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2024.5: Just a little bit smaller

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
1 mai 2024 à 00:00

Home Assistant Core 2024.5! 🎉

The last two releases were massive! With our new drag ’n drop dashboards and the tools to organize your Home Assistant instance, it is hard to top those releases… 😅

So, this release is just a tiny bit smaller than those two, but still epic! 🤘

My personal favorite is the new features added to the data tables, which many of you requested since the last update. But the ability to change the names of the devices shown on the energy dashboard is a close second!

Oh! We’ve held our State of the Open Home 2024 live stream! In case you’ve missed it, I would definitely recommend watching it back. There are tons of cool things and spoilers in there!

But more importantly, it launched the Open Home Foundation, which now governs our beloved Home Assistant project! ❤️ Read more in the State of the Open Home 2024 blog post.

Anyway, I will not hold you any longer. Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 1 May 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PST / 21:00 CEST!

More features for our data tables

In our last release, we introduced new data tables and we were thrilled to see that you all loved them! 🎉

However, we also received a lot of feedback for additional tweaks and features, so we’ve added a bunch of them in this release. 😎

One of the most requested features of these new tables’ new item grouping was the ability to collapse them, and we’ve added that!

Screenrecording showing items grouped in our data tables can now be collapsed. Each item group can now be collapsed and expanded.

Another one concerned the ability to select and assign an area to multiple items at once in the automation, scene, script, and device pages. We’ve added that too!

Not only that, we now store the last used grouping (and if they were collapsed or not) and sorting you have used, so when you return to that page, it will be the same as you left it.

Screenshot showing the device page with multiple items selected. They can all be assigned to an area with a single click.

Last but certainly not least, we’ve added the ability to group and filter entities by their domain in the entities panel. As the domains represent the type of entity, this means you can group and filter, for example, all your lights, switches, sensors, etc.

Screenshot showing the new group and filter by domain functionality on the entities page.

Create helpers directly from the automation editor

Our good friend @karwosts has been busy creating a great quality-of-life improvement for our automationAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] editor for this release.

I’m sure you’ll know this feeling. You are creating an automation and think: “Hey, I need a helper for this!” But then you have to leave the automation editor, create the helper, and then go back to the automation editor.

Well, not anymore! You can now create helpers directly from the automation editor 😎

In this example, a timer helper is created directly from the automation editor without leaving it:

Lock features for the tile card

The tile card is already amazing, but @marcgeurts made it even better by adding new features to the tile card: Locks!

When you now add a lock entity to the tile card, and if your lock supports it, you can now add two new features to the tile card:

  • Lock commands
    Adds buttons to your tile card to lock or unlock the lock.
  • Lock open door
    Adds a button to open/unlatch the door (with confirmation).
Screenshots showing different tile cards with the new lock features.

Reorder features of the tile card

Some features of the tile card, such as the presets or the HVAC modes of a thermostat, can show many buttons. While you can limit the buttons you’d like to see, they may not be in the desired order.

To improve this, @karwosts and @piitaya have added the ability to reorder the features of the tile card. For your thermostat, that means you can now reorder the HVAC modes or presets to your liking.

Screenrecording showing how you can now reorder the HVAC modes on the thermostat shown in a tile card.. You can now reorder the features of the tile card.

Adjust the device names on the energy dashboard

Another outstanding quality-of-life improvement from @karwosts is the ability to customize the display name for energy devices on the energy dashboard.

The entity’s name representing the device you use on the energy dashboard commonly contains additional or redundant information. With this new feature, you can customize the display name to make it more meaningful.

For example, if the entity is named “Attic Boiler Daily Energy Usage” and is shown as that today, you can now change the name displayed on the energy dashboard to just “Boiler”.

Screenshots showing you can now assign a different display name to the energy sensor of devices that show on your energy dashboard.

You can adjust the name of each monitored device in the energy dashboard setting page by going to Settings > Dashboards > Energy > Individual devices.

Improved audio with ESPHome for Assist

If you’re familiar with Assist, our private voice assistant, and are using it on an ESPHome-based device (like an ESP-S3-BOX-3 or the ATOM Echo), chances are you have experienced one of the biggest barriers to date when it comes to using it on a daily basis: chopped-off audio. 😞

More often than not, the responses sent to the voice assistant device were missing a few parts, most notably at the beginning and the end of the audio. This was very noticeable when the responses were short, such as asking how many lights are on in a home or the room temperature.

In conjunction with the latest release of ESPHome (2024.4), we are bringing a much improved and more reliable communication between ESPHome and Home Assistant for transferring voice audio, guaranteeing no audio is lost in the process.

Hear the difference in this side-by-side comparison:

In addition to updating to this release, be sure to update your ESPHome devices to the latest version to benefit from this improvement.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • Have you ever had a misbehaving (custom) integration cause a crash? This release introduces new detections and a new debug mode to catch known/common unexpected integration behavior. Thanks, @bdraco!
  • The ESPHome integration now supports date, time, date/time, valve, and event entities! The latter two require the upcoming ESPHome 2024.5.0 release. Thanks @jesserockz, @kbx81, and @nohat!
  • The MQTT integration has reached the highest quality scale: Platinum! Thanks @jbouwh, for all the work you have put into this!
  • The visualization graph for all Zigbee devices connected via ZHA has been improved by @Cougar. Devices now have colors to indicate their availability, signal strength, and relationship to other devices, which are much clearer. Nice!
  • The Glances integration got new sensors for network traffic, disk I/O, GPU, and uptime. Thanks @fhoekstra & @wittypluck!
  • @Lash-L added a service to the Roborock integration to easily get map information from your vacuum. Awesome!
  • The Airzone cloud integration now supports water heaters. Thanks @Noltari!
  • @joostlek added an extract media URL service to the media extractor, allowing you to get a media item’s source URL. Nice!

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more.
[Learn more] in this release:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more.
[Learn more] are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.5.1 - May 3

Release 2024.5.2 - May 6

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more.
[Learn more] are also no longer available as of this release:

  • Epson Workforce has been removed. The source package/dependency this integration uses, is no longer available. (@joostlek - #115201)

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.5

Thinking Bigger: State of the Open Home 2024

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
24 avril 2024 à 00:00

We recently held our State of the Open Home 2024 live stream, where we revealed how we are thinking even bigger about securing the future of the smart home. During this stream we launched the Open Home Foundation, a new non-profit organization created to fight for the fundamental principles of the smart home — privacy, choice, and sustainability — focused on serving everyone that lives in one. To learn more about the Open Home Foundation read the full announcement.

The stream includes a deep dive into the evolution of Home Assistant and how it has now reached an estimated 1 million installations. There were other substantial updates on voice and hardware, including teasing our upcoming Z-Wave and voice assistant hardware. The first panel discussion featured the founders of Open Home Foundation collaborating projects WLED, Zigbee2MQTT, Rhasspy, and Z-Wave JS. A second panel gave a comprehensive overview of the state of open standards, featuring key open-source developers working on Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Bluetooth. The stream caps off with a look into the future of the open home, including the announcement of a roadmap full of exciting new features.

Full list of chapters:

  • Introduction (0:00:11)
  • Announcing the Open Home Foundation - Paulus Schoutsen (0:02:36)
  • Panel with Open Home Foundation collaborators - WLED, Zigbee2MQTT, Rhasspy, Z-Wave JS (0:18:31)
  • Voice - Michael Hansen (0:36:31)
  • Home Assistant - Franck Nijhof (0:53:08)
  • Hardware - Uwe Bernitt (1:21:37)
  • Panel on Open Standards - Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, Bluetooth (1:40:21)
  • Future - Madelena Mak (2:07:29)
  • Closing (2:37:33)

The Open Home Foundation now owns and governs over 240 open-source projects, standards, drivers, and libraries, including Home Assistant - protecting these projects from buy-out or becoming abandoned. To learn more about the Open Home Foundation, visit: www.openhomefoundation.org

2024.4: Organize all the things!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
3 avril 2024 à 00:00

Home Assistant Core 2024.4! 🌱 🌻

Are you ready for another massive release? This release addresses the most requested feature in Home Assistant history: grouping automations! 🎉

But why stop there?

This release brings excellent new features to our user interface that house not one, not two, but three! new ways to organize your Home Assistant setup! The best part is that it is not just for automations, but for everything! 🤯

Perfect timing: spring is here! Time to spring clean your Home Assistant setup by adding some organization to your configuration! 🧹

Enjoy the release! 🌞

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 3 April 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PST / 21:00 CEST!

Home Assistant spring cleaning! 🧹 New ways to get your automations (and more) organized

By far, the most requested feature in Home Assistant history would be:

“Grouping Automations on frontend for organization”.

We hear you! Today, in this release, we are going to give you tools to organize your Home Assistant setup, and we took it a few (well, many) steps further than just grouping automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more]!

We are introducing 3 (yes, you’ve read it correctly. It’s three) organization taxonomies, and we revamped our entire table user interface plus a few goodies along the way.

Upgraded tables!

Adding more ways to organize your Home Assistant is great! But being able to easily view, filter, and navigate information is just as important. To achieve this, we have re-designed ALL the tables in Home Assistant.

For an admin interface, tables are essential for visualizing and managing large datasets. Home Assistant has many tables in its settings pages. Previously, our UI provided the ability to search, sort, and filter for a few aspects, but it was relatively barebones.

Today, we are rolling out a revamped table UI that will be standardized across all tables in the settings pages with new and improved features.

A new toolbar

As we add more features to the tables, we need to keep the UI clean and its features easy to find. Therefore, we added descriptive text to the dropdown menus and standardized the look and feel of the toolbar buttons and text boxes. Shiny!

Screenshots showing the new toolbar that is now on every table in Home Assistant. The new toolbar that is now on every table in Home Assistant.

Filter panel

Previously, our automations page allowed you to filter by areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room., entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more], or devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. , but only one at a time, and the filters were tucked away in a dropdown menu, which meant you needed to select a dropdown menu inside a dropdown menu to filter by area.

A new filter panel fixes these issues by providing a new dual pane user interface that can let you check multiple filters across multiple filter types on the left that stay put and view the filtered results on the right.

Screenshots showing the filter panel that tables can have, allowing you to easily find what you are looking for.

We also introduced multiple new filter types for each table. For example, automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] can now be filtered not only by areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room., entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] , or devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. , but also by used blueprintsA blueprint is a script or automation configuration with certain parts marked as configurable. This allows users to create multiple scripts or automations based on the same blueprint, with each having its own configuration-specific settings.
[Learn more], labels, and categories (more on these later!).

We didn’t stop at just that page! The devices and entities pages now also have a way to filter not only by state but also by integrations and areas. Almost all tables now have useful new filters to help you find what you are looking for.

Item grouping

Browsing a list of hundreds of automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] or thousands of entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] can be overwhelming. While filters can help narrow the list, visually grouping the items into smaller chunks makes browsing easier.

With the item grouping feature, we introduced a new dropdown menu to pick how you’d like the items on the table to be grouped. On the automations page, you can group automations by their stateThe state holds the information of interest of an entity, for example, if a light is on or off. Each entity has exactly one state and the state only holds one value at a time. However, entities can store attributes related to that state such as brightness, color, or a unit of measurement.
[Learn more] - whether enabled or not - and custom categories (more on that later!). On the devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. page, you can even group them by manufacturers, areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room., or integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more.
[Learn more], which is really cool because it makes the page much easier to browse. It gives you a new perspective on organizing your vast network of devices.

Screenshots showing the devices page, grouped by manufacturer.

Selection mode and batch actions

We removed the clutter of displaying a column of checkboxes by introducing a new selection mode. When it is toggled on, checkboxes will appear, and you can apply actions to all your selections with one click on the toolbar.

Screenshots point out the enable selection mode button in the toolbar of the tables in Home Assistant. This button enables selection mode in the new tables.

It allows you to, for example, enable or disable multiple selected entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] on the entities page at once. This new paradigm will allow us to introduce more batch management actions in the future.

Screenshots showing selection mode active in a table, with some items selected, highlighting the bulk actions you can perform on those selected items.

Three new ways to organize

Upon reading through and ideating on the feature request thread on “Automation Grouping”, we realized that organization can be done in multiple ways for different purposes.

We learned that users who are proficient in making automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] have hundreds of them, which makes locating a particular automation hard. They often had to resort to using “hacks” such as emojis, bracketed “tags”, or numbering each automation to get the sort order they wanted. They needed a way to easily filter down and break down the giant list into more manageable chunks.

We also noticed that users are stretching our areas feature beyond its intended purpose. For example, some users would create “areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room.” such as “3D printer”, “Christmas decorations”, or even “Left side of my office desk”, to group different devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. and entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] together under one umbrella for dashboards or automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more].

As we are developing our new dashboards and voice commands, this poses a big problem: We would be unable to provide specialized solutions if a dashboard blueprintA blueprint is a script or automation configuration with certain parts marked as configurable. This allows users to create multiple scripts or automations based on the same blueprint, with each having its own configuration-specific settings.
[Learn more] or automation blueprint cannot confidently assume the context of how it would be used. We need something more specialized.

Therefore, to balance the basic goal of providing a more digestible UI for all users, the need for flexibility for our power users, and the future vision of Home Assistant, we are introducing 3 new organization structures to Home Assistant:

Floors, Labels, and Categories

Floors: Help Home Assistant understand your house

Let’s talk about the new organizational structures, starting with floors.

To become a truly intelligent home automation platform, Home Assistant needs to understand the context: Where exactly is a deviceA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. ? How does one areaAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room. relate to another? What is the space used for?

Currently, Home Assistant has areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room.. Areas specify the physical location or vicinity of your devices per living space in your home (like the living room or kitchen). However, some users living in standalone houses might have multiple floors with their own areas.

FloorsA floor in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of areas that are meant to match the physical floors in your home. Devices & entities are not assigned to floors but to areas. Floors can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions. For example, to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed. are a new way to organize your areas per level of floors in your home. The better Home Assistant knows your home and how it is spatially structured, the better it can help you. Especially when it comes to future features like generating dashboards, voice commands, and maybe even AI-related features.

Screenshots showing areas settings page, which now also shows the areas grouped by floor.

You can use floors in your automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] and scriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more] as a target for your actions or control them with your voice. For example, you can turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed or ask Assist to turn on the lights upstairs.

For our power users, you can even use floors in your templates to create the most advanced and creative automations.

Labels: Tag everything any way you want

FloorsA floor in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of areas that are meant to match the physical floors in your home. Devices & entities are not assigned to floors but to areas. Floors can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions. For example, to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed. and areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room. are great for representing your actual home, but as everyone has their own ways of organizing their home, everyone has their own ways of organizing their Home Assistant, too! This is where labels 🏷️ come in!

Labels is an organizational structure that is completely up to you. You can make as many labels with any naming structure, in any color 🌈 you want, and assign them to basically anything in Home Assistant. You assign labels to anything: areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room., devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. , entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more], automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more], scriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more], helpers, you name it! You can even assign multiple labels to the same thing.

Screenshots showing the new labels assigned to automations.

Just like with floors, you can use labels in your automations and scripts as a target for your actionsActions are used in several places in Home Assistant. As part of a script or automation, actions define what is going to happen once a trigger is activated. In scripts, an action is called sequence.
[Learn more]. This gives you a lot of flexibility, not just in organizing your Home Assistant, but also in automating your home! 🤯

For example, you could create a label “🎄 Christmas” to label all your Christmas decorations during the holiday season. You can then use this label to automate all of those decorations at once or to filter them in the new tables.

More examples? You could create a label “🔒 Security” to label and control all your security-related devices and automations. Or, “🛌 Bedrooms” to label all your bedroom areas and simultaneously control all the devices in those areas.

Do you have solar panels or home batteries? Create a label “⚡️ Heavy energy usage” to label devices that consume a lot of energy. You could switch them off when there is not enough battery or solar energy available.

You decide how to use labels, and the possibilities are endless! And for our power users, you guessed it, you can use labels in your templates.

Categories: Make each settings page easier to browse

Last but not least, we are introducing categories. Categories are designed to be paired with the aforementioned item grouping feature, and it can be used to group things visually specific to a certain table in Home Assistant.

This is great for those who have a particular way of displaying their entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] by separating them into multiple sections on a specific page. For example, on the automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] page, you can create categories only used for visually grouping automations but nowhere else, like “Notifications” or “NFC tags”. You can then view your automations grouped or filtered by those categories.

Screenshots the new categories. Automations are grouped into their categories, making it easier to get an overview or to filter them.

As these categories are unique for each dashboard, you can have different sets of categories depending on the place you are organizing. This means you can have different categories on the automations page than the sceneScenes capture the states you want certain entities to be. For example, a scene can specify that light A should be turned on and light B should be bright red.
[Learn more], scriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more], or helpers settings page.

Time to clean up your Home Assistant!

In summary, there are a total of 4 taxonomies for organizing your entities. It sounds like a lot, but they all serve a distinct purpose. We are extending and clarifying areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room. with floorsA floor in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of areas that are meant to match the physical floors in your home. Devices & entities are not assigned to floors but to areas. Floors can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions. For example, to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed., and we are introducing labelsLabels in Home Assistant allow grouping elements irrespective of their physical location or type. Labels can be assigned to areas, devices, entities, automations, scenes, scripts, and helpers. Labels can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions and services. Labels can also be used to filter data. and categoriesA category is an organization tool that allows grouping items in a table. Like labels, categories allow grouping irrespective of the items’ physical location. For example, on the automations page, you can create the categories “Notifications” or “NFC tags” to view your automations grouped or filtered. Categories are unique for each table. The automations page can have different categories than the scene, scripts, or helpers settings page. to make your automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] and many other tables look more organized and be more manageable.

What’s next? Time to dig in! Here are a few steps we recommend you take action on to organize your Home Assistant better:

  • Migrate to labels:
    • If you have been grouping automations with emojis and bracketed text, you can now create labels for each. Labels can have icons to replace the emojis you had before.
    • For areas that aren’t really physical spaces, switching them to labels will provide you more flexibility in organizing your entities.
  • Start using categories:
    If you have a favorite way of organizing a particular page, create those categories and group the table by them. For example, you could create a notification category for all your notification automations and put all notification automations in that category.
  • Group your areas into floors:
    If you live in a multi-story home, grouping areas into floors help with organizing the areas as well as making them more compatible with future features.

Last of all, to help us to help you to perfect the design of these new features, we would love to hear your feedback and see how you use them! Please feel free to share them in the comments below and discuss them in our community.

Map dashboard

Introducing a new dashboard this release: The map! 🗺️

You might think, “Hey, we already have a map dashboard in Home Assistant!” and you are right! However, the map was an integration that was always there and didn’t provide the flexibility and features that were wanted.

With the map dashboard’s introduction, you can now add multiple map dashboards with different entities and configuration settings. For example, create a dashboard to show the location of your family members, another to track your car, and another to show the location of your pets. 🐶

Screenshots showing the new map dashboard you can add when you add a new dashboard to your Home Assistant.

On upgrade, Home Assistant will automatically migrate your existing map integration to a map dashboard.

You don’t like having the map in your sidebar? Well, that is no longer a problem. Since it is now a dashboard it means you can remove it in the dashboard settings.

Webpage dashboard

Another new dashboard for this release is the webpage! 🌐

The webpage dashboard allows you to add and embed a webpage to your dashboard. This could be a web page from the internet or a local web page from a local machine or device like your router or NAS.

Screenshots showing addition of a new webpage dashboard to Home Assistant, embedding the Home Assistant website.

This dashboard replaces the old iFrame panel (iframe_panel). If you have existing panels configured in your YAML configuration, Home Assistant will automatically migrate them to the new webpage dashboard on upgrade.

Screenshot showing the Home Assistant website embedded into the Home Assistant frontend using a webpage dashboard.

Note that not every webpage can be embedded due to security restrictions that some sites or pages have in place, enforced by your browser, that prevent embedding them into a Home Assistant dashboard.

Define the columns in the section view

In the last release, we introduced the section view with drag and drop support. We are absolutely thrilled to see how many of you loved it! 🥰

Many thanks for all the feedback and suggestions! We are prioritizing them and are working on making the section view even better in the upcoming releases.

In this release, based on your feedback, we have added the ability for you to define the maximum number of columns that the section view uses. This allows you to limit the number of columns, regardless of the screen width on which you are viewing your dashboard.

Screenshot showing the new option available to limit the number of columns the section view uses.

Adding Matter devices from other controllers

In the February release, we added support for sharing Matter devices tied to Home Assistant with other Matter controllers. This release, we are making the other way around easier.

We have improved how you can add Matter devices from other controllers to Home Assistant. When you add a Matter device to Home Assistant, it will now ask you if you want to add a new Matter device or if you want to add a device that is already added to another controller (like Google Home or Apple Home).

Screenshot showing the dialog to add a Matter device, asking if this is a new or existing matter device connected to another controller.

Suppose you choose to add a device that has already been added to another controller. In that case, Home Assistant will guide you through how to achieve this step by step.

Screenshot showing the dialog to add a existing Matter device that is connected to another Matter controller.

Lock behavior improvements

Some smart locks have an open (or unlatching) mechanism that can be triggered remotely. The door either pops out of the lock or can be opened by pushing against the door.

We want to ensure you don’t accidentally open the door when you miss-clicked the button (for example, while not at home 😬). Therefore, we have improved the behavior of locks in our user interface by requiring you to confirm the action.

Screen recording showing the confirmation in the UI when unlatching/opening a door.

Even more performance!

Remember how we wrote last release that Home Assistant now boots twice as fast? Well, @bdraco wasn’t done yet and teamed up with @balloob. If you thought the previous release was fast, you are in for a treat! 🚀 The difference is, yet again, very noticeable.

Besides streamlining what is loaded at startup (and doing less loading), we have adjusted the startup time tracking. It used to be that one integration could push other integrations to be slow too; that should no longer be the case, making this a more accurate representation of the actual startup time.

Want to learn about the individual startup times of your integrations? You can find them in the Settings -> System -> Repairs page by selecting the three-dotted menu in the top right and selecting the Integration startup time item.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • @karwosts has improved your Home Assistant user profile page, making navigating and finding the settings you are looking for easier. Nice work!
  • If you use a sentence trigger in your automation to trigger it using Assist. The trigger will now include the device_id in its trigger data you can automate with. Thanks, @synesthesiam!
  • The HomeWizard Energy integration now supports the newest generation of HomeWizard Energy Sockets! Thanks, @DCSBL!
  • We can now ship new releases of Home Assistant in waaay less time. Building and shipping Home Assistant for you, went down from 1.5-2 hours to just 20 minutes! 🚀 Thanks @edenhaus!
    Learn more about it in our developer blog.
  • Reolink now supports PTZ patrol start/stop, package detection and controls for playing quick reply messages. Thanks, @starkillerOG!
  • We have brand new template functions available to list all the issues in your repairs dashboard. Thanks, @RoboMagus!
  • If you prefer your wind speed sensors to be in Beaufort, you are in luck! You can now change the unit of measurement to Beaufort. Thanks, @fwestenberg!
  • The Husqvarna Automower integration development continues and has additional new entities, including sensors, select entities, and a device tracker. Thanks, @Thomas55555!
  • @catsmanac has added a sensor to monitor the battery storage attached to your Enphase Envoy; it works with the energy dashboard! Nice!
  • The Xiaomi BLE integration now supports locks and fingerprint readers! Awesome, @Ernst79!

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

  • Fyta, added by @dontinelli
    Monitor your plants with Fyta, a smart plant sensor that measures light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture.
  • Motionblinds Bluetooth, added by @LennP
    Control your Bluetooth Low Energy Motionblinds motorized window coverings.
  • Ollama, added by @synesthesiam
    Ollama a fully local AI conversation platform that can be used to create custom voice assistants.

This release also has new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integration have been added:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.4.1 - April 5

Release 2024.4.2 - April 8

Release 2024.4.3 - April 12

Release 2024.4.4 - April 23

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

  • OpenCV has been removed. The integration has been in a broken state for over a year and currently has no path forward. (@thecode - #113455)

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.4

And the winners of our voice assistant community contest are 🥁 ...

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
16 mars 2024 à 00:00

2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We organized a contest to celebrate what our voice assistants could enable with the community. The contest entries have been all amazing, the work produced outstanding. Personally, I learnt so much just reviewing all the entries, I learnt that our community is so creative and relentless. My personal project list grew quite a lot as I want to implement half of the entries at home! Today is the day we announce the winners!

It is important to note that while Year of the Voice is over, voice is now part of Home Assistant just like automations or dashboards. The sharp focus is over, but voice will get updates forever, just like every other part of Home Assistant.

The contest was split into 4 categories:

  • Most creative satellite ideas
  • Best Starting Guides
  • Best events organized, best group effort
  • Best voice experiences

You can read more about the contest specifics in the blog post announcing the contest.

Due to a lack of entries, we removed the category “Best events organized, best group effort”.

Most creative satellite ideas

The competition was the most fierce in that category!

On the one hand, it pleases me to see how many of you managed to create something unique, quirky, and creative using our voice assistant functionalities. This means that our voice assistant is indeed aligned with our value of Choice. On the other hand, it made picking a winner even more complex 😬.

So without further ado, the winner of the “most creative satellite ideas” category is dirtyharriv and their Bender Voice Assistant.

Congratulations on your entry! Your voice assistant embodies perfectly what we think when we talk about choice: Custom wake word, custom voice, in-character responses, a beautiful 3D printed case, LEDs… It’s perfect!

Dirtyharriv wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

Best Starting Guides

Again, lots of entries in this category, it amazes me to see how many of you tried hard to provide something that could be re-used by other members of the community, whether it was a device that you can purchase, hack, or build yourself, or a series of videos you can follow to set something up in your own home.

Building something is already hard, but building something to offer it to others is even harder. This category was, to me, the category with the biggest amount of work done by the contestants, congratulations to you all.

The winner of the “best starting guides” category is landonr with their homeThing S3.

The homeThing blew us away, it’s an iPod-style remote for your home that ticks so many boxes: Rotary dial, screen, IR blaster, microphone, speaker, battery …

Everything is open source, up to the custom PCB that landonr created. The ESPHome configuration is open source. This is the perfect device to have in your home!

Landonr wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a few runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

Best voice experiences

This category was not about hardware, it was about providing the best software experience that elevates the voice experience in Home Assistant. I had the most fun reviewing this category because most of the entries can be re-used at home without any particular hardware! Instant improvement of my system!

The winner of the “best voice experiences” category is dinki with their View Assist.

View Assist is a complete UI for Assist running on an old Android tablet that tries to replicate the UI of devices such as an Amazon Echo Show. It is very complete and well-documented, and I think can be a candidate for fully replacing a screen-based voice assistant such as an Amazon Echo Show or a Google Nest Hub.

Dinki wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

I want to give a small shout-out to one of the runner-up: Lajos and their improvement of the S3 Box firmware to display text, you did something I personally considered impossible in the S3 box, and never tried to implement it because of this false assumption. Seeing your entry pushed me to give it a try and I am happy to announce that very soon, the official voice assistant firmware for the S3 boxes will allow everyone to display the spoken text of the request and the response on the screen.

Community choice

We also asked you to vote for your favorite entry, the votes were fierce but one entry skyrocketed above the rest.

It is my pleasure to announce that the community vote is Rellu and their HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant.

HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant is an impressive voice experience that creates on-the-fly AI-generated videos of characters as visual feedback for Assist. The video that Rellu provides in his entry is really complete, with the ability to change characters and language directly via voice. Great job!

Rellu wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

Thank you

Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and the development of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects in general.

We will contact all winners and runners-up in the next few days to organize shipping. We are looking forward to having the winners on the livestream with us on the 10th of April.

I hope you enjoyed this first Home Assistant contest, rest assured that it won’t be the last.

JLo, Over and Out.

2024.3: Drag 'n Drop it like it's hot! 🎉

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
6 mars 2024 à 00:00

Home Assistant Core 2024.3! 🎉

Yes, you read the title right! I’m super stoked about this one. It has been talked about for ages… I promise it is real:

Drag ’n drop for dashboards is finally here! 🎉

A first experimental version of the section dashboard that supports drag ’n drop. A tremendous step forward and an even bigger milestone for Home Assistant!

But don’t be blinded by these Dungeons ’n Dragons; there is a lot more!

New intents for Assist (I can finally tell my vacuum to start cleaning!), using script inputs/fields from the dashboard, and a new energy graph for individual devices. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: A big thanks and shoutout to @bramkragten & @balloob for organizing and running the beta and everyone who helped out making these release notes happen during my absence this beta. 🥰

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 6 March 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

A new experimental sections view

Our dashboard currently comes with three view layout types: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry. Since the past year, we have been working hard to research and ideate on how to make dashboards easier to customize and use, and we learned that our current layouts are not the best for such purposes. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards cannot work well with the Masonry layout.

We came up with a few solutions, and the first thing we would like to share with you is a new view layout type called “Sections”.

Home Assistant dashboards are robust and packed with information. Users will often place dozens of cards for all sorts of buttons, switches, graphs, indicators, and more.

Example of a dashboard section Example of a dashboard section

By grouping cards into “sections”, you can reduce the number of items you need to scan through when you are looking for a certain card, as you’ll be able to look for the relevant group title first and then reduce the scope to scan that particular group for the information.

By packing cards in a section into a grid with a fixed number of columns, the relative positions of the cards within a section are not affected by changes in screen sizes, and so the spatial memory of the cards is retained, leading to a faster and less cumbersome experience.

A fully populated dashboard in Sections view layout A fully populated dashboard in the Sections view layout

Cards in the new sections view type are all aligned in a tidy grid to ensure consistency and predictability of their positions when the screen size changes. We currently have three cards reworked to fit the grid: Tile, Sensor, and Button cards. These cards will occupy the right amount of space in the grid, while other cards will occupy the full width of a section by default at the moment. Moreover, we have tweaked our “Add Cards” dialogs to recommend Tile cards by default when the sections view type is in use.

The new Sections view is experimental! Please do not build your daily dashboard on top of it yet! We are releasing this early so that we can collect your feedback.

To get started with the new Sections view type, create a new view on your dashboard and select Sections (experimental) as the view type. We currently do not have the option to migrate your current dashboard over yet.

For more information, check out our blog post about our new series A Home-Approved Dashboard: Chapter 1.

Amazing work! Thanks Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!

Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards and sections!

Wow! At long last!! The stars have aligned, and our experimental drag-and-drop feature for dashboards is finally here! 🥲

With the new sections view type, we can finally implement a way to arrange cards and sections that is intuitive with drag-and-drop gestures and predictable with how the cards will rearrange while creating a dashboard that is easy to navigate and remember. You will no longer need to pray and guess where the cards will land when they change their order!

How to drag and drop

While your dashboard is in edit mode:

Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange sections, tap and hold the Edit icon Move handle and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location. Other sections will move out of the way for where the selected section will drop.

Rearranging cards with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange cards, tap and hold anywhere on the card and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location.

Don’t you love it when instructions are so short? Simplicity FTW! 🦄

Thanks again Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!

Running script from your dashboard with user input

ScriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more] in Home Assistant allow you to capture a sequence of actions and choices in a reusable way. Scripts are extra powerful because they can have input fields, allowing you to send in data for when the script runs.

Script fields can be defined in the script editor and show up when you call the script in your automation. In this release, script fields will be available in the more info dialog when tapping a script on a dashboard.

This allows you to provide the input fields and run the script, unlocking a whole new dimension of possibilities.

To accompany this new functionality, we’ve created two blueprints to help you get started with using scripts on your dashboard:

Announce message: This blueprint allows you to create an announce script for your dashboard pre-configured to a specific media player and text-to-speech engine. When activated, it will ask the user for the message to play.

Add to to-do list: This blueprint allows you to create a script to add an item to a to-do list pre-configured to a specific to-do list. When activated, it will ask the user for the item to add.

New energy graph for individual devices

Digging into your energy data is a very interesting way to find ways to reduce your household’s energy usage and environmental footprint. 🌱

One of the missing bricks was the ability to see the energy consumption of individual devices over time. Thanks to @karwosts, we have a brand new graph on the energy dashboard that provides this insight!

Using this new graph, you can now easily spot which devices are responsible for which part of your energy usage over time.

Screenshot showing the new energy stacked bar graph of individual devices over time.

For example, in the above picture, it is very easy to see that the dishwasher was responsible for the morning spike and the oven for the spike in the evening.

New sentences for Assist

Assist, our private voice assistant, learned a few tricks this month.

Support for valves has been added. You can now ask Assist to adjust the position of a valve, or just open or close a valve completely.

Also, cover support has been extended to support the control of the position of your devices. Currently, most languages only support a single use-case as a starting point. Setting the position of a single device by targeting its name:

Set the curtain position to 80%

We are working on extending the use-case coverage to set the position of multiple devices or complete areas, similar to what is possible with the open and close sentences.

Screenshot showing a few of the new Assist commands.

The next new trick could be considered a bug fix: Until today it was not possible to start or stop a vacuum cleaner by voice; Now it can! Assist knows how to start a vacuum and return it to its base. Here are some example sentences, in case you have a vacuum cleaner named Dusty:

Start Dusty

Return Dusty to base

The biggest set of changes is for media players. Assist can now pause playback, resume playback, skip to the next media, and set the volume of media players!

Be aware that currently, these sentences are limited to targeting a single device by its name, for example:

Skip to the next song on the TV

We are actively working on extending the logic of these new intents to allow you to target areas and only affect the desired media player(s).

Disabling the remote activation of the Home Assistant Remote UI

If you are using Home Assistant Cloud, you can access your Home Assistant instance remotely using the Remote UI feature.

Suppose this feature is, for some reason, disabled, and you are currently not at home. In that case, you can enable the Remote UI feature remotely by logging into your Nabu Casa account and request your Home Assistant instance to turn it on.

Feedback from the community has shown that this feature is not always desired, and this release adds a new option to disable the remote activation of the Remote UI feature. Once disabled, the Remote UI feature can only be enabled locally from your Home Assistant instance.

Screenshot showing the new advanced option that allows disabling remote activation of the Home Assistant remote UI.

Translating states in your templates

Are you using templatesA template is an automation definition that can include variables for the service or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions.
[Learn more] to send notifications in automations? If so, @PiotrMachowski might just have added something new you need!

A new template method, state_translated, to translate entity states directly from your templates! Consider this template example:

# Untranslated
{{ states("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }}  # Shows: on
{{ states("sun.sun") }}  # Shows: below_horizon

The above example shows the raw state of two entities. However, with the new state_translated method, you can get the state in a human-readable form:

# Translated
{{ state_translated("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }}  # Shows: Detected
{{ state_translated("sun.sun") }}  # Shows: Below horizon

Even better, it uses the default language of your Home Assistant instance. So, if you use Home Assistant in a different language, the translated state will be in that language.

Home Assistant boots twice as fast

In case you didn’t know, every release @bdraco improves the performance on some aspect of Home Assistant. He has been on it for a long time and keeps pushing to improve it.

As a matter of fact, it has become so regular that we don’t always highlight his enormous efforts toward this goal in our release notes. Sorry! 🙏

However, in this release, his efforts are so noticeable that we wanted to call it out: Home Assistant now boots on average twice as fast! 🚀

That is a huge improvement @bdraco!! Thank you for your continuous work on making Home Assistant faster and faster! ❤️

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • The climate entity now has a toggle service (climate.toggle). Thanks @arturpragacz!
  • Matter lights now support transitions, nice! Thanks, @marcelveldt!
  • We heard you like downloading CSVs! So, we added the ability to download the energy dashboard data to a CSV file now as well! Thanks @karwosts!
  • After feedback and reports on the automatic Zigbee device firmware updates introduced in a previous release, this release brings a stricter and more robust update system to ZHA. Thanks @dmulcahey & @puddly!
  • The Tessie integration now provides charging and range sensors. Thanks @Bre77!
  • myUplink devices can now be updated directly from Home Assistant. Awesome @astrandb!
  • DuneHD media players now support browsing media files and playing them. Thanks @iliessens!
  • The Bring! now brings in a new “recently” list. Nice @miaucl!
  • @lellky added setpoints as number entities for fans to the Flexit Nordic (BACnet) integration, thanks!
  • The dialog to adjust long-term statistics now has automated outlier detection! That is a very smart and helpful addition. Thanks @karwosts!

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has new virtual integrations. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integration us now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.3.1 - March 14

Release 2024.3.2 - March 22

Release 2024.3.3 - March 22

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.3

A Home-Approved Dashboard chapter 1: Drag-and-drop, Sections view, and a new grid system design!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
4 mars 2024 à 00:00

Wow! At long last!! The stars have aligned, and our experimental drag-and-drop feature for dashboards is finally here! 🥲

Home Assistant strives to be the best smart home platform, and a smart home allows its residents to automate, control, observe, and anticipate the comfort, security, and various conveniences of their home. Besides voice assistants, dashboards are also a great way to help users do just that!

Therefore, we have been working hard to make customization and organization of dashboards as easy and intuitive as possible, and to create a default dashboard that will be more useful, user-friendly, and relevant right out of the box. Matthias and I teamed up in April last year to tackle this problem together, and we called this series of improvements over our current dashboard “Project Grace”, named after the influential and brilliant late Admiral Grace Hopper.

After months of user research and ideation to ensure that our design is “home-approved” - to be easy and intuitive to use for you, your family, your guests, your roommates, and more - we are happy to share the first fruit of our success in the upcoming release 2024.3, with the help of Paul and of course the wonderful frontend team. We hope that these features will help you take the dream dashboard for you and your home from idea to reality much faster and much more easily.

For those of you who are curious about the features and the design thinking behind them, read on and check out our special livestream last week. You can also try out our updated demo and get involved by joining the Home Assistant User Testing Group! And last of all, thank you for supporting our efforts by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud!

Enjoy!

~ Madelena 🥳

What is Project Grace?

Grace was the codename we used for the series of improvements to be built on top of Lovelace, the framework for our dashboards. We aim to preserve the strengths of Lovelace, such as its flexibility and extensibility, and to mitigate its weaknesses, such as its steep learning curve, its lack of scalability, as well as the poor responsiveness of its layouts.

The three-layout problem

The three basic view layouts: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry The three basic view layouts: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry

Our dashboard came with 3 default view layout types by default: Panel, which is simply one card covering the entire view; Sidebar, which is a two-column layout for cards; and Masonry, which is the most robust of them all.

While it is excellent at creating a tightly-packed screen space-saving dashboard, Masonry lays out cards in a logic that may not be immediately clear and predictable to many users, which leads to a frustrating user experience to create and customize the layout of the cards. And as the layout logic depends on the height of each card, the varying heights of the cards available for our dashboards become a blessing and a curse: Even a difference in height of 1 pixel would mean a card one would guess to be displayed on the leftmost column getting shifted all the way to the right.

Image showing how masonry arranges cards based on size. Masonry arranges cards based on size.

What’s more, unlike most other smart home apps, Home Assistant prides itself on Choice. In terms of dashboard view layouts, Choice means that dashboards should be able to be displayed on any screens that are the most convenient to our users - whether it’s a phone, a tablet, a large monitor, or other display devices. While the Masonry layout is great at making neat walls of cards, as its name also implies, it is a wall of cards which does not care whether the bricks are laid, thus the muscle memory of where users remember the cards will be lost every time the dashboard is displayed on another screen.

Masonry does not care about where exactly cards are placed when the screen size changes. Masonry does not care about where exactly cards are placed when the screen size changes.

For the past few years, we tried to create a more intuitive solution to rearrange the cards laid out by Masonry but ultimately the solutions did not work well for multiple screen sizes. Meanwhile, our users come up with solutions of their own, with many avoiding our default view layouts so that they can create a more predictable and memorable dashboard. As it turns out, “drag and drop” is not just an engineering problem; it is also a design problem.

To solve these problems with our layout, we realized that the Masonry layout, compatibility with multiple screen sizes, and easy “drag and drop” rearrangement of cards cannot co-exist. Over the past year, we ideated and identified a few solutions, namely:

  1. a new Sections view layout
  2. a design grid system, and
  3. a “Z-Grid” auto-rearranging pattern.

Let’s dive in each solution and learn how they work together to make your dashboards easier to customize and use!

The new Sections view

Case studies of our users' dashboards Case studies of our users' dashboards

Throughout this project, we have looked at dozens of different dashboards created by you and posted on our discussion boards. One thing we notice is that our more advanced users are all naturally drawn to creating “sections”, groups of different cards delineated by a group title, manually with grids and markdown cards.

Home Assistant dashboards are robust and packed with information, and our users often place dozens of cards for all sorts of buttons, switches, graphs, indicators, and more. By grouping cards into “sections”, our users can reduce the number of items they need to scan through when they are looking for a certain card, as they will be able to look for the relevant group title first and then reduce the scope to scan that particular group for the information. And by packing cards in a section into a grid card, the relative positions of the cards within a section are not affected by changes in screen sizes, and so the spatial memory of the cards are retained, leading to a faster and less cumbersome experience.

Example of a dashboard section Example of a dashboard section

For our new Sections view, we are making these sections as the base unit of the view and we are streamlining its creation and editing procedures. Users will not need to fiddle around with grid cards and markdown cards to assemble a section manually, and instead a section now comes with all those amenities and much more.

Getting started with Sections

The new Sections view is experimental! Please do not build your daily dashboard on top of it yet!

The Create New View configuration screen The Create New View configuration screen

To get started with the new Sections view, create a new view on your dashboard and choose Sections (experimental) as the view type. We currently do not have the option to migrate your current dashboard over yet.

If you are using the default dashboard, please read about how to create a new dashboard.

A new dashboard view laid out in Sections A new dashboard view laid out in Sections

You will be greeted by a clean new dashboard view, with one section already created for you.

  • To add a new section, select the Create Section button. Add Section button

  • To edit the name of a section, select the Edit icon Edit button on the top right of the section. (Tip: You can add any descriptive text for your section, including emojis!) When the section does not have a name, the section header will be hidden.

  • To delete a section, select the Delete icon Delete button on the top right of the section. You will be asked to confirm the deletion.

Filling it up

A fully populated dashboard in Sections view layout A fully populated dashboard in Sections view layout

There are multiple ways to add cards into a section and populate your dashboard:

Responsive design

One major benefit of the new Sections view is that it is now much easier to build dashboards that work with multiple screen sizes.

Sections view adapt nicely to different screen sizes. Sections view adapt nicely to different screen sizes.

The view will rearrange the sections according to the amount of space available horizontally, while the number of columns of cards within each section stays the same, thus preserving your muscle memory of where the cards are located.

The grid system

Our current dashboard views are organized in columns with cards of varying heights, and with masonry layout by default. As cards can vary in height in small amounts, it becomes hard to predict where cards will “land” when one moves a card to another column, or when screen size changes and moves all the cards, such as when viewing a dashboard on tablet vs on mobile. This creates friction in the customization experience of the dashboards.

Enter the grid system, a bastion of graphic design principles.

Examples of grid systems in use Examples of grid systems in use

Typographic grid systems have a long history in modern graphic design and print publishing, starting from its rise in the early 20th Century during the Constructivist and Geometrical art movements in Europe, which concerns the hidden rhythm behind a visual image. They are easily repeatable and, therefore, practical for generating an infinite amount of pages, yet also ensure aesthetic proportions and consistency for printable matter. They also bring order to a page. It helps users understand the relationship between each element on the page and whether one element belongs to another.

The Home Assistant dashboard grid system The Home Assistant dashboard grid system

When a UI is designed with a structured layout, that feeling of structure and organization comes through to the user in their first impression.

By introducing a grid system with cards of regular row height and column width multiples, we can help users rearrange cards more easily in a predictable manner, make Home Assistant adapt the dashboards to different screen sizes more easily, and, of course, make dashboards look tidier and more aesthetically pleasing.

Cards currently optimized for the grid system: Sensor card, Tile card, and Button card Cards currently optimized for the grid system: Sensor card, Tile card, and Button card

To implement the grid system, we are now in the process of standardizing the widths and heights of our cards, starting with the Tile card, Button card, and Sensor card. These cards will occupy the right amount of space in the grid, while other cards will occupy the full width of a section by default at the moment.

For card developers, we will have more information on how to adapt your custom cards to the grid system soon.

Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards and sections

With sections and a grid system in place, we can finally implement a way to arrange cards and sections that is intuitive with drag-and-drop, predictable with how the cards will rearrange, while creating a dashboard that is easy to navigate and remember by visualizing the information hierarchy and not disturbing the spatial relationship between cards. Users will not need to pray and guess where the cards will land when they change their orders anymore!

Comparison of four card arrangement methods Comparison of four card arrangement methods

Throughout the design process, we looked at a few different ways of how cards should be arranged. Ultimately, we chose the “Z-Grid” due to its simplicity, predictability, and memorability as the default, despite it may take up more space than other solutions. The Z-Grid works simply by laying out sections from left to right, and starting a new row when the row is full. The heights of the rows are determined by the tallest section on the row, while the width of the columns remain constant for responsive design.

How to drag and drop

While your dashboard is in Edit Mode:

Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange sections, simply tap and hold the Edit icon Move handle and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location. Other sections will move out of the way for where the selected section will drop.

Rearranging cards with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange cards, tap and hold anywhere on the card and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location.

(Don’t you love when instructions are so short? Yay to simplicity! 🦄)

What’s next? Get involved!

The new Sections view with drag-and-drop is just the first step of Project Grace, a Home-Approved Dashboard. We have a good idea of where we want to head next in our design and development process, but we want to hear from you first before we proceed so that we can prioritize and build a product that will help you the most.

To get feedback from all of you and your household members, we decided to release this early in its incomplete form as an experiment for you to try out the new Sections view. For those who are curious, feel free to check out our updated demo to play around and have fun!

We want to make sure that the new default dashboard will not only work for you, but also everyone who lives in your home. We would love to hear what they think as well. Please do not hesitate to leave your comments below!

Join the Home Assistant User Testing Group!

From time to time, we will send out user tests to help us make the harder product and design decisions we identify. By joining our user testing group, you will help steer the direction of our product and will also get a sneak peak of potential designs that are work in progress.

Please fill out this form to join the Home Assistant User Testing Group!

Big thanks to all the folks who joined us for user interviews, Lewis from Everything Smart Home for sharing his treasure trove of dashboards for our case studies, and of course, the fabulous Nabu Casa team. 💖

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading. Can’t wait to show you what’s next!

~ Madelena

Raspberry Pi 5 support and more in Home Assistant OS release 12 & Supervisor update

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
26 février 2024 à 00:00

TL;DR: Home Assistant OS 12 adds support for Raspberry Pi 5 and ODROID-M1S boards, with the Linux kernel updated to 6.6. Additionally, backups have become faster, and add-ons can now signal when they should not be auto-updated.

Raspberry Pi 5

With the release of Home Assistant OS 12, we officially announce Raspberry Pi 5 support! Many Home Assistant OS users have extensively tested the preview releases during the last few months, and after some initial hiccups with the Raspberry Pi 5-specific update mechanism, things are stable and solid today. As a third of all Home Assistant users currently use a Raspberry Pi board as their dedicated Home Assistant system, we are sure this support will make many users very happy!

Compared to other Raspberry Pi boards, HAOS does not use U-Boot as an extra bootloader. Instead, the Raspberry Pi’s built-in “tryboot” functionality is used to automatically fall back to a previous release in case of an update failure. This new update mechanism integration required us to have a longer testing phase.

In our testing, the higher CPU clock of the Raspberry Pi 5 (up to 2.4GHz) makes Home Assistant feel noticeably snappier compared to previous Raspberry Pi boards. Additionally, a Raspberry Pi HAT that provides NVMe SSD support allows you to extend your Raspberry Pi with fast, reliable, and cost-effective storage. We do recommend using an SD card as the boot medium and using the data disk feature to move most of the Home Assistant installation onto the NVMe. This is easy to set up and guarantees a reliable boot.

ODROID-M1S

The Raspberry Pi 5 is not the only new board that is supported with this release. We are happy to announce that the family of supported ODROID devices from the Korean manufacturer Hardkernel has become bigger thanks to a community contribution from Tim Lunn (darkxst), who implemented board support for the ODROID-M1S. The ODROID-M1S is the newest single-board computer from Hardkernel, which is similar to the already supported ODROID-M1, which was added in Home Assistant OS 10. This new board offers a slimmer form factor, 4 or 8 GB of RAM on board, and an embedded 64 GB eMMC storage. Home Assistant OS can be booted either from an SD card or the system can be flashed to the eMMC card using the procedure described in the documentation. While the board also has an NVMe slot for a solid-state drive, it is not supported as a boot device. However, just like on the Raspberry Pi 5, it can still be used as the data disk.

Just like its larger brother, the ODROID-M1S is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A55, but while ODROID-M1 has (very slightly) beefier Rockchip RK3568 SoC, this board sports the RK3566. Some of our more curious readers may notice this is the same processor that is found on our Home Assistant Green! While there are some similarities between those two boards, Home Assistant Green can offer you a seamless out-of-box experience, allowing you to set up your smart home in a matter of minutes. But Home Assistant is also about the freedom of choice, so if you are looking for a more DIY approach, ODROID-M1S might be the right choice for you.

Linux 6.6

Home Assistant OS 12 now comes with Linux kernel 6.6! This is good news for those who want to run their Home Assistant on newer hardware that lacked support in the previous 6.1 kernel. This version update also allows us to extend the list of supported Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, including ones you may find in new mini-PCs, a popular platform for Home Assistant OS. Those who run their installations on a Raspberry Pi (including the CM4 in Home Assistant Yellow) may notice their kernel version still starts with 6.1. This is because we are not using the upstream kernel but the downstream one maintained by the Raspberry Pi developers. But this kernel was also updated to the latest stable version, which we hope will resolve some sporadic bugs.

Home Assistant OS sticks to the LTS (long-term support) kernels, which are usually released once per year - just like Buildroot, the base system we use for Home Assistant OS. This time, we are slightly ahead of schedule, because usually the kernel update is done alongside the bump of the Buildroot version. But don’t worry, the Buildroot update is coming soon as well, and we expect to include its update in one of the next minor Home Assistant OS releases coming in the following weeks. This will conclude this year’s spring cleaning of Home Assistant OS, and we will be ready to focus on new features and improvements again!

Faster Backups

Home Assistant Supervisor and Core’s built-in backup functionality has become much faster. Thanks to contributions from bdraco, the backup feature gained faster compression speeds due to a library named isal, which provides optimized low-level functions for compression and decompression. More importantly, the backup feature now avoids intermediate copies, making it faster on slower storage media especially. If you used uncompressed backups before because the backup used to be too slow for you, now is the time to give compressed backups a try again! 😀

Comparison of the speed of a 100MB backup on a Home Assistant Yellow, between Supervisor 2023.12.1 and 2024.02.0.

Home Assistant OS users’ backup functionality is part of Supervisor. You’ll have received the improvements incrementally over the releases of the past few weeks. At the time of writing, your installation should run on Home Assistant Supervisor 2024.02.0 with all these improvements built in.

Safer add-on auto-updates

Last, but not least, the Supervisor features an auto-update flag for add-ons. However, depending on the nature of an update to the add-on, the new version might need user intervention or have breaking changes. Add-on developers now have the option to prevent auto-updates to such versions. Users of the auto-update feature might see an update notification despite auto-updates being enabled. This means that the author of the add-on decided that this particular update should not be auto-updated and instead be manually approved by the user.

Note: We generally don’t recommend auto-updates for add-ons, as even safe updates might interfere with regular operation. For example, during the automatic update of an add-on like Z-Wave JS, your Z-Wave devices would unexpectedly become unavailable for a short time. The better approach for such add-ons is to plan some time to maintain your Home Assistant system every once in a while and update your add-ons in a batch.

What about Grace? Tune in to our special livestream next week!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
22 février 2024 à 00:00

Who is Grace? Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, mathematician, and US Navy admiral who had made significant contributions to the field of computer programming and technology, from her pioneering work on and contributions to the Harvard Mark I computer, COBOL, and UNIVAC I.

Why is she important to us? Well, we have a habit of naming some of our projects after influential women in tech. And we have been working on a little something nice for the past year that we can’t wait to show you!

For those who are interested in making your smart home easier to control and monitor for everyone in your home, tune in next week on the leap year day, February 29, 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET / 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT, for a special livestream. We will walk you through the past, present, and future of this special project.

On device wake word on ESP32-S3 is here - Voice: Chapter 6

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
21 février 2024 à 00:00

TL;DR: We have added on-device wake word detection (microWakeWord)! It’s faster and more scalable than processing the wake word in Home Assistant. We will keep supporting wake word processing in Home Assistant. Also new is more customization for sentence triggers, additional intents for controlling more devices, and better error messages and debugging tools.

Watch the full Voice chapter 6 livestream

2023’s Year of the Voice built a solid foundation for letting users control Home Assistant by speaking in their own language.

We continue with improvements to Assist, including:

Oh, and “one more thing”: on-device, open source wake word detection in ESPHome! 🥳🥳🥳

Check out this video of the new microWakeWord system running on an ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside one doing wake word detection inside Home Assistant:

On-device vs. streaming wake word

microWakeWord

Thanks to the incredible microWakeWord created by Kevin Ahrendt, ESPHome can now perform wake word detection on devices like the ESP32-S3-BOX-3. You can install it on your S3-BOX-3 today to try it out.

Back in Chapter 4, we added wake word detection using openWakeWord. Unfortunately, openWakeWord was too large to run on low power devices like S3-BOX-3. So we chose to run wake word detection inside Home Assistant instead.

Doing wake word detection in HA allows tiny devices like the M5 ATOM Echo Development Kit to simply stream audio and let all of the processing happen elsewhere. This is great, as it allows low-powered devices using a simple ESP32 chip to be transformed into a voice assistant even if they do not pack the necessary power to detect wake words. The downside is that adding more voice assistants requires more CPU usage in HA as well as more network traffic.

Enter microWakeWord. After listening to an interview with Paulus Schoutsen (founder of Home Assistant) on the Self Hosted podcast, Kevin Ahrendt created a model based on Google’s Inception neural network. As an existing contributor to ESPHome, Kevin was able to get this new model running on the ESP32-S3 chip inside the S3-BOX-3! (It also works on the, now discontinued, S3-BOX and S3-BOX-Lite)

Kevin has trained three models for the launch of microWakeWord:

  • “okay nabu”
  • “hey jarvis”
  • “alexa”

You can try these out yourself now by following the ESP32-S3-BOX tutorial. Changing the default “okay nabu” wake word will require adjusting your ESPHome configuration and recompiling the firmware, which may take a long time and requires a machine with more than 2GB of RAM.

We’re grateful to Kevin for developing microWakeWord, and making it a part of the open home!

Sentence trigger responses

Adding custom sentences to Assist is as easy as adding a sentence trigger to an automation. This allows you to trigger any action in Home Assistant with whatever sentences you want.

Now with the new conversation response action in HA 2024.2, you can also customize the response spoken or printed back to you. Using templating, your response can refer to the current state of your home.

You can also refer to wildcards in your sentence trigger. For example, the sentence trigger:

play {album} by {artist}

could have the response:

Playing {{ trigger.slots.album }} by {{ trigger.slots.artist }}

in addition to calling a media service.

You can experiment now with sentence triggers, and custom conversation responses in our automation editor by clicking here: Open your Home Assistant instance and show your automations.

Improved errors and debugging

Assist users know the phrase “Sorry, I couldn’t understand that” all too well. This generic error message was given for a variety of reasons, such as:

  • The sentence didn’t match any known intent
  • The device/area names didn’t match
  • There weren’t any devices of a specific type in an area (lights, windows, etc.)

Starting in HA 2024.2, Assist provides different error messages for each of these cases.

Screenshot showing the new errors Assist will return in case the intention is understood, but something else is missing.

Now if you encounter errors, you will know where to start looking! The first thing to check is that your device is exposed to Assist. Some types of devices, such as lights, are exposed by default. Other, like locks, are not and must be manually exposed.

Once your devices are exposed, make sure you’ve added an appropriate alias so Assist will know exactly how you’ll be referring to them. Devices and areas can have multiple aliases, even in multiple languages, so everyone’s preference can be accommodated.

If you are still having problems, the Assist debug tool has also been improved. Using the tool, you see how Assist is interpreting a sentence, including any missing pieces.

Open your Home Assistant instance and show your Assist developer tools.

Our community language leaders are hard at work translating sentences for Assist. If you have suggestions for new sentences to be added, please create an issue on the intents repository or drop us a line at voice@nabucasa.com

Thank you

Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support voice and development of Home Assistant, ESPHome and other projects in general.

Thanks to our language leaders for extending the sentence support to all the various languages.

Thank you for supporting the Home Assistant project

Voice - Chapter 6 Livestream

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
16 février 2024 à 00:00

Even though our Year of the Voice has ended, that does not mean the development of our voice assistant has stopped! We’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on since Chapter 5 last year during our Chapter 6 livestream on Wednesday, February 21st, at 21:00 CET / 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT.

Want to get a sneak peek of what you can expect from this chapter? Well, remember the hype around chapter 4? Get ready for more of that!

If you can’t wait to get more hands-on with our voice assistants, join the Voice Assistant contest! You can win Home Assistant Green, Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a chance to be on a livestream with us to talk about your work. Watch our contest livestream, where we explain how each component of our voice technology works and guide you through building your own voice assistant, and take a look at the current entries!

Nabu Casa joins the Z-Wave Alliance

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
15 février 2024 à 00:00

TL;DR: We have joined the Z-Wave Alliance, thanks to revenue from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, and will start the certification process for Z-Wave JS.

Z-Wave is a local smart home standard that has been around since 1999. Thanks to operating on sub-Ghz frequencies, it is able to create a reliable mesh network that can span your whole house. Its reliability also made it popular to power brands like Yale locks and Amazon Ring. The Z-Wave standard is developed by a consortium of companies under the Z-Wave Alliance.

With Home Assistant, we have integrated Z-Wave since our early days. We first relied on OpenZWave until we transitioned in 2021 to using Z-Wave JS created by Dominic Griesel. Z-Wave JS is a fully open-source implementation of the Z-Wave protocol. Combined with Home Assistant and a Z-Wave USB stick, it gives our users the best possible Z-Wave experience. Dominic is employed by Nabu Casa and can work full-time on Z-Wave JS thanks to the revenue generated from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers (thank you!).

We have thoroughly tested Z-Wave JS with the Home Assistant community. Our community is from all over the world and has access to a wide variety of Z-Wave devices from all generations. This has ensured that Z-Wave JS is able to deal with devices and their quirks all the way back to the original Z-Wave release.

However, our ambitions for Z-Wave JS are bigger than just making sure we have a rock-solid Z-Wave implementation for you. We want to make it easier for companies to develop Z-Wave controllers and grow the Z-Wave ecosystem. A bigger ecosystem is more appealing for manufacturers to make Z-Wave devices, which results in more choices for our users. And as Z-Wave works locally, it is a local choice.

Today, we are proud to announce that we have joined the Z-Wave Alliance to get Z-Wave JS officially certified. Certification shows other companies that Z-Wave JS is a full and correct implementation of the Z-Wave standard. It will allow other companies to feel confident that they can adopt Z-Wave JS to integrate Z-Wave into their products. HomeSeer, for example, has announced that it is migrating its platform to Z-Wave JS. We hope this will open up new opportunities as more companies follow our lead in the future.

The Open Home

With Home Assistant, we have a vision for the smart home that we call the Open Home. It revolves around three core values: privacy, choice, and sustainability. Anything that lives up to those values is worthy of being adopted by our community. It’s why we have previously joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) to take part in the development of Matter and Zigbee, and have now joined the Z-Wave Alliance.

Z-Wave aligns with these three values: your data remains local, you can combine Z-Wave devices from any manufacturer, and devices will continue to operate even if the company behind them is no longer around. It is an important standard for the Open Home.

This is why, even though Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter are competing standards, we have joined both the Z-Wave Alliance and the CSA and will keep supporting each standard. Not every smart home is the same. Users need to have choice and be able to pick the standard that works best for their home. And competing standards push each other to improve and innovate, ultimately leading to all standards becoming better for users.

As part of the Z-Wave Alliance, we plan on bringing our unique insights as an open source community to the table. We want to make sure that the future direction of the Z-Wave standard continues to remain true to our Open Home values. Just like we do for Zigbee and Matter within the CSA.

2024.2: More voice, more icons, more integrations, more... everything!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
7 février 2024 à 00:00

Home Assistant Core 2024.2! 🥰

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard about last year’s “The Year of the Voice”. 2023 might be over, but we are definitely not done with voice yet! This release contains some very cool new features for voice.

Not just that, we’ve also launched a voice assistant contest that you could join, and I’m happy to inform you that we will have another voice-related live stream on 21 February 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET: Chapter 6!

But there is more in this release besides voice! There’s drag ’n drop magic for our automation editor, and you can now update Zigbee devices directly from Home Assistant. We also have icons in more places 🤩, and quite a lot of new functionalities for Matter devices.

In general, contributions to our open-source project have been amazing this month. I’ve never seen so many contributed bug fixes, improvements, and new features in a single release. Like… 21 new integrations! This is, without a doubt, the largest release we’ve ever put out. A big shout-out to everyone who helped! ❤️

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Oh! And don’t forget Valentine’s Day is coming up! 😘

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 7 February 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

Better drag & drop support for automations

Let’s start with some old-fashioned drag ’n drop magic! 🪄

As of this release, dragging and dropping triggers, conditions, and actions in the automation editor are always enabled. Previously, you had to explicitly enable re-ordering in the automation editor settings, but now, it is just always active.

But even more exciting is that you can now drag and drop elements into other nested elements! For example, you can now drag a condition into the condition of an if-then or choose action. 🤯

Screen recording showing you can now also drag and drop into nested elements in the automation editor.

Export data from the history dashboard

The following feature might be small, but it is a big deal for many. Home Assistant stores your data privately and locally; it is your data. To make this data more accessible, we’ve added a new feature to the history dashboard.

You can now download the data you are viewing in the history dashboard. This allows you to further analyze the data in, for example, Excel or to visualize it in other ways.

The button will export and download the data you currently view in the history dashboard as a CSV file.

Screenshot showing the new export button in the top right of the history dashboard.

Thanks for this one @balloob!

Improved error responses when using Assist

If you use Assist, our private voice assistant, you may have noticed that its responses were not meaningful when something was not understood.

Some of the errors encountered while using Assist can easily be fixed on your side by adding aliases to entities or areas, exposing entities to Assist, or assigning entities and devices to the correct areas.

So we are taking the first step to help you fix these errors: as of this release, Assist provides much better errors in case your intention is understood, but something else is missing (An unknown name, area, device class, or domain).

Screenshot showing the new errors Assist will return in case the intention is understood, but something else is missing.

Custom Assist responses in automations using the sentence trigger

Like almost every other component and feature of Home Assistant, Assist can be customized and extended to understand more sentences.

A few releases ago, we introduced a very simple way to extend what Assist understands: The sentence trigger in our automation engine.

Up until now, using a sentence trigger always led to the same Assist response: “Done”. In fact, the only way to define a custom response was to write complex custom sentences in YAML.

This release introduces a new action to set a custom response in your sentence-triggered automations directly inside the automation editor.

Screenshot showing how to build a custom response in our automation editor.

The response field accepts templates, so it can be used to build complex responses, for example, listing all your room temperatures.

Screenshot showing a custom response in Assist.

A very cool feature that might come in handy if you build an automation blueprint to submit as an entry for our voice assistant contest!

All known Assist devices

Last addition for voice, we’ve added a small additional page to give you an overview of all the Assist devices you have active in your Home. You can find this on the Assist configuration dashboard by selecting the new “Assist devices” button.

Screenshot showing a custom response in Assist.

Or, use this My Home Assistant button below to navigate to the voice assistants configuration dashboard:

Updating your Zigbee devices

ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation, our built-in Zigbee integration) now provides update entities to Home Assistant!

This means you can get notified when a device has a firmware update available, and you can trigger the update from Home Assistant!

Screenshot showing an Zigbee device connected via ZHA being updated.

Noticed the weird version numbers? Unfortunately, that is how version numbers in the Zigbee standard work and look. We haven’t figured out a way to translate them to something more human-readable format that matches what the manufacturer communicates.

Currently, it supports updating Inovelli, OSRAM/Ledvance, Sonoff, and ThirdReality devices, and we are looking at adding support for more brands in the future. Be aware, Zigbee is a slow protocol, and firmware updates can take a long time (sometimes hours).

Matter diagnostics and actions

Home Assistant works actively to provide the best support for Matter devices out of the box. To help with that, we have added more information and controls for your Matter devices in the UI.

On the device page of the Matter device in Home Assistant, we will now show additional diagnostic information about the device. This information can be used to troubleshoot issues with the device or when reporting issues. Some examples include the network type the device uses, its addresses, and IDs, device types and its connected fabrics.

Screenshots showing a matter device in the UI with additional diagnostic information. The other screenshots shows the overflow menu on the device, that provides more actions.

Besides more information, you can also take new actions on the device. For example, ping the device to check if it is available, force a full device interview to sync all its information, remove it from another controller, and even a new button to share your Matter device from Home Assistant with another Matter controller.

Screenshots the result of pinging a Matter device and sharing a Matter device with another controller.

Icons everywhere

We completely changed how Home Assistant handles icons under the hood. A big effort from many people, with almost… no change! That is right, almost everything looks just the same as before. 😁

We did make some improvements! For example, integrations can now provide icons for things like fan speeds or thermostat presets. Also, service call actions can now have their own icon as well:

Screenshots showing that each media player service, now has its own icons matching the action.

Areas now have icons too! You can set them in the area configuration. They show up in the area selectors and in the area dashboard itself (in case you didn’t upload a picture).

Screenshots the areas dashboard, with new icons used on each area.

Integrations with authentication issues are now shown in the repairs dashboards

When one of your integrations has authentication issues, Home Assistant will now report this in the repairs dashboard.

Previously, this was only visible on the integration dashboard, but now it shows up in the repairs dashboard, as this is the place where Home Assistant reports all issues with your system.

Screenshots showing a repair issue being raised for an integration that needs re-authentication.

Revamped Proximity integration

For this release, @mib1185 completely revamped our Proximity integration. In case you are unfamiliar with it, it allows you to monitor the proximity of persons to a particular zone. It provides information on how close one is to a zone and if they are traveling towards or away from it.

It is an extremely powerful tool for automations. It allows you to create automations based on the proximity of people. For example, if you are within a certain range from your home and traveling towards it, you could use Home Assistant to turn on the lights, open the garage door, turn up the heating, and start your favorite playlist in the living room. Welcome home! 🤗

The best part? This integration is now available to set up from the UI! Not just that, but it now uses normal sensor entities that we are all already familiar with. This will make automating and displaying the data a breeze!

Screenshots of a set up proximity integration, and the proximity of a person moving towards the home zone.

Thanks @mib1185! You did an outstanding job on this one!

If you are already using this integration, this change will come with the deprecation of the old entities. See our backwards-incompatible changes for more information.

Shipping on a new Python version

This release ships running on Python 3.12! In case you are wondering, what is that? Well, Python is the programming language Home Assistant is written in.

Why it matters? It provides many improvements to the foundation we are building Home Assistant on, most notably: It is faster! 🚀

Don’t worry! If you run the Home Assistant Operating System or are using the Home Assistant Container installation type: You won’t have to do anything, as we handle the upgrade to Python 3.12 for you. Just upgrade Home Assistant as you normally would, and you are good to go! 😎

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • @edenhaus improved how we handle errors in our form fields. We no longer show the technical coding gibberish that often showed up in the past. Nice!
  • When you change the type of a switch entity to, for example, a garage door entity, you will now have the option to invert its behavior. Thanks, @emontnemery!
  • The Ecovacs integration received lots of love from @edenhaus and now has support for many Deebot vacuum models with tons of entities to automate with. Nice job!
  • @mib1185 added automatic cleanups of old/unused refresh tokens 🧹. This means you will be logged out on a device that hasn’t used Home Assistant for 90 days. Clean and tidy!
  • The Tuya integration can now be set up directly using the Tuya Smart or Smart Life app. No more need for developer accounts or complicated procedures!
  • Using the utility meter integration on, for example, your solar inverter, which turns off at night? You can now set the sensor to always be available, even when the source entity is unavailable. Thanks, @dougiteixeira!
  • The TP-Link Smart Home integration now supports newer devices, including Tapo-branded devices! Awesome job @sdb9696, @bdraco, and @rytilahti!
  • @AngellusMortis added new sound event sensors introduced in UniFi Protect version 2.11 to the UniFi Protect integration. Nice!
  • Are you a Jinja templating Ninja? @TNTLarsn added a new bitwise_xor filter for you to use. Awesome!
  • The Google Generative AI Conversation allows using the new Gemini Pro models, including support for the Vision models. This allows you to use images in your prompts too! See an example in the screenshot down below. Super impressive, thanks @tronikos!

Screenshot showing Google Generative AI with the Gemini models describing what it sees in the image that was taken from the doorbell. In this case, a package that is being delivered. The Google Generative AI Conversation integration using the new Gemini Pro Vision models to describe what is seen on the doorbell camera.

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.2.1 - February 9

Release 2024.2.2 - February 16

Release 2024.2.3 - February 22

Release 2024.2.4 - February 25

Release 2024.2.5 - February 27

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

  • Facebox has been removed. It is no longer possible to get API keys, and thus, it is no longer possible to use this integration. (@reedy - #107005)
  • Legrand Home+ Control has been removed as their API shut down in December. Use the Netatmo integration as an alternative to integrate your Legrand Home+ Control devices. (@jpbede - #107587)
  • Life360 has been removed. They are now actively blocking third-party access, including Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Companion app is a good and (above all) privacy-friendly alternative. (@pnbruckner - #107805)

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.2

Companion app for iOS 2024.1: CarPlay is here!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
29 janvier 2024 à 00:00

Hey, this is Bruno. I have recently joined Nabu Casa to work full-time on the Home Assistant iOS app (thanks Home Assistant Cloud subscribers!). Today I have big news: Home Assistant is now available on Apple CarPlay! The release is rolling out and should be hitting your iOS devices soon (version 2024.1).

CarPlay support now gives Home Assistant users easy access to their devices and areas and the ability to create custom actions. Custom actions allow users to create advanced action sequences like unlocking the front door and turning on the porch lights. And all of this works across the multiple Home Assistant servers that you have configured in the app.

Big thanks to DXspark for helping us make the foundation of CarPlay and kicking off the project.

CarPlay features

The app is divided into four tabs to easily access the different functionality. We’ve followed Apple’s guidelines to give the user a familiar experience that they know from other CarPlay apps.

You don’t have to configure the CarPlay app separately. It will automatically pick up your Home Assistant servers as configured in your app.

Actions

Actions are a concept in the Home Assistant iOS app that allows you to execute automation in Home Assistant. This means that you can execute any automation you want, such as:

  • “Open the garage and start heating my home to 22 degrees Celsius”
  • “Close the garage and announce in the kitchen that I arrived”
  • “Turn the front yard lights on and unlock the front door”

These actions have been available in the Home Assistant for Apple Watch app and can be called from the Home Assistant widgets. With today’s release, you can also easily trigger them from your CarPlay dashboard. This is the feature that has already become part of my daily routine.

If you haven’t created an Action yet, the CarPlay App can send a notification to your phone to guide you to get started.

Create your first CarPlay Action CarPlay Actions

Controls

The controls tab will group your devices and entities by their domain. We have started small and included the most useful domains first:

  • Button
  • Cover
  • Input boolean
  • Input button
  • Light
  • Lock
  • Scene
  • Script
  • Switch

For these domains, you can toggle lights and switches, activate buttons, script, scene actions, and of course, toggle your garage door or gate.

Create your first CarPlay Action

Areas

The areas tab allows you to find your devices and entities based on their area. Quickly scroll through an area to see the current states and toggle devices.

CarPlay Areas

Servers

When you’re driving to your parents, you might want to be able to notify them or open their garage door as you arrive. With the “Servers” tab, you will be able to quickly change and control a different Home Assistant server.

This feature builds upon the multiple server support that has been part of the Home Assistant iOS app for a couple of years now.

CarPlay Servers

I hope you will enjoy using Home Assistant on CarPlay. Please let us know what else you would like to see available for CarPlay!

Release notes

  • The app is now available for iOS 15+
  • CarPlay support was added for iOS 16+
  • The Bulgarian language was added
  • Improvements for iOS Actions so they’re easier to use
  • In macOS, the window size will be restored when you open the app again

The State of Matter

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
25 janvier 2024 à 00:00

During our State of Matter live stream two weeks ago, we explained what Matter is, how it relates to Thread, and how you can compare it with existing protocols you may already know, like Zigbee or Z-Wave.

In this blog post, we’ve extracted the highlights of the stream for you. We also link to our updated Matter and Thread documentation where relevant.

You can watch the entire live stream here:

We’ll also highlight each segment of the live stream in this blog under each corresponding heading, so you can start watching the specific parts that interest you!

Why we believe in Matter

We believe in Matter: it’s open source, and most importantly, it’s fully local by default. Matter will allow us to control devices ranging from lights, to robot vacuums, to TVs, and to many other IP-connected devices, all through a standardized protocol. It is a huge step forward towards having more sustainable and worry-free smart home products. For this reason, Nabu Casa uses the revenue we get from the subscribers to Home Assistant Cloud (thank you all!) to employ developers who are dedicated to implementing Matter. And we have even joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) - the organization behind the Matter standard - as a participant to have a front-row seat and to defend the Open Home values during the development of the standard.

Matter launched only one year ago, compared to twenty years for a standard like Zigbee, so it’s important to account for that in your expectations. If you’ve already invested heavily in an existing local standard, like Zigbee or Z-Wave, Matter is probably not your best choice at this point. We think there is no reason to throw these current smart home devices out, especially when they still work fine - after all, sustainability is one of our Open Home values. But if you are new to the smart home scene and looking for devices with local, cloud-free standards that will still work even many years from now, keep an eye on Matter. The standard is rapidly evolving, with major updates twice a year where new device types and enhancements to existing ones are released.

After this first year, the current selection of Matter devices is still a bit limited, but a lot of companies have been using this time to develop them, and we expect more to be released soon. More and more companies are joining the CSA and taking up the standard every month. We think Matter is here to stay and is going to be widely adopted.

Demystifying Matter

To really understand what we’re talking about when it comes to Matter, we recommend you read our updated Matter documentation or watch this chapter from our live stream.

In this segment, our product manager JLo explains Matter in an easy-to-understand, visual manner, using the diagram you see above. You’ll no longer have to wonder about Thread, Border routers, Bridges, or other Matter terminology after you’ve watched this video.

The current state of Matter in Home Assistant

For the past year, we have been working on getting the foundation ready to support Matter devices in Home Assistant. Our implementation is based on the official Matter SDK, and we plan for it to become officially certified by the CSA to show that it will work problem-free with all products that carry the Matter logo. But we are not there yet; that is why we still label Matter as Beta in the integrations list. This will not change until our implementation has been certified.

We are still ironing out bugs, writing documentation, adding missing features, and doing a lot of troubleshooting. We are not alone on this, as many manufacturers needed this first year to get comfortable with the new standard as well, resulting in some unstable early devices coming to the market. We’ve also had to tweak our Home Assistant Operating System to work well with Matter, Thread, and its IPv6 requirement.

It has been a bumpy - sometimes even frustrating - ride, but everything is slowly getting into good shape. Vendors have ironed out bugs in their Matter device firmware, all kinds of new devices are popping up in stores, and the Matter 1.1 and 1.2 updates brought tons of stability fixes to the standard.

From our perspective, it’s amazing that Matter is already in this state after being started only a couple of years ago. You can clearly see the enormous power of so many companies, from small to big, believing in Matter and working together to improve it.

Get started with Matter in Home Assistant

If you want to get started with Matter in Home Assistant, it is really important that you read the documentation or watch this chapter of our live stream, which covers it all.

Matter has a few gotcha’s you should know about, and because we are still in the Beta stage, not everything is as polished as we want it to be.

If you follow the requirements/recommendations in the documentation, you will see that there are four scenarios that are stable and work well in Home Assistant today:

  • Using WiFi-based Matter devices, like TP-Link (Matter) power plugs.
  • Using Matter bridges, like the Aqara M2 or SwitchBot Hub 2.
  • Using Thread-based Matter devices; if you have an Apple iPhone and one or more Apple devices that can be utilized by Home Assistant as a Thread Border router: HomePod gen2, HomePod Mini, Apple TV 4K (with ethernet).
  • Using Thread-based Matter devices; if you have an Android phone and one or more Google devices that can be utilized by Home Assistant as a Thread Border router: Google Nest Hub v2, Google Nest Hub Max, Google Nest WiFi Pro

It’s very important to note here that for Thread-based devices, the current recommended setup utilizes border routers from Apple or Google that match the type of phone you have. Please don’t worry - this doesn’t mean you have to add your devices to their ecosystems. Home Assistant will just use them to get access to the Thread radio network. The communication between the Home Assistant Matter controller and your Matter devices is completely encrypted and secure.

Using Home Assistant itself as a Thread border router (for example, by using the Thread radio in the Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant SkyConnect) is still under development at this point and is only recommended for the more technically experienced users. Currently, due to a bug, it can only be set up if you use an Android phone. Setting the Home Assistant SkyConnect or Home Assistant Yellow up as a Thread border router is not yet possible for users in the iOS/Apple ecosystem. We recommend that iOS users place, for example, a HomePod Mini or other Apple border router near their Thread devices to get the required Thread coverage. Alternatively, you can stay with WiFi-based Matter devices.

Important

You do not need any additional hardware or radios to work with Matter devices. Any device that is running Home Assistant Operating System, be it a Home Assistant Green, a Raspberry Pi, or any other installation, is already a fully functional Matter Controller. You can connect to WiFi-based Matter devices straight out of the box. Only if you plan to use Thread-based Matter devices do you need additional hardware in the form of a Thread border router.

Our tips for a frustration-free Matter experience:

  • Read the documentation for Matter.

  • The easiest devices to get started with are WiFi-based Matter devices and Matter bridges. Do note that many brands with Matter bridges also have excellent native integrations in Home Assistant, and these integrations may offer features not yet available in the Matter standard.

  • You need to run the Home Assistant Operating System. Other installation types are not supported.

  • You need a standard (flat) network. Enterprise-like network setups with VLANs, mDNS responders, etc., break the expectations that Matter has about the network and are not supported. Keep it simple, and it will just work.

  • Enable IPv6 on your home router and Home Assistant Operating System. You don’t need to get IPv6 from your internet provider, as the Matter devices operate locally. But you do need to make sure it’s enabled on your home network.

  • If you are planning on using Thread-based Matter devices, you will need one or more Thread border routers in your home. Home Assistant can work with third-party Thread border routers from Google or Apple as well, without having to add your devices to their ecosystem.

  • Always check the device packaging to make sure it has a Matter badge. Thread is also used for other standards, so a device with a Thread badge on the packaging does not have to be a Matter device.

  • Note that Matter is still in an early stage, so not every advanced feature you are used to may currently be implemented in this standard.

  • Use the latest version of both Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Companion apps, as we are improving Matter support and fixing bugs continuously. Using the latest version can make the difference in being able to add a device to Home Assistant or not.

Support

If you run into problems, please join our Discord server, where we have a dedicated Matter channel. Both our developers and many very experienced members of our community are active there to help you out with your Matter setup. Please only open an issue on our GitHub issue tracker if you encounter an actual bug.

The Future of Matter in Home Assistant

In the near future, we are focusing on improving the user experience to onboard and manage Matter devices. Especially adding new Matter devices to Home Assistant should be as stress-free as possible.

This is what we are focusing on now:

  • Functionality to ‘share’ a device from Home Assistant to another Matter controller.
  • Showing basic device information and diagnostics about a device in the Home Assistant interface, as well as adding some troubleshooting options such as forcing a full interview.

This is what we will be focusing on next:

  • A simpler flow to add Matter devices (a process called commissioning), where we guide our users step-by-step all the way from unboxing a device to being able to control it in Home Assistant. For now, we are focusing on the stable scenarios we mentioned previously. This means that we are improving the commissioning flow in our companion apps, relying on the Matter functionality built into your phone, and using (if necessary) Thread networks managed by the vendor of your phone (Google or Apple).
  • A better handling of sharing of devices between controllers (a functionality called multi-admin). Adding a brand new Matter device (commissioning) and sharing a device that is already controlled by a Matter controller (multi-admin) are not part of the same flow. This difference is dictated by the Matter standard and its security features; a current controller (admin) has to allow a device to join another controller. This is often misunderstood today, and we are trying to create a better flow that guides our users toward the right path for their devices.
  • We want to implement some missing features in the current platforms, such as light transitions and scenes.

This is what we want to achieve in the long run:

  • The ability to use the Home Assistant SkyConnect or Home Assistant Yellow as a Thread border router to connect to Thread-based Matter devices instead of using Apple or Google Border routers.

On top of this, we will continuously focus on extending the support for new devices as new device types are added to the specification or existing ones are extended. In some cases, manufacturers even contribute to Home Assistant themselves to ensure a new device type is supported.

We are also continuously keeping the quality of our Matter integration up to the standard of Home Assistant and fixing the most impactful issues our users are facing. For example, right now, we are making sure Matter devices that lose power are handled better in Home Assistant.

Using Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant SkyConnect

As we mentioned while talking about the recommended scenarios earlier, using the Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant SkyConnect for Thread is still in development and only recommended for technically experienced users.

That’s why our current recommendation for Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect is to use the Zigbee firmware to power your Zigbee network. This is a stable solution that has worked reliably since the introduction of these products and offers a great experience.

As we continue to work on Matter in Home Assistant, we’re now focused on ensuring that the Thread experience will catch up and become a first-class citizen, making it easy to connect to your Thread-based devices in Home Assistant without a third-party Thread border router. The Thread firmware is already fully functional under the hood, but we still have some work to do to make the experience of using Thread-based devices in Home Assistant feel good. As we mentioned in our chapter on the future of Matter in Home Assistant, we expect great strides in this area within the following months. Once the experience has improved, we will recommend using this Thread firmware to power your Thread network as an alternative to using third-party Thread border routers from Apple or Google.

There is a third, experimental, firmware option that supports multiprotocol, which allows the Silicon Labs chip in these products to connect to both Zigbee and Thread networks with one radio. We announced our intent to release a firmware supporting multiprotocol when we launched Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect, and this firmware has been available since December 2022. It integrates the Silicon Labs SDK, which adds this support for multiprotocol. During the further development and testing of the multiprotocol firmware, we have concluded that while Silicon Labs’ multiprotocol works, it comes with technical limitations. These limitations mean users will not have the best experience compared to using dedicated Zigbee and Thread radios. That is why we do not recommend using this firmware, and it will remain an experimental feature of Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect. If you currently have the multiprotocol firmware installed but don’t actively use it to connect to Thread devices, we recommend that you disable multiprotocol.

Nothing changes for current users of the multiprotocol firmware who are happy with their experience. The experimental multiprotocol firmware will remain available, but we will not recommend it to new users. Instead, we will focus on making sure the dedicated Zigbee and Thread firmwares deliver the best experience to users.

Thank you

After our first year of implementing Matter, we’re very happy that the technical foundation is in good shape. We can now take the next steps to ensure the entire Matter experience is as good as it can possibly be! Thank you to all of the users who have been on this journey with us, have provided us with valuable feedback and bug reports, and have shared their experiences so we know how we can make Matter in Home Assistant even better. And thank you to all of the viewers of the live stream and everyone who sent in questions beforehand and during the stream; your input helps us make these streams the best they can be. And if you made it all the way down here - thank you for reading!

If you have any more questions or experience problems with Matter in Home Assistant, please join our Discord server! We have a dedicated Matter channel there, and our developers and many experienced members of our community can help you out.

Voice Assistant Contest - Let's build and win some prizes!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
17 janvier 2024 à 00:00

TL;DR: We are organizing a voice assistant contest between the 17th of January and the 10th of March. You can win some Home Assistant Green, Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a chance to be on a livestream with us to talk about your work.

2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We built some amazing things throughout the year, from a very powerful intent recognizer specifically optimized to run on a small computer like a Raspberry Pi 4, all the way to custom wake words created by our community.

In fact, we believe that what we built during the Year of the Voice allows almost anyone to build a voice assistant that embodies our Open Home values perfectly: Personalized, Private, and Sustainable. Every component of our voice assistants can be heavily customized to fit your language, your style and your needs, fully local options exist for each of them, and finally you can retrofit voice assistant into anything, even a 1970s Walkie Talkie found in a flea market

This is why, after spending a year building great things, we want to celebrate what our voice assistants can enable with the community: We’re launching a voice assistant contest, with great prizes to win!

Contest specifics

The contest will be held between Today (the 17th of January) and the 10th of March.

We tried to be as inclusive as possible. The contest is not only about building voice assistant hardware, it is also about building voice experiences that can be used with any voice assistant (For example, a blueprint that you can use to generate images from voice and cast them on your TV: “Show me a picture of an astronaut riding a unicorn!”)

An entry in the contest can take any form: A video, a blog post, a website, an event, etc.

The only requirement is for you to post on this forum category, this is how you officially participate in the contest.

Winners will be announced on the 15th of March.

A closing ceremony will take place on the 10th of April in the form of a livestream. Winners will be invited!

Contest categories

You can participate in the contest in four different categories.

Most creative satellite ideas

We have all the ingredients to unleash creativity: Custom sentences, custom wake words, custom voices. This category is here to showcase your smartest ideas. We will be judging the creativity, uniqueness, and coherency of the whole package.

Example: Piitaya’s moving and talking droid.

Best starting guides

Because our voice assistant can be heavily customized, starting can be daunting. This category showcases the easiest ways to create a voice assistant for a novice. From ordering parts, flashing the firmware, integrating it into Home Assistant, and using it. We will judge how easy the guide is to follow and how usable the final product is.

Example: The amazingly complete guide to build a Wyoming Voice Assistant Satellite by YouTuber FutureProofHome.

Best events organized, best group effort

Building privacy-focused technology only makes sense if we can get people to use it. Go to a hackerspace, invite some people, and build some voice assistants together! We will be judging the impact of the event (Size, outcome, topics discussed, etc)

Best voice experiences

This category is here for people who want to participate in the contest but not necessarily build a hardware product. This is all about creating the best experience using a voice assistant on Home Assistant. We support custom sentences, custom responses, and custom actions. Go crazy, be creative, and show us how to unlock the potential of our voice assistants. We will be judging how useful the experience is, how easy it is to integrate it, and of course, of fun it is.

Example: Play any music on any speaker in your home from a blueprint.

Contest prizes

For each category, the winner will receive:

Runners-up will receive a Home Assistant SkyConnect.

The community will also get a chance to vote for a favorite entry. The choice of the community will also receive the same prizes as a category winner (A Home Assistant Green, A Home Assistant SkyConnect, a spot on the livestream on the 10th of April).

How to get started

  • Watch the Voice Assistant Contest launch live stream, we did a recap of Year of the Voice and created a few voice assistants live with you.
  • Learn more about the different chapters of Year of the Voice here.
  • Learn more about Wyoming Satellite in the launch live stream and here.
  • Learn how to create a basic voice assistant within minutes for $13 here.
  • Learn more about ESPHome-based voice assistant in the launch live stream and here.
  • Learn how to create custom wake words here.
  • Learn how to create custom sentences here.

Thank you

Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and the development of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects in general.

We are looking forward to seeing what you will build and we are looking forward to having you on the livestream with us on the 10th of April.

Head over to the forum category to see the progress of the contest.

Have fun building, learning, and sharing.

Voice Assistant Contest - Let's build and win some prizes!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
11 janvier 2024 à 00:00

We are organizing a voice assistant contest for the community, starting on the 17th of January and ending on the 10th of March, there will be prizes provided by Nabu Casa! You can win Home Assistant Greens and Home Assistant SkyConnects and have a chance to be on a live stream with us to talk about your winning entry.

Tune in to our live stream on Wednesday, 17th of January, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET to learn all about the contest, the categories, and the prizes you can win! Michael Hansen (Voice Lead at Nabu Casa and Founder of Rhasspy) and JLo (Product Manager of Home Assistant) will first quickly recap the components we created to make voice assistants during Year of the Voice. Then, we will create several voice assistants live during the stream to show you how you can get started!

This live stream will be the perfect opportunity for everyone who loves our voice assistants but still needs to figure out where to start. You can learn everything you need during the stream and be fully prepared to build the voice assistant of your dreams. We’re excited to see what you will create and enter into the contest!

The State of Matter livestream

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
5 janvier 2024 à 00:00

TL;DR: We’ll have a Matter livestream on Wednesday, January 10. Post all your questions about Matter and Home Assistant in the comment section, and we’ll try to answer them during the stream!

In late 2022, Matter was first released to the public. It promised to be the new local home automation standard that would unify various manufacturers’ ecosystems and smart devices. We joined the CSA, the alliance developing Matter, to have a front-row seat and make our implementation of Matter the best we can. Now, one year later, did Matter live up to its promise, and what’s the state of Matter within Home Assistant?

We ask this question because lately, articles about Matter in the media have turned a bit sour. Compared to older standards like Zigbee and Z-Wave, they say, Matter is not yet in good shape. But this is not an entirely fair comparison: Zigbee and Z-Wave have had many years to develop into what they are now, while Matter was released just over a year ago. A new standard will always need some time to settle in and mature.

Our view on Matter is both more optimistic and still realistic. We think Matter completely fits our Open Home vision. In the future, Matter will give us all fast, reliable, and local control of our smart home devices. At the same time, we’re realistic; this perfect vision of Matter has yet to arrive, and not everything we hoped for is possible today. Still, significant companies and organizations around the globe have committed to Matter, and they are improving it every month. We believe Matter is here to stay.

So, instead of discussing what isn’t currently working in Matter, we want to explain what Matter can offer you today. We want to show you the potential Matter has for the future and how your first steps with Matter today prepare you for that. Talk about what Thread is, how it relates to Matter - it is not the same! - and how to build your Thread network. And much more.

On Wednesday, January 10, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET, we’ll be hosting a State of Matter livestream to discuss this and address your questions and concerns about Matter and Home Assistant. We’ll make sure it’s an excellent watch for both beginners and more technically-oriented viewers - our Matter developers will be there to give you a technical deep-dive into Matter, too. Please save the date in your calendar and post all your questions and concerns in our comments section!

2024.1: Happy automating!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
3 janvier 2024 à 00:00

Happy New Year! 🍾

We wish you, and all the loved ones around you, all the best for 2024! 🥂

I cannot think of a better way to start the new year: Home Assistant Core 2024.1! 🎉

This release is fairly small, as expected; we are just coming out of the holiday season. However, it does contain some nice improvements and features to be excited about and a stunning total of 13 new integrations!

My favorite: the automation editor changes. It had quite a bunch of user interface tweaks. Most are focused on making it friendlier and easier to use for new and long-term users, making it quicker to find the right trigger, condition, or action.

I greatly like this improved experience, and I hope you do too!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 3 January 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

Automation editor improvements

The automation editor got some love for this release, with many small improvements to make it easier for both new and long-time users.

As there are many small improvements, let’s go over them individually.

PS: One quick note: all changes are UI changes, meaning that these changes do not affect the underlying automation configuration. All your existing automations will continue to work as they did before.

Improved empty automations dashboard

If you start with Home Assistant, visiting the automations dashboard would result in an empty page. That is not very helpful if you see this for the first time. So, we’ve improved that!

You are now greeted by the little automation robot that explains what an automation is and references to the documentation that can help you get started.

Screenshot showing an empty automations dashboard, explaining what automations are.

A small but effective improvement to help new users get started. We have also applied this same improvement to the scripts and scenes dashboards.

Guidance when creating a new automation

When starting a new automation from scratch, you used to be greeted by some, possibly, new terminology and almost a blank page with some buttons to add triggers, conditions or actions. As a new user, this immediately imposes a challenge: what do I need to do?

You guessed it: We have slightly improved that. We have changed the big headers to be more descriptive and less technical. We have also added some help text to explain each section, including examples of what they can be used for.

Screenshot showing descriptions on what each section in an automation is and can be used for.

Don’t worry; we’ll hide the explanation once you add elements to the sections to keep the overview of existing automations as clean as possible.

Building blocks

You might have noticed in the screenshots above the conditions and actions have a new button next to them: + Add building block.

Selecting these new buttons allows you to add logical elements to your automation or scripts, like And, Or, If-then, Choose, etc.

These used to be mixed in with the conditions and actions but now have their own dedicated button. It makes it easier to find them and declutters the list of conditions and actions.

Screenshot showing the new dialog that allows you to add logical building blocks to automations.

Notice how this now opens up a dialog? A dialog gives us more space to describe what each building block does and room for a search box to find the one you need.

Improved trigger, condition & action buttons

The bigger change can be found in the buttons to add a trigger, conditions, or actions to your automation. This change was not just aimed at new users but also long-time users.

All these buttons are used to give a dropdown that allows you to select the type of trigger, condition, or action you want to add. This dropdown has been replaced by a new dialog similar to the one we just saw for the building blocks.

Like the building block, it describes what each trigger, condition, or action does. These descriptions are important, as they help you understand what they do.

Screenshot showing the new add trigger dialog, which displayed the most common triggers first.

If you add an element, we will first show you the most used triggers/conditions/actions by our community. We now have all others neatly grouped. For actions, we took it a step further and unified them with service calls.

Unified actions

If you have been using Home Assistant for a while, you are probably familiar with the “service call”-action that you can add to your automation. But, honestly, what is a “service call”? It is a bit of a technical term that is especially confusing for newer users. You just want to turn on a light, right?

This release unifies those “service calls” with all other actions, meaning there is no “service call” anymore; that layer has been refactored from the UI. Instead, you add an action and select the action you want to take, for example, turn on a light.

Screenshot showing the new add action dialog, which now shows all possible actions, including services.

This means that if you add an action, you see all actions (including all service calls), categorized, with description, and searchable! Being able to search through all available actions is a huge improvement.

Screenshot showing the new add action dialog utilizing the search function to find whatever you need.

By default, just like with the triggers and conditions, we show you the most used actions first and the actions for the entities you have on your system. All others are neatly grouped by integration in the Other actions section.

Screenshot showing the new add action dialog that neatly groups all other actions that integrations provide.

Description & due date support for to-do list items

The to-do list integration keeps getting better and better. This release adds support for descriptions and due dates!

If the integration you are using supports it, you can now add descriptions to each task on your list. It fully supports the Markdown markup to add links, bold text, etc. If due dates (or due date + time) are supported, you can set these.

Screenshot showing the new to-do item dialog, where you now can set a description and a URL.

As shown in the screenshot above, there is a whole new dialog to adjust your to-do item. But this is not the only change. The list itself has been improved as well.

Screenshot showing the improve to-do dashboard, showing descriptions and highlighting overdue items.

It is much cleaner, all big text boxes are gone, and each item is nicely formatted, including an excerpt of the description and the due date. If the due date is overdue, it will be highlighted.

New entity type: Valve

A brand new entity type has been added to Home Assistant: Valve!

Integrations can use this entity type to expose valves, such as a valve on a radiator, pool, sprinkler system, and main house gas or water line.

Screenshot showing a valve entity in the Home Assistant UI.

Currently, the Shelly integration supports it and now provides a valve entity for the Valve addon for Shelly Gas. Additionally, support for it has been added to MQTT, and the valve entities also work with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Tip: Do you have a switch entity that controls a valve? You can now change the entity type to valve in the entity settings.

Swappable current/target on thermostat & humidifier cards

By popular demand, the thermostat and humidifier cards now support setting current temperature/humidity as the primary information to show on the card.

You can enable the show current temperature as primary information option in the card, which will result in the target temperature being swapped with the current temperature in the card.

Screenshot showing two thermostat cards. One has the setpoint as a primary temperature, the other the current temperature.

New card features

Last year, we saw many new features added to the cards, so let’s start the new year with some more!

@Quentame added the climate fan mode card feature. This feature can be used with both the thermostat and the tile card:

Screenshot showing the new fan mode card feature that can be used on the tile and thermostat cards.

Also new is the update actions card feature. This addition by @piitaya allows you to add buttons to a card to trigger update actions when pressed.

Screenshot showing the new update card feature the can be used on the tile card.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • Two brand new template functions have been added this release: median and statistical_mode. Thanks, @TheFes!
  • @bieniu added support for the brand new Shelly 3rd generation devices to the Shelly integration. Nice!
  • A long-time shutdown bug has been fixed: You can now run automations triggered when Home Assistant shuts down. This could, for example, be used to send yourself a notification when that happens. Thanks, @tetele!
  • Created your own fan controller using ESPHome? You can now add preset modes to it! Thanks, @mill1000!
  • The ping integration now has the option to configure the number of seconds that must elapse before considering a disconnected device “not at home”. Awesome, @jpbede!
  • Looking for the ZAMG integration? It has been renamed to GeoSphere Austria. Thanks, @killer0071234!
  • Got one of those Sonos amps? @jjlawren added support for the subwoofer crossover setting to the Sonos integration. Nice!
  • @tkdrob added support for the new calendar entity to the Radarr integration. So you can see the release schedules straight from Home Assistant. Awesome!
  • You can now configure the minimal number of samples the trend helper uses. It allows you to make it less sensitive when there is not that much data. Thanks, @jpbede!
  • Got cold toes in bed? @kbickar to the rescue! He added support for foot warmers to the SleepIQ integration. Nice!

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.1.1 - January 5

Release 2024.1.2 - January 6

Release 2024.1.3 - January 12

Release 2024.1.4 - January 19

Release 2024.1.5 - January 20

Release 2024.1.6 - January 30

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.1

Companion app for iOS 2023.12: Let’s go!

✇Home Assistant
Par : Home Assistant
27 décembre 2023 à 00:00

We have good news for those hoping for more features and faster development of the iOS Companion App! I, Bruno Pantaleão, have joined Nabu Casa as an iOS engineer (of course, also working on watchOS, iPadOS, and macOS apps), and am planning to continue the great work done by Robbie Trencheny, Zac West, and the community, giving the iOS app the attention that it deserves. So let’s talk about this month’s 2023.12 release of the app!

Companion App for iOS 2023.12

Apple Thread network credentials sharing

If you have HomePods or Apple TVs and you also have a Thread border router in Home Assistant, you may want to take advantage of Apple’s network to control devices in your home. You can now import your Apple Thread credentials into Home Assistant and then make Apple the preferred Thread network.

Apple Thread network credentials sharing

New watchOS App Icon

We updated the Apple Watch App Icon with the new Home Assistant logo.

New watchOS App Icon

Toggle all scenes for watchOS

Previously, you would have to disable scenes one by one to hide them on your Apple Watch. If you, like me, have a Philips Hue bridge, you would probably see several auto-generated scenes (like ‘Bathroom concentrate’ and ‘Bathroom Arctic aurora’ below :D ) that are not always relevant to see on your watch. We added a button to quickly toggle between all scenes now in the iOS companion app.

Toggle all scenes for watchOS

Keep up with “What’s new” in the App

We have added a What’s new? link in companion App settings so you can quickly access the latest App release notes.

Keep up with Whats new in the App

Support for iOS 12, 13, and 14 in 2024.01

In the new year, we will do some housecleaning to make sure that the iOS Companion App is prepared for the future. To do so, we will stop supporting iOS 12, 13, and 14 in release 2024.01 of the Companion App. We know our users are repurposing older phones and tablets into dashboards and controls for their homes, which aligns with our focus on sustainability. It’s why we try to keep our apps running on older devices for as long as we can.

Currently, less than 1% of our users (according to the App Store analytics provided by users who gave permission to share their data with Apple) are still on these three iOS versions. Supporting them makes the codebase hard to maintain and blocks us from using newer iOS features. This change will make it easier for new contributors to feel comfortable contributing to the iOS codebase, which is also one of my goals. With a more modern codebase, we can give more attention to PRs and help other contributors have everything they need to feel comfortable submitting PRs.

This does not mean your iOS 12, 13, or 14 devices have become unusable. You can still access your Home Assistant using the browser if you have a device that can’t update past iOS 12, such as the 2014 iPhone 6 or iPad Mini 3. All other devices currently capable of running iOS 13 or 14 can be updated to iOS 15 or higher and use the new versions of the iOS Companion App.

On the roadmap

Wondering what we have on the roadmap for our Apple apps? We’re still working on it, but you can expect further developments to make Home Assistant on the Apple ecosystem more integrated, bringing shared features between iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac - and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on Apple Vision Pro and seeing the possibilities it brings to the Open Home. We’re also planning on improvements to Siri shortcuts widgets and as many new sensors as possible. Another feature that is on our radar is Assist; in 2023, we completed the Year of the Voice. Android users benefitted from some extra functions compared to iOS users, and we want to make sure we catch up and bring these features to iPhones as well!

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