ha-paneld is retiring, long live Panel Assistant!

[maxlyth]

Actually not entirely but I'm not likely to talk about it any more. The project has transmuted and is now, primarily, an integration to Home Assistant, not just an Android app. The new project will be called Panel Assistant and you can find out more about it on it's new website.

ha-paneld is still a key part of the solution but running everything 'on-panel' was restricting some of the ideas I had for the future and seeing as all the panels connect to HA, that seems the logical place to move the install, command and control. To be clear Panel Assistant is still open and free but starts from a new Git repo with zero star count so please help out.

ha-paneld will continue to evolve but it is only part of the machine and new features will be announced on the Panel Assistant repo going forward. I am aware that this current repo was more than ha-paneld as I had collected extensive documentation on various hardware panels through technical analysis. Those documents live on and the new home is better than before with a content management where the community can edit and add their own knowledge to these pages without me acting as the gatekeeper.

Currently Panel Assistant is at v0.4.0 and that just barely covers the previous feature-set but a large part of that is a migration away from MQTT. During versions up to v1.0 there is code in the product that helps migrate existing users and you entities IDs and history should be retained. The help my loyal first users I have written documentation that explains the migration process for my loyal users.

I look forward to seeing you all on the new Panel Assistant repo and website (don't forget to star)

[xionc666]

I am a bit confused. I have only one panel, so managing fleet of panels is not a thing for me. I am also quite cautious about what I install from HACS - the less the better. Reliability of HA is a key for me. Will I still be able to use ha-paneld moving forward as a standalone android app with its own web interface, or will the new release eventually go via HACS integration only?

ps. Your development pace is so fast - is it a full time task?

[maxlyth]

You are correct to be cautious about what you install from third parties but core HACS is highly curated and the admission rules and requirements are very high and can take months. For that reason Panel Assistant uses the HACS mechanism but with a manually Github repo. We don't expect to receive official approval for a while.

ha-paneld is moving away from being a standalone Android install, and going forward it will need the Panel Assistant integration to talk to Home Assistant and the best panel installer/update experience will be far superior. This is because the standalone route depended on a bash installer run from your computer, which shut out most Windows users and anyone with only a phone.

MQTT is also being removed in favour of a more capable and flexible custom websocket connections which is delivered on the server end by the Panel Assistant integration. The HA integration is not about fleet management and it works just as well for one panel as for 10, however because Panel Assistant integrates with HAs native update mechanism you get to update your panels just like you update firmware and many of your other IoT devices, directly through the HA UI.

Yes I am full-time on the project, I am lucky enough to be retired and have a very understanding family. Pace will slow as I am just one man. The migration to an HA integration has taken a lot of work which is why there have been much fewer releases recently. I am hoping to release 0.9.8 this weekend which will have full support for Panel Assistant and migrate users configurations away from MQTT. This will be the last standalone release that will still function with MQTT and even that I can't vouch for as all the 0.9.8 testing has been on the migration and new transport.

[maxlyth]

An extra point that I did not make above is that the Panel Assistant installer does not call the existing Bash install scripts. It is a greenfield re-implementation of the lessons learned in the Bash script. I have not covered all the corner cases of the old installer, but that was already becoming hard to maintain and I had no clear way to translate it into other languages.

The network installer is rewritten in Python, and while a lot of it is streaming shell commands over ADB, I can use Python's native error handling and HA's i18n mechanisms for language support. The USB installer runs in the browser, so that part is JavaScript, but it is the same approach and no Bash is involved.

[maxlyth]

Panel Assistant 0.6.x has shipped

This is a big one for us and we have been working feverishly over the last 2 weeks to get this released. This version marks the official beginning of the full migration to Panel Assistant as an HA integration with all deployment, upgrades and UI/config accessed within the HA environment. The ha-panel project will continue but the Android app is subsumed as a component of Panel Assistant. We are starting with a new repo so don't forget to star the new project on Github.

Along with Panel Assistant the version of ha-paneld has been bumped to 0.9.8. This version supports both the current (retiring) MQTT transport and the new WebSockets based transport. I have put a lot of work into migrating your existing entities, while retained their histories etc. It might not be perfect but shoudl save you a bunch of work in the migration.

I am planning to remove all MQTT code from the next version of ha-paneld so 0.9.8 is a key version to handle the migration.