Home Assistant 2024.12! 🎄

Holidays are coming, and it is time for the last release of the year! 🎉

2024 has been a crazy year for Home Assistant. Not just in terms of features like drag-and-drop dashboards, organization capabilities like labels, and the countless improvements to our voice efforts. But also the founding of the Open Home Foundation, and even more in the growth of our lovely community as we’ve risen up to become the #1 open source project on GitHub! ❤️

However, the year ain’t over yet! This month, we want to learn about all your “What the heck?!” moments with Home Assistant. Tell us about any little annoyances, bugs, ideas, or suggestions. You can read all about it in the WTH announcement blog, or join the conversation on our WTH forums!

Honestly, the biggest announcement of the year has yet to come though… 🤫 I’m pretty sure it is voice hardware related. 😉 So make sure you aren’t missing the live stream on 19 December! 📺 You will not be disappointed! 🎁

Before you check out everything in this release, I just want to close this year with a big thank you to every single person in our community, which includes you!

Thank you for using Home Assistant! ❤️

Happy holidays! And for the last time in 2024: Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

TL;DR: For all of December 🎄, we are opening up to share any issue, idea, suggestion, or annoyance you have with Home Assistant on our community forums!

Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!”: Third edition

It’s back! 🎉 We are thrilled to announce the third edition of the month of “What the heck?!” (WTH for short). Every two years, we take the time to pause, listen, and dive deep into the little things that maybe you go “What the heck?!” about Home Assistant.

We’ve been growing really hard for years now with over a million Home Assistant-powered smart homes out there, and, as of this year, we are also the #1 open source project on GitHub!

A lot has happened since the last edition two years ago. Lots of effort went into making a voice-controlled Home Assistant a reality. We have implemented new dashboards and cards (with drag-and-drop!), added organization capabilities with labels and categories, and so much more! But did everything turn out the way it should? Did we miss things? Or, worse, did something start to annoy you?

That is what this month is about! This year, we are kicking it off in the month of December as a nice closing activity for this year, and we can’t wait to hear from 👉 YOU 👈!

Lowering the barrier for sharing WTH?! moments

We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub might be a steep hill and, for some, maybe even a bit scary. You need a GitHub account to report an issue following issue templates and forms, and the report itself needs to be written in a way that a developer can work with. Above all, we use our issue tracker to track actual issues and bugs, not small feature requests or annoyances.

While this is a common and reasonable process to collect, track, and process bugs, our issue tracking-process might not be the ideal way to learn about your “What the heck?!” moments, small tweaks, and improvements that can make us all enjoy Home Assistant even more.

Today, we have opened up a Community Forum category as a safe, lower-barrier place to talk about your Home Assistant “What the heck?!” moments. More importantly: discuss and vote on topics your fellow home automators have brought up.

What are we looking for?

Just as with previous editions, I sent out a related question on my socials earlier this week:

🎅 𝘚𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨… If you could ask for one small Home Assistant improvement this holiday season, what would it be?

The answers to this question pretty much capture the goal behind this month: Finding those nice quality-of-life features and little annoyances, highlighting inconsistencies, suggestions for things that could be streamlined more, and even big-ticket items. All of those things would make Home Assistant even more awesome for everyone.

I’ve received many responses on these social media posts on X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Most of the responses there are exactly what we are looking for this month. I’ve picked a few from these platforms to show you what I mean:

• “Makes exposing entities to HomeKit the same as to Alexa & Google” (Peter Hardy-vanDoorn)
• “Polygon zones would be so very helpful instead of just the base circle” (KrispKiwi)
• “Edit a scene without activating it. I can only edit my sleep scene after everyone goes to sleep or in YAML.” (codebuild21)
• “The possibility of catching errors in automations and being able to take actions when they occur 🙂” (Sergio Mayoral)
• “Not Fancy! Better backup management, especially pruning options!” (Alex Alami)
• “Persist my prefered dashboard across my different devices/browsers.” (Carlos Sánchez López)
• “Home Assistant voice hardware!” (Paulus Schoutsen) 😆

These are all great topics for the month of “What the heck?!”, I hope they inspire you for more topics to share 💖.

Roadmap

As you might be aware, we also create and publish a bigger, high level, roadmap for the greater direction of Home Assistant. A few weeks back, Madelena and JLo shared the 2024 Year-end update of our roadmap.

This year’s month of “What the heck?!” is thus different in this regard, as in previous editions we didn’t have any roadmap in place. For this year’s WTH, the product team will also be watching for items that will help shape and prioritize our roadmap for the near future.

As a matter of fact, many items on this year’s roadmap that we’ve worked on have their origins or have been shaped by topics from the previous WTH from 2022. For example, the ability to organize automations and the ability to drag-and-drop cards on your dashboards.

Why December?

In the previous editions, we had this month in October; this year, we decided to move it to December. We figured, the holiday season is perfect for this event. 🎄

Many of us have a bit more time on our hands during the holidays, whether that’s tinkering with automations, exploring our new dashboards, contributing to our project, or simply enjoying engaging our active and vibrant community.

Start sharing your WTH!

👆That title says it all really. Start sharing your “What the heck?!” moment, browse through all the WTH moments others brought up, and vote for the ones you feel the same about.

We are excited about this month and looking forward to everything brought up!

Join us on the forums!, or read the FAQ below.

So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?

FAQ

• “Great! I have multiple things! Should I put all my stuff in a single topic?!”

  No, please create multiple, smaller topics. There is no limitation on how many forum topics one can create for WTH. Each topic can be voted on, picked up, and maybe even resolved. Also, having multiple things stacked in a single forum topic makes resolving, discussing, and voting on them hard.

• “Is everything reported going to be fixed/addressed?”

  Sorry, but the answer here is no; there is no guarantee that it will happen. The goal is to lower the barrier reporting things for one month. Code contributors will definitely join the effort and address a few of the listed things. Still, in the end, the number of submissions in WTH is, in general, simply too much to address. However, we have picked up a lot of items over the years (including bigger topics); it helps us shape our roadmap.

• “I really want this new integration or add-on to be implemented, so I can use my devices. Is this the right place for it?”

  No, this event is not for requesting new add-ons or device/services integrations. Please use the “Feature Requests” forum category instead.

• “My WTH topic is one of the top-voted ones, so it is going to be fixed/addressed, right?”

  This is not a contest. Voting will help with visibility and give a sense of the suggestion’s impact. However, it might be difficult or too big to implement. A topic with lots of votes is more likely to be noticed by a contributor, but it is not guaranteed to be picked up.

  Topics with a lot of engagement, of course, help us shape our future roadmap.

• “I’ve found a bug and am comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report my issue now?”

  If you are comfortable using GitHub, please, by all means, file an issue report on GitHub instead.

We launched our Home Assistant Yellow over two years ago, with the design philosophy that it would grow and extend its capabilities with its users’ needs. Need more storage, add an NVMe drive. Need Matter over Thread instead of Zigbee, change the firmware.

Thanks to Raspberry Pi providing us with an early sample, we have been able to add Compute Module 5 (CM5) compatibility to the Home Assistant Yellow, which will be included in Home Assistant OS 14 (along with some other hardware support). This gives current and future users a great option to get more performance if they need it, but we must say that CM4 is still more than enough for most Home Assistant users’ needs.

As part of the Open Home Foundation, we fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home. The Yellow achieves all three, and this announcement only improves the choices available and long-term sustainability.

In case you missed it, we had a pretty huge presence at this year’s GitHub Universe, their global annual developer conference. 2024 was the culmination of many years of our community growing, and there were some really big moments—our community meetup in San Francisco, awards, rising in GitHub’s rankings, and being a part of the event’s Day 2 keynote.

After a few years of being in 2nd place, we are now the #1 open source project on GitHub with over 21,000 contributors helping build Home Assistant. We also won the Wonderfully Welcoming award for being the 2nd most active project for new contributors. This is really just scratching the surface of the week we spent together in San Francisco, and I (Missy Quarry, your Community & Social Media Manager) would like to share the highlights with everyone who couldn’t make it this year.

Table of contents

• Community comes together
• We are number 1!
• Open Source - ⭐️ of the show
• Connecting with the community

TL;DR We are making great progress on our roadmap, and moving forward onto the next priorities on the roadmap. 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃

As we had previously mentioned, the goal of the roadmap is to provide a North Star for all of our product initiatives to follow in a coherent and consistent direction. At the State of the Open Home in April this year, we introduced to our community our first roadmap. We intend to keep our community informed every half year, and this is our first update to our public roadmap.

We are happy to report that we have made good progress on the product initiatives on our roadmap so far, thanks to our core maintainers along with the help of the team at Nabu Casa, the commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation. Most of the product initiatives in the 2024 roadmap have matured according to plan, and now the team has begun to focus on the ones that we had planned for next.

- Madelena & JLo

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

Give us a minute of your time and lend your voice to improve our community-driven, privacy-focused voice assistant, and together we’ll break big tech’s stranglehold on home voice control.

When you use Home Assistant Assist we’ll never take your data unwillingly to improve its functionality; that’s why we’re asking for your help today (more on that below).

Specifically, we’re trying to improve our wake word engine, which “wakes” the device to listen for more commands. Our open source microWakeWord engine is an incredible, lightweight bit of code but requires training with real voices to improve. Everyone’s voice is unique, and we need recordings of people of all genders, ages, and accents from around the world saying this wake word. So get the whole home involved, along with friends and family.

Help us today

We’ve found an issue in Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 that has affected a small number of customers, which appears to be the result of a faulty part incorporated in the first production run of ZBT-1 devices, causing the device to fail and become completely unresponsive. We want to make sure everyone can get a replacement ZBT-1 and ensure they are covered far into the future.

Though Home Assistant SkyConnect is identical to the ZBT-1 under the hood, it is not affected. The design is not what’s at fault, but instead, a defective voltage regulator that was used in this specific production run that is causing the issue. When a ZBT-1 is inserted into certain USB-A ports, the voltage regulator can fail, fully bricking the device. We used high-quality manufacturing and quality control in this and previous production runs. We are undertaking an investigation to find out how this could happen and most importantly, to avoid a repeat of anything remotely similar in the future.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. Below are details on our investigation, how devices are affected, and the replacement program.

• Background
• Do I have a ZBT-1?
• Pausing sales
• Replacement Program
• Conclusion

Boo! 👻

Please don’t be scared; it is October, Halloween is coming, and so is the next Home Assistant release: 2024.10! 🎃

The release we bring you today is a perfect mix of new UI features, advanced features, improvements, and lots of bug fixes while not being too overwhelming. There is something for everyone in this release.

Most notably, we have a brand new heading card. It allows you to add titles or subtitles to your dashboards, make them clickable, and even add cute little entities to them. The new section dashboard gets better and better with every release, which is super exciting!

We also introduce some small YAML automation syntax changes. If you are still a sucker for writing your automations in YAMLYAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is used to store and transmit data in a structured format. In Home Assistant, YAML is used for configuration, for example in the configuration.yaml or automations.yaml files. [Learn more] (like me), I’m sure you’ll love these little tweaks that make it all feel more natural.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Today there has been an important announcement, I (Paulus, founder of Home Assistant) will be taking a seat on the Z-Wave Alliance Board of Directors, representing Nabu Casa. This is a significant piece of recognition for the work we have put into our support of open standards, and the importance of open source projects in keeping standards successful and thriving.

Being part of this board allows us to play a bigger role in shaping Z-Wave’s future. As a Standards Development Organization (SDO) the Alliance is shaped by its members, and they brought us in for our connection to our community and expertise in open source. We will be giving a voice to Home Assistant users, open source development, and Open Home Foundation values.