2024.5: Just a little bit smaller

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!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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”.

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

Release 2024.5.3 – May 10

Release 2024.5.4 – May 17

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

AVM Fritz!SmartHome

Activating the HVAC mode heat no longer overwrites the current target
temperature with the comfort temperature but retains the currently set target
temperature unless the thermostat is in HVAC mode off, in which case the
comfort temperature is still set.
Use the available presets or the set temperature service to set the target
temperature for HVAC-mode heat.
(@jayme-github – #112119) (documentation)

Big Ass Fans

The BAF fan Auto preset mode has been renamed to auto. Any scripts
or automations using this need to be updated accordingly.
(@mill1000 – #109944) (documentation)

ecobee

The preset modes Away, Home, and Sleep have been renamed to the lower-case
variants away, home, and sleep.
This is consistent with the rest of Home Assistant, which also means
Home Assistant can support icons and translations for these.
If you used these preset modes in your automations or scripts, you will need
to update them to use the new names.
(@gagebenne – #116072) (documentation)

Honeywell Total Connect Comfort (US)

The auxiliary heat climate option has been deprecated and will be removed in
Home Assistant 2024.10.
Use the newly added emergency heat switch entity to set the thermostat mode
to the previous auxiliary heat mode.
(@mkmer – #114110) (documentation)

IMAP

The default for new entries is that the text and headers will no longer be
included in the imap_content event data. Instead, if needed, you can fetch
the email content using the imap.fetch service.
It will not break for existing entries where we assume text and headers
are included.
(@luca-angemi – #115108) (documentation)

Insteon

The Insteon configuration panel, which was previously on the Home Assistant
sidebar, has moved to the integration page in
Settings -> Device & services -> Insteon -> Configure.
(@teharris1 – #105581) (documentation)

LG Netcast

Turn on action for turning the TV on via a custom script
within configuration.yaml has been changed to use a custom automation trigger
lg_netcast.turn_on or a device trigger that can be set up from the UI.
(@splinter98 – #104913) (documentation)

Netatmo

The state of the Netatmo wind and gust direction sensor provided by
the weather station now exposes the state in lowercase.
(@joostlek – #115413) (documentation)

The state of the Netatmo health index sensor provided by the weather station
now exposes the state in lowercase.
(@joostlek – #115409) (documentation)

Recorder

Previously, recorder.purge_entities called with no arguments would purge all
entities. This PR makes this call raise an error instead.
It was too easy for users to accidentally purge their entire database using the
old logic. Users who want to purge all entities can still use
the recorder.purge service to achieve the same effect, and that service
is more obvious in how it behaves.
(@karwosts – #110066) (documentation)

Traccar Server

The following attributes have been removed from device_tracker entities
provided by the Traccar server integration:

address
altitude
battery_level
geofence
speed

All of these are now dedicated sensor entities that you can enable.
(@ludeeus – #111374) (documentation)

The following attributes have been removed from device_tracker entities
provided by the Traccar server integration:

All of these are now dedicated binary sensor entities that you can enable.
(@ludeeus – #114719) (documentation)

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

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