2024.12.5

2024.11: Slick dashboards and speedy cameras

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof Comments

Home Assistant 2024.11! 🎉

It is November already, and we are closing in on the end of the year, but we are not slowing down!

Before we dive into what this release has to offer, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has contributed to the Home Assistant project. You might have heard this already, but going to share it again:

We are number one! 🥇

GitHub published its annual Octoverse report, highlighting the platform’s biggest trends and projects. It named Home Assistant 2024’s largest open-source project, with over 21,000 contributors over the year. That includes you! ❤️

Continuing the festivities, this release is a big one! The new dashboarding system we have been working on all year is now out of its experimental phase and generally available! 🥳 Exciting, everyone can now create beautiful dashboards with ease!

To top it off, this release also supports faster and lower-latency camera streams using WebRTC, supported by the Open Home Foundation. This is a huge improvement! 🎉

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Sections dashboard no longer experimental!

This release marks a big milestone in our pursuit of making dashboards easier to customize and use for everyone, aka Project Grace! The sections view layout, together with its drag-and-drop 🐲 capabilities and responsive design, is now out of its experimental phase, and ready for primetime! This means that, as of this release, you will get our awesome feature-rich and easy-to-use dashboard editing experience when you create a new dashboard. 🎉

Over the past few months, we have worked hard to iterate and listen to your feedback to ensure that our new dashboard is easy to customize for both beginners and advanced users alike. We have added new capabilities such as resizing cards, visibility options, wider sections, new badges, and, most recently, adding the new heading card.

To finish this journey, we are adding two more features to this release.

Convert your old dashboards to sections view layout

Screenshots showing the conversion of a view in masonry into sectionsScreenshots showing the conversion of a view in masonry into sections

This release includes a way to convert individual dashboard views from the old masonry view layout to the new sections view layout. When you change the view type to sections, you get a button to convert the view. All the cards of the old view are then copied and placed in an imported cards section in the new view, and you can then easily drag-and-drop them into the right sections.

Please note that cards placed within the imported cards section are only visible to users once moved to a section above the fold. This ensures that cards do not get accidentally shown in the wrong sections while you are still working on the dashboard.

Screenshot of the imported cards sectionScreenshot of the imported cards section

If you are not ready for the new layout yet, no worries! Your old dashboard view is kept when a new dashboard is created, giving an excellent way for masonry view veterans to try out sections while keeping all the hard work they have put into customizing their cards.

Alternatively, you can move each card one-by-one from another view. All moved cards will also be temporarily placed in the imported cards section.

Precise mode for card sizes

Examples of cards using precise modeExamples of cards using precise mode

If you love tinkering with your dashboards and fine-tuning card sizes with more precision, you now have even more control over the size of cards. In the layout options of a card you can now enable “Precise mode”, which will give you three times more options for the card widths!

Precise mode is applied on a card-by-card level. While a normal section is divided into 4 columns, precise modes gives you 12 columns, which allows you to align 2, 3, 4, or 6 buttons side-by-side.

Low latency cameras using WebRTC

Lots of effort has gone into this new and amazing feature for this release: WebRTC! 🎉

Logo of WebRTC

Not sure what WebRTC is? No worries! Let us try to explain. If you are watching a camera in Home Assistant, you might have noticed it is sometimes a bit slow and delayed. WebRTC support is going to change that!

Camera streams will now try to use WebRTC whenever possible. WebRTC is a standard that makes a peer-to-peer connection for lower-latency audio and video streaming. You are probably using this technology a lot already, for example, when having an online video call. When you’re away from home, it will try to find the fastest and most direct path between your Home Assistant instance and the camera you are trying to view.

The Open Home Foundation will host the negotiating network infrastructure (STUN servers) for free for all Home Assistant users and enable the capability to use WebRTC for peer-to-peer connections whenever possible. If you are using Home Assistant OS or our containers, after you update this will automatically work out of the box.

Logo of the Open Home Foundation

Sometimes, a direct connection between the client (like your browser or mobile app) and the camera is not possible; in those situations, the camera stream needs to be relayed by an external server. Home Assistant Cloud now provides this relay server (TURN server), and it’s included as one of the many benefits available to all subscribers!

So, no matter where you are, you should always be able to watch your cameras via this low-latency technology. If, for whatever reason, WebRTC is not available, it will fall back to using the old method of streaming to ensure you can always see your camera feeds.

So, after reading all of this, what changed? Well, camera feeds will do everything they did before, but will be faster, more responsive, and less delayed! 🎉

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

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

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:

  • Bloomsky. Their service shut down.
  • Google Domains. The domain registration service by Google has been shut down.
  • Spider. The service is no longer available.

Other noteworthy changes

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

  • Image entities now have a snapshot action, allowing you to save the current image in the entity to a file. Nice @NickM-27!
  • @Petro31 added (limited) template support to the “at” field of time triggers. This allows you to template the time of that trigger in, for example, a blueprint automation.
  • Nautical miles (nmi) is now a valid distance unit. This means you can now use this as a unit for your distance sensors. Thanks @mib1185!
  • @tetele added blueprints for template entities! This allows for easier re-use and sharing of common blueprints for sets of templated entities. This is an advanced feature and is only available using manual YAML configuration.
  • @MindFreeze and @matthiasdebaat have improved the network settings user interface. It is now easier to manage and configure your network settings, including nicer handling of IP addresses, improved Wi-Fi configuration, and better visibility on the URLs Home Assistant is using for your instance.
  • We now indicate if a custom integration is overriding a built-in integration. This makes it easier to spot if a custom integration is taking over a built-in integration while you are wondering why you didn’t get the latest features Home Assistant releases bring. Thanks, @MindFreeze!

Live logs

Sometimes, if something does not work as expected, you might resort to a more technical tool for finding out what is going on: The logs.

Previously, if you looked at the logs of, for example, an add-on or the Home Assistant Supervisor, you would only see the last 100 log lines. You would have had to refresh the page to see new log entries.

Well, no more! As of this release, the logs are now streaming live! 🎉

Screenshot of the imported cards sectionScreen recording demonstrating logs showing up as they happen.

And not just that, you can scroll back in time to see previous log items. That’s a pretty cool improvement. 😎

Voice

Last year, 2023, was the Year of the Voice for Home Assistant. And while this year isn’t specifically dedicated to voice, everyone is still working hard towards the goal of letting users control their homes with their voice in their own language.

As you might have heard through many community channels 🕵️‍♀️, we are working to make this a reality for everyone. We are hard at work getting our Home Assistant voice satellite hardware ready and available for selling and shipping! 🤗

Stay tuned for more information on that soon!

Home Assistant intents improvements

One of the things we are working on is the Home Assistant intents. This is a way for a voice assistant to understand the intention behind your spoken sentences. This is a very crucial part of a local voice assistant.

In this release, we decided to align and combine Canadian French and French languages for the time being. Though we understand it is a unique dialect, this is about giving Canadian French users a lot more voice features.

Screenshot showing a few commands in Canadian French before and after this release

These intents are built and maintained by the community, and we are very grateful for their work. For example, @piitaya and @jlpouffier have made a great effort to lead the French language intents mentioned above.

Nevertheless, we want to ensure everyone can use Home Assistant in their own language, so we need your help! Help the community by contributing to the intents for your language. You can find more information on how to do that in our developer documentation.

Join the Wake Word Collective

Another essential part of voice is the Wake Word! And this is where everyone, no matter your skill level, can help out with just a minute of your time!

Wake words are the words you say to wake up your voice assistant. For example, “Hey Google” or “Alexa”. As we are building our own voice assistant with our own wake words, we need to train our models to recognize these words, regardless of your accent, language, gender, or age.

So, get your whole home involved 🏠! Take a minute to help us out by recording your voice saying the wake word. It is super easy, and you can do it right from your browser or mobile, no need to install anything!

Help us improve our wake words today! ❤️

You can read more about the Wake Word Collective in our dedicated blog post.

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2024.11 in November. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2024.11.1 - November 8

2024.11.2 - November 15

2024.11.3 - November 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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

A. O. Smith

A. O. Smith now provides the hot water status as a percentage rather than low, medium, or high. The hot water status entity has been updated accordingly.

(@bdr99 - #127678) (documentation)

Google Calendar

Google Calendar events that are declined are now omitted from the calendar.

(@joelhawksley - #128900) (documentation)

HomeKit

Historically, many integrations implemented doorbells as binary sensors with a device class of occupancy. This design was replaced with the new event entities, which use a purpose-built device class of doorbell.

HomeKit will no longer automatically link binary sensors with device class occupancy as linked doorbell sensors. However, linked doorbell sensors can still be configured manually via YAML.

(@bdraco - #127668) (documentation)

Litter-Robot

Previously, Litter-Robot could have an off state. This has now changed to docked, as off isn’t a valid state for vacuum entities.

(@gjohansson-ST - #128297) (documentation)

Netatmo

The preset modes of the thermostat have been renamed in order to support translations Schedule, Frost guard, and Manual have been renamed to schedule, frost_guard, and manual.

(@piitaya - #128890) (documentation)

Tibber

The tibber.get_prices action has been adjusted to return datetimes as strings instead of raw datetime objects.

Automations or template sensors using this may need to be modified with an as_datetime filter. See our templating documentation for more information on using these filters.

(@functionpointer - #123901) (documentation)

Updates

State attributes of update entities have been changed:

  • The in_progress state attribute is now always a bool, never an integer.
  • A new state attribute update_percentage has been added. The update_percentage is a number between 0-100 if an update is in progress and the entity supports reporting progress, or None if an update is not in progress or an update is in progress but the entity does not support reporting progress.

Scripts, automations, custom frontend components, etc., which consume the in_progress state attribute of update entities, need to be updated accordingly.

(@emontnemery - #128877) (documentation)

WMS WebControl pro

The open/closed state of awnings will be inverted so that the UI visualization and positioning match reality. This means open (100%) now refers to the awning being completely retracted, and closed (0%) now means the awning is fully expanded. This is not in line with industry terminology, but Home Assistant does not yet natively support awnings of type patio.

(@mback2k - #128079) (documentation)

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about 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 2024.11