The biggest release yet. The devices you track in the Home Assistant energy
dashboard become first-class citizens of the card, the scene lives through the
day/night cycle, the map is now yours to theme, and the whole thing is lighter and
faster.
New: monitoring groups replace the custom entity
You can now bundle the devices tracked in your energy dashboard into up to four
monitoring groups, each with its own name, colour and icon, set in the editor.
A group shows up as its own chip on the scene and its own curve in the timeline.
The old single "custom entity" is gone; groups do the same job for any number of
devices and need no YAML. Each group is shown by a coloured pill (its number by
default, its icon once you set one), consistent across the editor and the scene.
New: your own map, fully themeable
The basemap is now drawn by Helios's own vector renderer, built on OpenFreeMap
(open data, still no API key). A new Map configuration editor section lets you
theme the ground itself: pick Auto (follows your Home Assistant theme), Dark, Light
or Custom, and in Custom set the colour and visibility of every layer, ground,
water, parks, roads, paths, railways, buildings and more. Make it match your
dashboard, or make it your own.
New: the scene follows the sun
The whole scene is now graded through the day/night cycle. The ground and buildings
warm toward midday and cool through dusk into night, so a glance tells you roughly
where the day is, no flat overlay, just light.
New: a sun-only card, and easier scrolling on mobile
Hide every chip (including home consumption) and the card collapses to just the sun
position and your location, a solar-position card you can drop on a non-energy
dashboard, for shutters or climate control keyed on the sun. And on a phone the card
no longer traps your scroll: swipe up or down and the page moves as it should, swipe
sideways and the scene turns. Your finger's direction decides, so neither gesture has
to wait for the other. Once a turn is under way, drifting up or down tilts the scene
as it always did on a mouse (#308).
New: per-bank battery state of charge
The battery timeline now draws one state-of-charge line per battery bank, each
tinted by its live charge/discharge flow, so you can read each pack against the
charge and discharge beams above it.
New: the day curve
Click any chip a second time, once it is the active one, and the day you are looking
at rises around your house as a curve.
It does not stand on a ring. It stands on the sun's own path, projected straight
down onto the ground: the track closes in on the house at midday, when the sun is
overhead, and reaches out to the exact spots where the arc meets the ground at
sunrise and sunset. So where a point sits on that track IS the hour it happened, and
a dashed line drops from the sun to the curve right beneath it. Scrub the timeline
and the whole thing follows: another day means that day's sun, that day's track and
that day's readings, never an average of the week around it.
Every metric draws itself its own way. Production splits into one curve per solar
source, each in its energy-dashboard colour, like the timeline; today's remaining
hours carry on from your forecast, dashed, so the shape of the day runs unbroken from
this morning to tonight and only its certainty gives way at the present moment.
Grid draws import and export together. Battery draws its power, tinted by
charge and discharge, alongside a dashed state-of-charge curve for each pack.
A monitoring group draws one curve per device, in each device's colour.
Irradiance draws one too, on every period but Month, which reaches back further
than the weather model does.
Switch chips and the curve re-points and stays up, so you can walk one day through
each metric. The curve writes itself on as it is raised, from its own midnight, and
the chips that have nothing to say about the metric on show step aside while it is
up. Click the active chip again to put it away. It follows your Graph detail
setting like every other curve, so it smooths out at one point an hour and resolves
every cloud at six.
Changed: a calmer scene
The home now simply takes the active chip's colour (keeping the squash-and-grow
animation when you switch chips). The camera lock is a scene-only setting. A single
tap on a chip now opens its detail panel (it used to want a double-tap), and a tap
anywhere on the scene background dismisses it, which finally makes it easy to close
on a phone. The sun arc uses the true -0.833 degree horizon so sunrise and sunset
land where Home Assistant puts them.
Changed: solid buildings, shadows that follow their walls
The surroundings have been rebuilt. Buildings are no longer cut in half at the seams
between map tiles, and faces no longer flicker in and out while you turn the scene:
the order they are painted in is worked out from the buildings' real outlines. Rows
of houses that touch at the same height are drawn as one block, roof lines and all,
rather than a queue of overlapping boxes. Facades are lit by the sun's direction, so
a wall facing it reads brighter than one turned away, and a wall in shade is lit by
the sky alone.
Shadows follow each building's true outline, including concave blocks and inner
courtyards, and account for the roof rather than the walls alone. They no longer lie
underneath the building casting them, they stop at the ground their neighbours stand
on instead of running through them, and their fade no longer swings to the other
side when you nudge the camera by a fraction of a degree.
The display radius now tops out at 250 m, which is as far as the ground beneath
the buildings actually reaches. A card set higher than that settles at 250 m; before,
the extra radius put buildings out past the edge of the map with nothing under them.
Changed: a clearer default timeline
The default in-card period is now Forecast (today to two days ahead), a tighter
window that reads better on a phone. The timeline and period-selector top borders
take the active chip's colour, so the whole bar reads as one with the metric you are
looking at. The timeline itself now sizes from the card's own height rather than its
width, so it keeps its proportions whether the card is a squat tile on a dashboard
or a tall one on a wall tablet. On a phone it used to pin to its minimum and take no
notice of the vertical room it had, so a tall card and a squat one got the same bar.
Changed: focused translations
Helios now ships 27 European languages, curated for the communities that use
the card most. This cuts the download size substantially with no change to the
languages kept; any other language falls back to English.
Fixed
- Scene: left-click drag-rotate now works on Firefox (#306).
- The basemap no longer vanishes after the card has sat in a background tab for a
while, leaving the buildings floating over nothing. It is repainted from memory
the moment the card comes back, which matters most on a wall tablet. - The building colour and the home colour now take a plain colour (
#ff0000,
rgb(...)) as well as a Home Assistant colour name, like every other colour in
the editor. They previously accepted the name only, and silently ignored anything
else, leaving the buildings grey. - The irradiance tooltip shows the forecast value and its beam again (#305).
- The dashed timeline lines (the solar forecast and the per-bank battery state of
charge) now always draw their full length instead of stopping short until you
scrubbed the timeline. - The battery timeline no longer stacks a cluster of markers on its charge line.
- Assorted robustness: DST-safe day maths, a watchdog on slow map tiles, cleaner
teardown of animations, and quieter, deduplicated data-layer warnings.
Removed
- The clock and period-over-period trend dials. The scene, the timeline and
its period selector now tell the same story more directly. - The Year period. Month is now the longest view, and the last one the scene can
still speak for: any day of it can be scrubbed to and read under that day's own
sun. A year sat on a daily store that carried no shape of a day at all, so the arc,
the shadows and the curve had nothing to say about it, and 365 bars two pixels wide
had nothing to say to the eye. Your energy dashboard already tells that story
better. Cards saved on Year fall back to the default period.