Home Assistant is a more lively project than ever, more and more third-party developers are getting involved with this project to make it even more complete. In fact, the most popular integrations that we install through HACS have, over time, been officially added to the system, with the aim of providing seamless service and great support through official developers.
What’s new in the new version
This new version is not a maintenance version, adding few new features. The development team has added some really interesting features before the end of the year.
To Do List
In this new version of Home Assistant, the list of «All«, where we can create different lists with various tasks that we must perform. We can create a list or even several, all locally, and we can view and manage them directly from the “To-do lists” section that we will find in the left sidebar. In Home Assistant we have always had a section called “Shopping List”, where we can put different items to buy in a supermarket or wherever. In this new version there has been a generalization of this function, and now we can create different lists and interact with them through automations.
These task lists, together with automations, will allow us to carry out really interesting actions. For example, we can scan an NFC card to automatically add a product to a specific list, or directly press a series of buttons to add previously configured products. We can also create automations to delete tasks and even clean them all at once. We could also create automations to notify us of products that we should buy if we are near a DIY store, supermarket, etc. In this way, it will notify us intelligently. We can put this shopping list directly on a To-do card in the main menu, and thus be able to select it very quickly from the views we have in the home automation system. Finally, we have the possibility of incorporating task lists from Todoist and Google Task directly to Home Assistant, to manage everything locally without needing the cloud.
Matter 1.2 now ready
The Matter 1.2 standard is now available in this home automation system, not only will we be prepared for the new types of devices that will be created in the future, but it also has all kinds of minor error corrections and stability. Keep in mind that we will only be able to benefit from new types of devices once they are launched, because they do not exist right now.
In the near future, when manufacturers start releasing Matter 1.2 devices, the Home Assistant system will already be ready to support it. According to the developers, many manufacturers use this home automation system to carry out their tests, so they are surely 100% compatible and work perfectly.
The most complete Tile cards
Tile cards are one of the great novelties of this year, and we can now use the air conditioning, lights and other entities in a very visual and easy to understand way. With each new version of Home Assistant, new features are improved and added. The novelty we have in this version is that we can now customize the status information of the entity on the card to our liking.
This new feature not only works for “climate” entities, but also for all entities. We could set the brightness percentage of a light, and even the battery level of a sensor. We only have to add the corresponding state attribute.
Other improvements
The “Energy» allows us to keep a fairly advanced track of all the energy produced by the solar panels, consumed by our home, and we can even set gas usage entities and much more. One of the drawbacks we had is that we could not select a custom date range, but rather had to choose by complete days, weeks or months. Now this has changed, and we have the possibility of choosing custom dates. This panel is one of the most important if you have solar panels, because you will be able to have a global vision of everything that happens in your home at the energy level.
It has also been improved conditional card which allows you to show or hide cards in the main menu depending on certain previously defined parameters. For example, we can show a card to a certain user, and other cards only at night or during the day. This functionality will give us a lot of versatility when it comes to dynamically displaying the different cards.
Finally, the system has incorporated the possibility of reboot in safe mode. This is intended to avoid problems in third-party integrations or through HACS. This is perfect for ruling out issues with integrations that could cause your home automation system to malfunction.
