November 2020 Releases

We have a number of small releases today, mainly quality of life changes - performance improvements and such.

The only major work here is around our Autonomous Agent feature, this lets you build managed finite state machines that can manage components on your machines without RPC interaction. This underpins our Scout checks and helps in IoT scenarios etc.

Today we’re adding 2 new watchers, an Apple HomeKit Button and a Timer. The HomeKit button is interesting in home automation scenarios where a Choria Autonomous Agent can appear to your Apple devices as a button that you can toggle from your Apple Home apps. Combined with the timer it’s possible to create an override button for HVAC, Fans etc that interrupts a normal managed schedule for a while. For example when watching a movie I don’t like having my extractor fan on, using any Apple device I can now set a 2 hour override, after 2 hours normal scheduled activity resumes so I don’t need to remember to re-enable the extractor.

In future releases we’ll add a Timer based maintenance window to Scout checks using the timer watcher.

We’re starting to work on supporting Puppet 7, progress is being made (thanks Tim!) but I think we have some way to go.

Special thanks to Tim Meusel and Romuald Conty for their contributions in this release.