First beta of 2026.9.4: feature-complete, not merged to main yet. Everything from the alphas, in one place.
Changed: a release dedicated to performance (from a0)
A full audit of the rendering pipeline, every fix re-measured under simulated weak-hardware CPU throttling before it shipped, then re-audited after landing. Timeline scrubbing tracks your drag far more closely (the ground map only repaints when the sky genuinely changes), chip and marker movement is lighter on every device (compositor-friendly transforms, every second frame skipped during a fast spin), the ground map reuses its shapes between redraws, the card recognises when nothing it reads has changed and skips that render entirely (a light bulb three rooms over no longer re-renders it), and a handful of smaller savings (colour lookups resolved once, the sun's heat glow paused when invisible, weather variables only rewritten when they change). Charts and the timeline no longer share cached data between multiple Helios cards on one dashboard. Thanks to @mifritscher2 for the detailed report that pointed at the scrubbing cost (#417).
Fixed: the forecast curve could stay frozen on a stale snapshot (from a1)
The unified store's rebuild check tracked the fetched solar forecast by its point count only, blind to a provider revising past-hour values in place: the curve kept whatever it had at the last rebuild, discarding every later background refetch. It now also tracks the last fetch's timestamp. Traced from @ruteclrp's reports on Helios-Forecast#52 before turning out to be a card-side bug.
Added: the moon, on its own arc, with its real phase (from a2, tuned in a3)
The scene draws the moon: its own arc across the same sky dome as the sun's (dotted below the horizon, solid above), and a disc showing the actual crescent for the current phase, lit toward the sun's position in the scene so it reads right whichever way the camera turns. Position and illuminated fraction come from a compact lunar-position model, no ephemeris library; the phase checks out against documented full and new moons to well under a percent. The moon always paints in front of the sun (the nearer body) and carries no chip and no value: purely cosmetic. moon-display (visual editor, "UI and map" section) picks night only (the default: while the sun is below the horizon), always visible, or hidden. Asked for by @Sniper435 (#408).
Fixed: a fetch-per-render loop for every non-admin viewer, since 2026.9.3 (from a2)
The 2026.9.3 fix that stopped retrying the rejected Energy-preferences subscription for non-admin users (#415) skipped the subscription but forgot to leave its guard set, so the one-shot preferences fetch re-ran on every render, indefinitely, on every dashboard a non-admin user views. The guard now holds after the first fetch.
Fixed: the battery sign guard now covers installs with several batteries (new in b0)
Helios cross-checks a battery's live power sensor against its charge and discharge meters and corrects a sensor whose sign convention contradicts the slot it was wired into (a charge-positive sensor set to "Standard", say). That check only ever ran for a single battery: with two or more it switched itself off, so a backwards sensor stayed backwards on the live chip and in the flow while the history, built from the meters, stayed right. It now judges each battery against its own meters and flips exactly the sensor(s) that need it, inside the sum, so a correct second battery is never turned around with a wrong first one. Single-battery installs behave exactly as before. Thanks to @bernhard2901 for the screenshots that pinned this down (#422).
Fixed: the sunrise and sunset markers no longer paint over the chips
The two horizon-crossing markers (glyph + local time) shared the chips' own layer and came later in the paint order, so one landing under a chip covered its value. They now sit just below the chips and still above the weather, so a downpour never dims the times either.
To test: in HACS, open Helios, click the three dots > Redownload, and pick 2026.9.4-b0 from the version dropdown.