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
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 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
To rearrange sections, tap and hold the
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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
AEMET
The daily data for the current day wasn’t available after midday, and
now it will be. Automations and scripts relying on day[0] for checking
the next-day forecast will have to be adjusted to use day[1] instead.
(@Noltari – #107795) (documentation)
JuiceNet
The JuiceNet integration has been removed.
Enel X has migrated from JuiceNet to JuicePass, rendering the JuiceNet
integration useless. Background and alternative solutions to the juicenet
integration can be found in the related
issue.
(@emontnemery – #111477)
Met.no
The met.no integration previously created two entities for each configured
location: one provided daily weather forecasts,
and one provided hourly forecasts.
The met.no integration now only creates a single entity that provides
both daily and hourly weather forecasts.
(@emontnemery – #97023) (documentation)
Z-Wave
For Z-Wave climate entities, the behavior of the climate.turn_on service
has changed. Previously, the service would act in the following order depending
on whether the corresponding conditions were met:
If the entity supported the off mode and exactly one additional mode,
climate.turn_on would set the mode to the additional mode.
If conditions for 1 were not met and at least one of the following modes were
available, the service would set the mode to the first mode it found
in the specified order: heat_cool, heat, cool.
If conditions for 1 and 2 were not met, the service would silently do nothing.
Now, the service follows the following behavior in order:
If the entity supports the resume thermostat mode, it will be used to
restore the last mode you used before the entity was turned off.
If the condition for 1 isn’t met and the entity was turned off in
Home Assistant, and Home Assistant wasn’t restarted, Home Assistant
remembers the last “on” mode and will set it to that mode. Home Assistant
will be unable to set the entity to the previous mode if Home Assistant
starts with the entity already in off mode since the integration will
not know what the previous mode was.
If conditions for 1 and 2 are not met and at least one of the following
modes is available, the service sets the mode to the first mode it finds
in the specified order: heat_cool, heat, cool
(no change to condition 2 above).
If conditions for 1, 2, and 3 are not met, the mode will be set to the first
supported mode it finds (like dry or fan_only).
(@raman325 – #109187) (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:
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