The third alpha of the full controller. As before, this is for the curious. If your garden depends on Smart Irrigation and you do not want surprises, stay on v2026.10.8.
What changes for everyone on this version
These apply with or without the full controller.
- The water balance is replayed in five-minute steps. The hourly replay of alpha2 put an hour's rain at its start and drained it for the whole hour, even when it fell in its last minutes. Each rain reading now also says when the reading before it was taken, and its rain is spread between the two, over an hour at most. On a soil above field capacity with a fast drainage, a rainy evening now keeps the water it should: on one real evening of 12.8 mm over five hours, the bucket ends at 6.5 mm where it ended at 5.6. No extra reading or API call. Thanks @Megalos for the analysis (#931).
- A weather entity of Home Assistant can be your weather service. DWD, Met.no, KNMI, the NWS or any other weather integration you already have: its current values and its forecast, converted from Home Assistant's units, with solar radiation and reference evapotranspiration from Open-Meteo. It only forecasts rain, so give your sensor groups a rain sensor; the panel says which groups still need one. Thanks @johnnyh1975 (#928).
- A sensor that goes silent is noticed for wind and pressure too, and a weather service that goes silent no longer lends its last values to the calculation.
The fixes of the stable releases v2026.10.7 and v2026.10.8 are in this alpha too: the fixed amount that added water instead of removing it, the setup assistant's fixed amount, the blueprints (#926, #930), a forecast that could not be read, and the OpenWeatherMap and Pirate Weather requests.
The full controller
- Each zone can set how long its valves have to confirm, and how often the open is sent again (advanced mode, with a linked valve). For a cloud valve that confirms slowly and counts every command against a quota, such as Gardena, a longer wait and no resend avoid a false "out of sync" and a valve reopened after the run gave up. Left empty, nothing changes. Thanks @johnnyh1975 (#927).
- The MQTT hardware dead-man is verified on a Sonoff SWV with zigbee2mqtt (firmware 1.0.4): unplug the coordinator in the middle of a run and the valve still closes on time. Thanks @Moharmate (#893).
Trying it
In HACS, turn on "Show beta versions" for Smart Irrigation, update, restart Home Assistant, and reload the browser so the panel is the new one. 2897 Python tests and 107 panel tests pass.
Feedback is welcome in the issues, good or bad, with the log if something goes wrong. 🌱