2026.9.2
A performance and reliability release, mostly about running clean on real devices:
Android WebViews stop flickering during rotation, with a manual Compatibility
rendering option for the phones and tablets the automatic detection still misses,
and the scene turns smoothly again on entry-level hardware while drawing lighter
overall. Alongside it, a handful of correctness fixes settle real edge cases (an
inverted battery sign, the live flow direction, a coarse-cadence cost chip, a
Firefox console warning, a stale Helios-Forecast curve after switching to
Yesterday), and energy totals can now be set to their own Wh/kWh unit, independent
of live power.
Fixed: an inverted battery power sensor no longer reads backwards
2026.9.1 added an automatic correction for battery power sensors reported with
the opposite sign. It could turn on a battery you had already set to "Inverted"
in the Home Assistant Energy dashboard: it re-flipped the already-correct reading,
so the battery ran backwards and the live home-consumption chip was inflated. The
correction now judges the sign the card actually shows (honoring your Energy
dashboard's normal / inverted choice) rather than the raw sensor, so a correctly
configured inverted sensor is left alone while a genuinely mislabeled one is still
fixed. Thanks to @FoxP.
Fixed: the house and timeline follow the live flow direction
The home tint and the timeline border take the colour of the selected chip, but
for the grid and battery chips they used the period's dominant direction. So the
house could read "discharging" (blue) while the battery was charging right now
(purple), and the same for grid import versus export. They now follow the live,
instant direction, matching the chip and the flow, in both live and scrub. Thanks
to @FoxP.
Fixed: no more Firefox console warnings from the GPU probe
On Firefox the card logged two console messages, a deprecation warning for
WEBGL_debug_renderer_info and a "WebGL context was lost" notice, from the one-off
probe that reads your GPU to choose the right rendering path. The probe now reads
the standard RENDERER where the browser exposes it (Firefox) and no longer
force-frees its throwaway context, so the console stays clean. No change on other
browsers. Thanks to @FoxP.
Changed: a lighter idle and cheaper redraws
First pass of a performance sweep. The rain and snow canvases now pause when the
card scrolls off-screen (they kept animating before), the particle loops no longer
measure the layout on every frame, and the buildings and shadows are redrawn only
when the scene actually changed instead of on every frame. The card runs cooler
and lighter, especially on a wall tablet or a busy dashboard.
Changed: smooth rotation on entry-level tablets
Entry Android GPUs (and the Home Assistant app / kiosk WebViews) fall back to a
compatibility renderer because a GPU-drawn basemap corrupts into colored noise on
those drivers. That path re-projected the whole map on the CPU every frame, so
rotating the scene dropped to a few frames per second. It now keeps the fast GPU
rotation on a CPU-rasterized basemap, which dodges the corruption while staying
pixel-correct, so the scene turns smoothly on those devices too. Thanks to
@beatschubser (#383).
Changed: a lighter map that flickers less on Android tablets
On Android WebViews (the Home Assistant app, kiosk browsers) the scene could flicker
while rotating or panning. The "your real sky" weather grade was applied as a CSS filter
over the map, which forced the whole 3D scene to re-draw every frame on those devices.
The grade is now painted straight into the ground and buildings, which removes that
per-frame cost on every device and calms the flicker on many of them. Some phones and
tablets still flicker on the 3D-transformed map, though, which is what the new
compatibility rendering option below is for. Thanks to @Aaroneisele55 (#396) and
@charleslales (#370).
Added: a compatibility rendering option for devices that still flicker
If the map still flickers or tears while you rotate it, the new Compatibility
rendering toggle in the card options draws the ground with a simpler, more compatible
method (no 3D transform, a per-frame redraw instead) that avoids the glitch, in exchange
for slightly less smooth rotation. It is off by default: the automatic detection handles
most devices on its own, and this is the manual fallback for the ones it misses.
Fixed: the energy diagram stays readable while the scene turns
With auto-rotation on, the sun path and the irradiance readout swept in front of the
day's energy diagram, so you had to wait for the rotation to come round before you
could read it. The diagram now always draws on top of the sun path. Thanks to
@beatschubser (#397).
Fixed: the cost chip no longer flips to zero between meter reports
For a grid meter that reports on a coarse cadence (every 15 minutes, say), Home
Assistant's cost sensor only steps when the meter does, leaving the buckets in between
at zero. The cost chip read those as a real 0.00/h, so it flickered between the true
rate and zero while you were genuinely importing. It now recognises the meter's
reporting cadence and holds the last report's rate between updates, while a meter that
has genuinely stopped still falls to zero. Thanks to @Rag30 (#395).
Fixed: switching to Yesterday could still show a narrower forecast window
With a Helios-Forecast source
configured, switching to a period reaching further into the past than the one
already loaded, most commonly the Yesterday tab, could keep showing the
forecast fetched for the narrower period for up to five minutes: the fetch was
throttled purely by elapsed time, not by whether the cached data actually
covered the newly needed window. The card now re-fetches immediately whenever
the requested past window grows, instead of waiting the throttle out on stale
data. Home Assistant's built-in solar forecast (Forecast.Solar, Solcast, ...)
is unaffected either way: that API never returns past days, so it still cannot
show a forecast for a day already gone. Thanks to @FoxP (#406).
Added: a separate unit for energy totals
power-unit (W / kW) used to set the energy totals' unit too, kW pairing with
kWh and W with Wh, with no way to pick one independently of the other. A new
energy-unit option (Wh / kWh / Auto, the visual editor's "Energy unit")
lets you set the day curve, the detail panel and the timeline's day totals on
their own, for example precise W chips alongside kWh totals. Auto (the
default) keeps today's behaviour, so an existing card reads exactly the same
until you pick a unit here. Thanks to @zigomatichub (#407).