a way to beam that energy down to the surface in a way that doesn’t lose most of it to the aforementioned protective layers but also doesn’t fry anything passing through its path.

These fundamental questions have been looked at systematically for the last decade, and the team is clear that without Bren’s support, this project wouldn’t have been possible. Attempting to do the work while scrounging for grants and rotating through grad students might have prevented its being done at all, but the steady funding meant they could hire long-term researchers and overcome early obstacles that might have stymied them otherwise.

The group has produced dozens of published studies and prototypes (which you can peruse here), including the lightest solar collector-transmitter made by an order of magnitude, and is now on the verge of launching its first space-based test satellite.

“[Launch] is currently expected to be Q1 2023,” co-director of the project Ali Hajimiri told TechCrunch. “It involves several demonstrators for space verification of key technologies involved in the effort, namely, wireless power transfer at distance, lightweight flexible photovoltaics and flexible deployable space structures.”

Diagram showing how tiles like the one above could be joined together to form strips, then spacecraft, then arrays of spacecraft. Image Credits: Caltech

These will be small-scale tests (about six feet across), but the vision is for something rather larger. Bigger than anything currently in space, in fact.

“The final system is envisioned to consist of multiple deployable modules in close formation flight and operating in synchronization with one another,” Hajimiri said. “Each module is several tens of meters on the side and the system can be built up by adding more modules over time.”

Image Credits: Caltech

Eventually the concept calls for a structure perhaps as large as 5-6 kilometers across. Don’t worry — it would be far enough out from Earth that you wouldn’t see a giant hexagon blocking out the stars. Power would be sent to receivers on the surface using directed, steerable microwave transmission. A few of these in orbit could beam power to any location on the planet full time.

Of course that is the vision, which is many, many years out if it is to take place at all. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as having that single ambitious, one might even say grandiose, goal. The pursuit of this idea has produced advances insolar cells, flexible space-based structures and wireless power transfer, each of which can be applied in other areas. The vision may be the stuff of science fiction, but the science is progressing in a very grounded way.

For his part, Bren seems to be happy just to advance the ball on what he considers an important task that might not otherwise have been attempted at all.

“I have been a student researching the possible applications of space-based solar energy for many years,” he told Caltech. “My interest in supporting the world-class scientists at Caltech is driven by my belief in harnessing the natural power of the sun for the benefit of everyone.”

We’ll check back with the SSPP ahead of launch.

2021.8.0: Feel the energy ⚡️

Happy August! ☀️

Home Assistant Core 2021.8 is here, and this is the release I have been looking
forward to for months! There is so much exciting new stuff in here: I don’t
know where to start.

The most exciting part is the new main focus that is added to Home Assistant:

Home Energy management.

A massive deal for a lot of people, no matter if you are doing it for
environmental reasons or simply to save a buck or two (or both 😬). Knowing
that moving forward, it will be an additional focus, I think, is amazing.

But besides the Energy management stuff, I’m also excited about the side effects
of it. A lot of things created for Energy, are also re-usable for other things!
That is how we roll, right?

We get long-term statistics, new super nice and fast graphs, and a new
layout option for Lovelace. All the building blocks are available for
customization and re-use. I am looking forward to seeing how they are going
to be put to use.

Anyways, enjoy the release! And don’t forget the drop by
the release party on YouTube
later today (9:00 PM CET).

../Frenck

Matthias de Baat joins Nabu Casa

Let start by announcing that Matthias de Baat
is joining the team at Nabu Casa to work on
Home Assistant as a UX-designer.

UX stands for “User Experience”, which is Matthias’ area of expertise and what
he will be working on improving. His goal is to make Home Assistant easier to
use and accessible for everyone. He will be setting up design processes and
tooling, doing user research and making designs.

If you are interested in joining the Home Assistant user research group, you
can show your interest by filling in this Google Form
that Matthias has prepared.

Welcome Matthias! Excited to have you on board!

But wait! There is more!

Otto Winter, the founder of ESPHome, will
be joining Nabu Casa during his summer break as well! Welcome Otto! This summer
is going to be fantastic!

Home Energy Management!

This feature is a big thing; A start of something new. Home Assistant is going
to provide you insight into your energy usage.

But this needs more than just a paragraph in the release notes, this needs
its own blog! So, at this point, stop reading the release notes (momentarily)
and read the blog Paulus has written about this:

Read the blog about the new Home Energy Management features of Home Assistant

Long term statistics

Storing sensor data for a more extended period using the recorder, can make your
database grow pretty fast (especially if you have sensors that update a lot!).

In the previous releases, we’ve worked towards improving this situation and
laid down the groundwork for tracking statistics in the database;
We are making it widely available this release!

Integrations can now hint Home Assistant about the type of value the sensor
represents, allowing us to process and store that data in a more efficient way.
Every hour, we calculate things like mean, min/max values, or the difference
created that hour and store just that result in our long-term statistics.

These statistics is what partly powers the new Energy dashboard, however,
they can be used for anything else: Introducing the Lovelace statistics graph card.

Screenshot of the new Lovelace statistics graph card
Screenshot of the new Lovelace statistics graph card.

This card can make beautiful graphs, allowing you to make graphs for any of
your stored long-term statistical data. It can render as a line or bar chart.
Bars are suited for metered entities that have a summed value. Lines are
perfect to display the mean, min and max of the entity.

The support for long-term statistics is limited at this moment. We are
expecting to open it up for more measurements in the upcoming releases while
more integrations are adding support for these new measurement types.

Sidebar view

The default layout you see in Lovelace (which we generally all use), is called
the “masonry” layout. We also have a panel view/layout that stretches a single
card to the whole view. This release brings in a brand new view layout: Sidebar.

This new sidebar view has two columns, a wide one and a small one on the right.
It is perfect for displaying larger cards like graphs (like that nice new
statistics graph card), or maps. While having some additional smaller cards
with information on the side.

The new Energy dashboard uses this new view layout, but of course, made
available for use in other Lovelace dashboards as well.

Screenshot of new Lovelace sidebar view layout
Screenshot of new Lovelace sidebar view layout.

Gauge card now has needle mode

A nice little addition to the Lovelace gauge card: Needle mode!

Instead of showing a value and filling it partially, in needle mode, it will
show the full gauge but point out the value with a needle. And, if you add
severity to your gauge card configuration, it will always be shown.

Screenshot of the Gauge card in needle mode with severity configured
Screenshot of the Gauge card in needle mode with severity configured.

These settings are available straight from the Lovelace UI editor; More
information and examples can be found in the Gauge card documentation.

Currency core setting

To support the display of financial values, we’ve added a new setting to Home
Assistant that allows you to define the currency Home Assistant should use
in cases it relies on your input.

You can find this new currency setting in the general settings of Home Assistant.

This setting is used for the cost calculation of the new energy features.

Siren

The last release, we introduced the select entity,
this release, we introduce the siren entity! 🚨

Thanks to @raman325 for adding this noisemaker to the family! He also
implemented the first integration to add support for Sirens: the Z-Wave JS
integration. So, if you have a Z-Wave enabled Siren, you can now control it.

Locking, Unlocking and Jammed

Locks in Home Assistant can be a little bit smarter as of today, thanks
to @bdraco. Besides the locked & unlocked states, support for locking,
unlocking and jammed has been added.

Support for these new states has been added to the August, HomeKit Controller
and template integrations. Additionally, HomeKit, Alexa and Google Assistant
have been made compatible and aware for these states as well.

Scripts/Automations/Templates

Some new features landed for script, automations and templates this release.

This

When an automation or script is triggered to run, a new variable is available:
this. This variable contains the state object
of the automation or script running and allows you to access information about
the automation directly. Thanks, @r-t-s!

Device template functions

If you like to write YAML automations manually, are using templates, and require
device IDs or device information, than you know those IDs are hard to find and
the device information is not available at all.

@raman325 added some new template functions that can be helpful when working
with devices.

  • device_entities(device_id) returns a list of entities associated
    with a given device ID (can also be used as a filter).
  • device_attr(device_or_entity_id, attr_name) returns the value of attr_name
    for the given device ID or entity ID.
  • is_device_attr(device_or_entity_id, attr_name, attr_value) returns whether
    the value of attr_name for the given device ID or entity ID matches attr_value.
  • device_id(entity_id) returns the device ID for a given entity ID
    (can also be used as a filter).

Thanks for these powerful new features!

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other
noteworthy changes this release:

  • Thanks to @firstof9, Z-Wave JS now has support for transitions with lights!
  • More Z-Wave JS improvements by @raman325. He added support for device
    triggers and conditions. Thanks!
  • You can now assign a unique ID to light, cover and media player groups,
    allowing you to manage them from the Home Assistant frontend and assign
    them to an area!
  • The motionEye integration now has support for motion detection, thanks @dermotduffy
  • ZHA can now work with Formaldehyde and VOC level sensors, thanks @Adminiuga
  • @posixx added a new feature for integration that provide alarm panels;
    those integrations can now update to support Vacation mode!
  • Rainbird now has a service to change the rain delay, thanks @Kr0llx!
  • If you are using BMW Connected Drive, @EddyK69 added a lot of trip sensors.
  • Sonos snapshots now behave, are more robust and work as expected. Additionally,
    support for controlling crossfade has been added, thanks @jjlawren!
  • WLED now supports controlling the new playlists features introduced in WLED 0.13.
  • @farmio added support for KNX lights that use HS-colors, thanks!
  • And @joncar added support for transitions to LiteJet lights, awesome!
  • If you have MFA on your Tesla account, thanks to @BreakingBread0,
    the integration now supports that.
  • When using the Netatmo integration, you can now control the schedule it
    should be using with a select entity. Thanks, @cgtobi!
  • @janiversen added more data types to modus and added array write to
    the turn on/off capabilities of Modbus switches, fans and lights.
  • Advantage Air now has temperature sensors for each zone, thanks @Bre77!
  • Gree Climate now has switches to support more modes, thanks to @cmroche!
  • You can now remove holidays from the workday sensor by name instead of
    date. This is useful for holidays they don’t have a fixed date each year.
    Thanks @matthewgottlieb!
  • HomeKit will not auto-recreated TVs when sources are out of sync. One thinsg
    less to worry about, thanks @bdraco
  • @jbouwh has drastically reworked and extended the Humidifier support for
    the Xiaomi Miio integration. Amazing job!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations this release:

New Platforms

The following integration got support for a new platform:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2021.8.1 – August 4

  • Fix Panasonic Viera TV going unavailable when turned off (@Hyralex – #53788) (panasonic_viera docs)
  • Add temporary fix to modbus to solve upstream problem (@janiversen – #53857) (modbus docs)
  • Fix attr_unit_of_measurement in update of apcupsd entity (@mib1185 – #53947) (apcupsd docs)
  • Fix coordinator not defined in yale_smart_alarm (@gjohansson-ST – #53973) (yale_smart_alarm docs)
  • Fix divider for Fritz sensors (@chemelli74 – #53980) (fritz docs)
  • Fix empty sonos_group entity attribute on startup (@jjlawren – #53985) (sonos docs)
  • Update frontend to 20210804.0 (@bramkragten – #53997) (frontend docs)

Release 2021.8.2 – August 5

  • Bump pylitterbot to 2021.8.0 (@natekspencer – #54000) (litterrobot docs)
  • Add missing device class to SAJ energy sensors (@frenck – #54048) (saj docs)
  • Handle empty software version when setting up HomeKit (@bdraco – #54068) (homekit docs)
  • Bump up ZHA dependencies (@puddly – #54079) (zha docs)
  • Packages to support config platforms (@balloob – #54085) (automation docs) (script docs) (template docs)
  • Fix Shelly last_reset (@thecode – #54101) (shelly docs)
  • Two fixes (@chemelli74 – #54102) (fritz docs)
  • Increase time before scene and script HomeKit entities are reset (@bdraco – #54105) (homekit docs)
  • Bump zeroconf to 0.33.3 (@bdraco – #54108) (zeroconf docs)

Release 2021.8.3 – August 6

  • Gracefully handle additional GSM errors (@ocalvo – #54114) (sms docs)
  • Handle software version being None when setting up HomeKit accessories (@nzapponi – #54130) (homekit docs)
  • Fix sensor PLATFORM_SCHEMA for ebox and enphase_envoy (@mib1185 – #54142) (enphase_envoy docs)
  • Fetch interface index from network integration instead of socket.if_nametoindex in zeroconf (@bdraco – #54152) (zeroconf docs) (network docs)
  • Bump zeroconf to 0.33.4 to ensure zeroconf can startup when ipv6 is disabled (@bdraco – #54165) (zeroconf docs)

Release 2021.8.4 – August 8

  • Add missing motor_speed sensor for Xiaomi Miio humidifier CA1 and CB1 (@bieniu – #54202)
  • Fix update entity prior to adding (@Trinnik – #54015) (aladdin_connect docs)
  • Fix androidtv media_image_hash (@tkdrob – #54188) (androidtv docs)
  • Solve missing automatic update of struct configuration in modbus (@janiversen – #54193) (modbus docs)
  • Update const.py (@Mk4242 – #54195) (ebusd docs)
  • Add parameter to delay sending of requests in modbus (@janiversen – #54203) (modbus docs)
  • Bugfix: Bring back unique IDs for ADS covers after #52488 (@carstenschroeder – #54212) (ads docs)
  • Don’t block motionEye setup on NoURLAvailableError (@dermotduffy – #54225) (motioneye docs)
  • Pin google-cloud-pubsub to an older version (@allenporter – #54239)

Release 2021.8.5 – August 9

  • Fix camera state and attributes for agent_dvr (@tkdrob – #54049) (agent_dvr docs)
  • Force an attempted subscribe on speaker reboot (@geuben – #54100) (sonos docs)
  • Fix login to BMW services for rest_of_world and north_america (@rikroe – #54261) (bmw_connected_drive docs)
  • Always set interfaces explicitly when IPv6 is present (@bdraco – #54268) (zeroconf docs)
  • Fix atom integration for long term statistics (@ZeGuigui – #54285) (atome docs)
  • Use correct state attribute for alarmdecoder binary sensor (@tkdrob – #54286) (alarmdecoder docs)
  • Bump soco to 0.23.3 (@jjlawren – #54288) (sonos docs)
  • Fix ondilo_ico name attribute (@cdce8p – #54290) (ondilo_ico docs)
  • Bump zeroconf to 0.34.3 (@bdraco – #54294) (zeroconf docs)
  • Ensure hunterdouglas_powerview model type is a string (@bdraco – #54299) (hunterdouglas_powerview docs)
  • Remove zwave_js transition on individual color channels (@firstof9 – #54303) (zwave_js docs)
  • Restores unit_of_measurement (@dgomes – #54335) (integration docs)
  • Fix xiaomi air fresh fan preset modes (@jbouwh – #54342) (xiaomi_miio docs)
  • Update frontend to 20210809.0 (@bramkragten – #54350) (frontend docs)
  • Fix Xiaomi-miio turn fan on with speed, percentage or preset (@jbouwh – #54353) (xiaomi_miio docs)
  • Fix aqualogic state attribute update (@dailow – #54354) (aqualogic docs)
  • Cast SimpliSafe version number as a string in device info (@bachya – #54356) (simplisafe docs)
  • Do not process forwarded for headers for cloud requests (@balloob – #54364) (http docs) (cloud docs)
  • Revert “Use entity class attributes for Bluesound (#53033)” (@balloob – #54365) (bluesound docs)
  • Update Climacell rate limit (@raman325 – #54373) (climacell docs)
  • Fix race condition in Advantage Air (@Bre77 – #53439) (advantage_air docs)

Release 2021.8.6 – August 10

  • Handle CO2Signal response value being None (@balloob – #54377) (co2signal docs)
  • Fix Canary sensor state (@ludeeus – #54380) (canary docs)
  • Re-add Tibber notify service name (@Danielhiversen – #54401) (tibber docs)
  • Bump hass_nabucasa to 0.46.0 (@balloob – #54421) (cloud docs)
  • Bump pyopenuv to 2.1.0 (@bachya – #54436) (openuv docs)

Release 2021.8.7 – August 15

  • Use pycarwings2 2.11 (@filcole – #54424) (nissan_leaf docs)
  • Fix Huawei LTE entity state updating (@scop – #54447) (huawei_lte docs)
  • Strip attributes whitespace in universal media_player (@0xFelix – #54451) (universal docs)
  • Bump notifications-android-tv to 0.1.3 (@tkdrob – #54462) (nfandroidtv docs)
  • Updates to bump MyQ to 3.1.2 (@ehendrix23 – #54488) (myq docs)
  • Add missing PRESSURE_BAR conversion (@Danielhiversen – #54497)
  • Treat temporary errors as warnings for Tesla (@alandtse – #54515) (tesla docs)
  • Fix attributes not showing after using entity class attributes (@gerard33 – #54558) (bmw_connected_drive docs)
  • Upgrade qnapstats library to 0.4.0 (@colinodell – #54571) (qnap docs)
  • Fix bug in ambiclimate (@Danielhiversen – #54579) (ambiclimate docs)
  • Fix Tibber last reset (@Danielhiversen – #54582) (tibber docs)
  • Adax, update requirements (@Danielhiversen – #54587) (adax docs)
  • Clamp color temperature to supported range in ESPHome light (@oxan – #54595) (esphome docs)
  • Bump zeroconf to 0.35.0 (@bdraco – #54604) (zeroconf docs)
  • Bump py-synologydsm-api to 1.0.4 (@mib1185 – #54610) (synology_dsm docs)
  • Guard partial upgrade (@balloob – #54617) (http docs)
  • Solve switch/verify register type convert problem in modbus (@janiversen – #54645) (modbus docs)
  • Send color_brightness to ESPHome devices on 1.20 (pre-color_mode) (@jesserockz – #54670) (esphome docs)

Release 2021.8.8 – August 18

  • Fix TPLink emeter reset not updating (@TomBrien – #54848) (tplink docs)
  • Fix tplink doing I/O in event loop and optimize (@rytilahti – #54570) (tplink docs)
  • Fix ‘in’ comparisons vesync light (@cdce8p – #54614) (vesync docs)
  • Update PyMetEireann to 2021.8.0 (@DylanGore – #54693) (met_eireann docs)
  • Fix BMW remote services in rest_of_world & north_america (@rikroe – #54726) (bmw_connected_drive docs)
  • Fix HomeKit cover creation with tilt position, open/close, no set position (@bdraco – #54727) (homekit docs)

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.