"Your real sky"
When I released Helios six months ago, it was a sun crossing an empty scene. Tonight it carries the weather of the place you actually live: the light dimming as the clouds gather, the rain and the snow, the ridge of your own horizon, and, when your dashboard tracks a price, what your energy is costing you right now.
This is, honestly, the version I had in my head the first time I hit publish. It exists because of you: your messages, your issues, your feedback (the tough kind included), your coffees and your stars.
Everything from 2026.8.0 is still here. This release only adds to it, nothing was taken away.
And because I couldn't help myself, there's a new trailer, made by hand, no AI, with a synthwave track I love a bit too much. Turn the volume up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrGNsCsGLGg
Added: the terrain horizon
Helios now knows the shape of the land around your home. It works out the local
skyline from the surrounding terrain (worldwide, with no setup on your part) and
uses it two ways: the sun dims realistically the moment it drops behind a hill
or a mountain, not only at the flat horizon, and a discreet horizon ridge is
drawn around the house. The realistic dimming is always on, so the scene stays
true to where you live; the drawn line can be shown or hidden and recoloured in
the editor. A perfect match for anyone in a valley or the mountains.
Added: state of charge on the battery chip
The battery chip now has a readout option: keep showing live power (the
default), or switch it to the battery's state of charge (%), so a wall
dashboard can show how full the battery is at a glance. It falls back to whichever
value your battery actually provides.
Added: a cost chip
When your Home Assistant Energy dashboard tracks a price, a new cost chip
joins the card: it reads out what your energy is costing you right now, in
your own currency per hour (net of any export revenue), and behaves like every
other chip. Tap it to bring its cost curve up on the timeline and around the
house, and scrub the day to read the cost at any moment. Like the weather chips
it sits along the bottom as secondary information, and you'll only see it if a
price is set in the Energy dashboard, Helios never invents one. It has a fixed,
configurable colour and icon, and a negative rate simply means you're earning
(selling your surplus). It reads Home Assistant's own cost statistics whenever
they exist, so any tariff is handled out of the box, a flat price, peak /
off-peak, Tempo, or a whole-home cost sensor from an integration, each already
priced correctly hour by hour by Home Assistant. A fixed price with no cost
statistic still works, computed as energy times price. Multi-tariff grids
(peak / off-peak, Tempo) are detected automatically, even when you only set a
price per tariff and never an explicit cost sensor: Helios finds Home Assistant's
own per-tariff cost statistics and sums them. And the chip is fully in the
editor now, show or hide it, and pick its colour and icon, like every other
chip. The chip follows the timeline as you scrub (the cost at the hovered
moment, like the other chips), and its day curve around the house now draws
for multi-tariff grids too, not just a fixed price. Open its detail panel for the
cumulative total over the selected period, what you spent, what you earned, and
the net.
Added: the real weather, painted over the scene
The card now shows the weather at your home, resolved for the moment on the
timeline: clear-sky sunshine that dims as the cloud cover builds, an overcast
grey, then rain, snow or a thunderstorm on top. Each layer is driven by a real
measured value (cloud cover, precipitation, snowfall, the weather code), never a
guess, and the whole thing follows the scrub, so you can watch a front arrive
across the day. The sun glow now also fades as the sun nears the horizon, so
sunrise and sunset read honestly.
Added: outdoor temperature and humidity
Two new chips show the outdoor temperature and humidity, grouped along the bottom
of the scene as secondary readings, and behave exactly like the other chips: tap
one to bring its day curve up around the house and its series onto the timeline,
tap again to toggle the curve, with the same detail panel (min / mean / max) and
hover readout.
Temperature scales to its own range so a two-degree swing is legible; humidity
sits on a fixed 0-100 % scale. Thanks to @tfriberg for the suggestion (#332).
Added: local weather sensors override the forecast
If you run a weather station, you can point each weather reading at your own
sensor, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, snowfall, or the
condition from a Home Assistant weather entity, and it takes over from
Open-Meteo for the live and past hours, while the forecast stays on the model.
Added: a locked view that is the same on every device
The viewing angle of a locked card lived in the browser, so it differed from one
device to the next. Turning on Lock rotation now captures the current angle
into the card's configuration in one step: frame the scene in the preview, enable
the lock, and the exact same view is saved and frozen on every device and
browser. Thanks to @ferreto1978 (#310, #353) and @roumano (#363).
Fixed: the grid import/export arrow, definitively
The 2026.8.3 fix for the swapped grid tower icons was itself the wrong way round,
because the MDI icon names are the opposite of what they draw. The arrow now
follows the real flow, points into the grid when exporting and away from it when
importing, everywhere it appears, with a code note so it can't be "corrected"
back. Thanks to @7oku (#356).
Fixed: the battery detail chart now shows your battery names
On a multi-bank install, the battery detail chart labelled its banks "Battery 1,
2, 3…" instead of the names you gave each battery in the Energy dashboard. It now
uses your configured names throughout the per-bank charge, discharge and
state-of-charge rows. Thanks to @tfriberg (#365).
Fixed: cloud shadows stayed round on a narrow card
The drifting cloud shadows were sized to the card's width and height, so on a
narrow or portrait card they stretched into tall ovals. They're now sized to the
card's width on both axes, staying round at any card shape. Thanks to @tfriberg
(#332).
Fixed: the forecast curve could be shifted by the wrong time zone
When your device or Home Assistant server sat in a different time zone from your
home's coordinates (a "server time" setup, or simply browsing from elsewhere),
the weather forecast curve was displaced by the difference between the two zones,
so it no longer lined up with your live production. The forecast times are now
anchored to a fixed reference regardless of where you view the card from, so the
curve always aligns with the moment it belongs to. Thanks to @m1chaelmichael for
the precise report (#366).
Fixed: the production curve could read above your real power
On installations whose production meter reports its energy less often than the
graph's detail (or at an uneven pace), the past-production curve could briefly
climb above the real power your panels can produce - a 2.5 kW-capped array
plotting more than 2.5 kW for a moment. The curve is reconstructed from the
Energy dashboard's energy, and a long report landing in a short slice made the
computed average too high. Helios now spreads each reading across the interval it
actually covers, so the curve never resolves finer than your meter reports and
can no longer overshoot - while the totals still match the Energy dashboard
exactly. Thanks to @ritonbrunis-lab for the clear screenshots (#371).
Fixed: flicker and black screen on some entry-level tablets
On a few low-end wall tablets the whole view could shimmer or recompose between
frames, and a kiosk screenshot came back black. The cause was the same family as
the old half-3D iPad issue: the device's graphics couldn't correctly compose the
tilted 3D ground layer. Helios now recognises those graphics chips and switches
them to a lighter drawing path automatically - no setting to touch, and the 2.5D
look is kept. Thanks to @Richaaldo and @charleslales for the detailed reports (#370).
Changed: the battery now connects to the home, not the solar
The battery used to show a line from the solar chip while charging, which quietly
claimed the charge came from your panels. That isn't always true - an AC-coupled
battery, or one charged from the grid overnight, would be drawn charging "from
solar" even with no sun. The battery is now a single connection to the home, like
every other chip: the flow runs from the battery to the home while discharging and
from the home to the battery while charging, without claiming a source. As always,
the flow's value is your real measured battery power - nothing is invented. Thanks
to @addinsella for the sharp, fair pushback (#355).
Thank you for being here. I'm proud of this one.
ReikanYsora / Jérôme