title: "0.28: Reload automation and groups, API documentation, car tracking, Pi-Hole stats"

description: "No Home Assistant restart for reloading automations and groups, Automatic car tracking, Pi-Hole and battery details, and bugfixes for climate and cover"

date: 2016-09-09 08:00:00 +0200

date_formatted: "September 09, 2016"

It's already time for 0.28 thanks to our super short release cycles. Now, it' official...we hit 4000 stars on Github. That's amazing. Sorry, not as amazing as all the stuff that was going on for 0.27 but still pretty awesome.

This release brings you a huge improvement of the [automation] and [group] handling. Both can be reloaded without a Home Assistant restart. The automations can be controlled directly from the frontend.

<p class='img'>

<img src='{{site_root}}/images/screenshots/automation-switches.png' />

</p>

There are countless bugfixes included in this release which will make your experience with the `climate` and the `cover` platforms better. Two week ago was the biggest merger of implementations released that ever happened in the history of Home Assistant. Thanks to [@turbokongen], [@pvizeli], [@djbanks], [@danielperna84], and others the improvements on the code and the frontend side is continuing...

The [Home Assistant API Documentation](https://dev-docs.home-assistant.io/en/dev/) is a great addition to the already exisiting user documentation. The focus is not end-users but developers who whant to get details about the code without actually browsing the code on Github.

The validation of the configuration is still on-going. Approximatly 80 % is done. This means that we will propably talk about this topic in the next release notes again. To align the configuration of components and platforms we needed to break some. Please refer to the Breaking changes section to check if you need to update your configuration or simple check your log for configuration validation errors. Thanks to [@kellerza], [@fabaff], [@Teagan42], and [@pvizeli] for your effort!

<img src='/images/supported_brands/xbox-live.png' style='clear: right; margin-left: 5px; border:none; box-shadow: none; float: right; margin-bottom: 16px;' width='100' /><img src='/images/supported_brands/automatic.png' style='clear: right; margin-left: 5px; border:none; box-shadow: none; float: right; margin-bottom: 16px;' width='100' /><img src='/images/supported_brands/pi_hole.png' style='clear: right; margin-left: 5px; border:none; box-shadow: none; float: right; margin-bottom: 16px;' width='100' />

- Light: Added bitfield to Flux LED since we are supporting effects ([@tchellomello])

- Device tracker: [Owntracks] waypoint import ([@pavoni])

- Climate: A lot of bugfix ([@turbokongen], [@pvizeli], [@djbanks])

- Notify: Improvement of the title handling ([@lwis])

- RFXtrx: Sensor cleanup ([@turbokongen])

- Device tracker: Fix for BLE device tracker ([@open-homeautomation])

- Device tracker: Allow 'None' MAC addresses to be loaded from `known_devices` file ([@kellerza])

- Cover: Bugfixes ([@turbokongen], [@danielperna84])

- Sensor: Support for displaying details about [crypto currencies][Coinmarketcap] ([@fabaff])

- Device tracker: Support for [automatic] to track your vehicles ([@Teagan42])

- Devie tracker: Add exclude option to [Nmap] device tracker ([danieljkemp])

- Device tracker: Improved login errors for Asus device tracker ([@kellerza])

- Sensor: Support for displaying the status of [Xbox] Live accounts ([@mKerix])

- Notify: Adding `link_names` for sending Slack message ([@salt-lick])

- Binary sensor: Add the occupancy sensor class ([@robbiet480])

- Fan: Add supoort for [MQTT fans][mqtt-fan] ([@robbiet480])

- Docs: Add Sphinx API doc generation ([@bbangert])

- Core: Allow reloading automation without restart ([@balloob])

- Sensor: Added scale and offset to the [Temper] sensor ([@mKerix])

- Sensor: New support for [Trend] sensor ([@pavoni])

- Device tracker: Keep looking for new BLE devices ([@Bart274])

- Switch: Added device state attributes and support for legacy firmware for D-Link switches ([@LinuxChristian])

- Sensor: Improve 1-Wire device family detection ([@Ardetus])

- Modbus: Update to be thread safe ([@persandstrom])

- Camera: FFMpeg is abale to get the images ([@pvizeli])

- Core: Reload groups without restart ([@balloob])

- Core: Fix remove listener ([@balloob])

- Sensor: Support for monitoring your [battery] on a Linux host ([@fabaff])

- Core: Add support for complex template structures to `data_template` ([@pvizeli])

- `check_config`: Improve yaml fault tolerance and handle border cases ([@kellerza])

- Core: Add additional [template] for custom date formats ([@lwis])

- Sensor: Support for getting stats from Pi-Hole systems ([@fabaff])

- Mediaplayer platforms [FireTV] and [MPD]

- [switch][command-line-switch] and the [cover][command-line-cover] `command_line` platforms

[@Ardetus]: https://github.com/Ardetus

[@Bart274]: https://github.com/Bart274

[@bbangert]: https://github.com/bbangert

[@danieljkemp]: https://github.com/danieljkemp

[@djbanks]: https://github.com/djbanks

[@LinuxChristian]: https://github.com/LinuxChristian

[@lwis]: https://github.com/lwis

[@persandstrom]: https://github.com/persandstrom

[@salt-lick]: https://github.com/salt-lick

[@tchellomello]: https://github.com/tchellomello

[MPD]: /components/media_player.mpd/

[Coinmarketcap]: /components/sensor.coinmarketcap

[template]: /topics/templating/

[battery]: /components/sensor.linux_battery

[group]: /components/group/

[automation]: /components/automation/

[Temper]: /components/sensor.temper/

[mqtt-fan]: /components/fan.mqtt/

[Xbox]: /components/sensor.xbox_live/

[Nmap]: /components/device_tracker.nmap_scanner/

[automatic]: /components/device_tracker.automatic/

[Owntracks]: /components/device_tracker.owntracks/