Home Assistant

2024.5: Just a little bit smaller

Franck Nijhof Comments

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

Release 2024.5.3 - May 10

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