2024.12.2

2022.12: It does matter!

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Home Assistant Core 2022.12! 🎄

Already the last release of the year, right on time to bring you some cool new features to work with during the upcoming Holidays!

2022 has been a fantastic year for the Home Assistant project. We became one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing GitHub open source projects! ❤️ Tons of new features each month, and not just that, we matured a lot! Everything became more stable and faster, and the UX made leaps forwards as well!

We looked back at 2022 during the State of the Open Home, and sneak peaked at 2023, with some great new UI concepts and: The year of the voice! 🗣️ Missed it? The full video is available on YouTube.

But! The year isn’t over yet! This release really Matters! We are thrilled to be one of the first in the world to roll out Matter support to the public! 🎉

No Matter devices yet? Don’t worry! There are tons of things in this release that will keep you busy. The Tile card got “features”! You can now extend your Bluetooth range using Shelly devices, and a long-requested feature lands: Local Calendar. 🤩

For 2022, this is it! Thank you for joining our community. Thank you for sharing, helping out, contributing, creating YouTube videos, blog articles, and podcasts.

Thank you for using Home Assistant! ❤️

Happy holidays and for the last time in 2022: Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube today at 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CET!

It does Matter!

Does it Matter? Yes, Home Assistant does Matter!

Matter is a new smart home interoperability standard, an open-source protocol, that defines how devices can communicate and work together. Read more about Matter in this comprehensive write-up from The Verge.

Today we release the first iteration of the Matter integration for Home Assistant. It is a big and important foundation that is probably best described as “alpha” or maybe even a “developer preview” — allowing anyone to help and jump in on the Matter development. For the first release, we think that is a great start!

At this point, Matter-enabled products are not (yet) generally available. However, if you can get a Matter-certified product, it can be commissioned!

A screenshot of a Matter device showing up in Home Assistant A Matter device integrated with Home Assistant.

Adding Matter devices (commissioning) can be done using our iOS and Android Home Assistant Companion apps. Adding support for this to our apps is being worked on and will become available in the upcoming weeks. The Android Companion app supporting Matter, is currently available for beta testing.

Interested? We have made more details available in our documentation.

Tile card gets features

In the last release, we introduced the Tile card. Today we extend the Tile card by adding support for “features”.

For the Tile card, “features” are additional extras that can be added to a Tile card. For example, they can provide additional controls or information for the entity the Tile card displays.

Screenshot showing the new features that can be added to tile cards

Multiple usable Tile features have been added:

  • Command buttons for vacuum cleaners
  • Brightness slider for lights
  • Controls for opening/closing and tilting covers

Checkout the documentation for more information about Tile features

But that is not all! The Tile card also got colors! 🎨

Based on the entity’s state, the card will get different colors. This color provides an additional visual indication of the entity’s state.

Screenshot showing the new state colors provided by the Tile card

Shiny new state colors!

Those lovely new state colors added to the Tile card, as shown above, are not just added to the tile card. This same color logic has now also been applied to the state history and the logbook!

Screenshot showing the new state colors in history and logbooks

Previously, these colors would be random. Now they are predictable, recognizable and, above all: just look a lot better 🤩

This same experience will also be visible on the dedicated Logbook and History pages of course.

Local calendar

This is one of the longer outstanding and bigger requested features of Home Assistant: A local calendar!

Building a calendar isn’t easy, but Allen Porter did it! And it is not just a calendar with dates and descriptions… oh no! Allen went all in!

Screenshot adding an event to the local calendar

We now have a full blown, local, built-in calendar, which can do all-day event or recurring ones tuned to your liking. Even multiple different local calendars are supported!

Screenshot adding recurring events to the local calendar

Bluetooth proxy using Shelly devices

In the September release, we brought Bluetooth everywhere, by adding Bluetooth proxy support, allowing any ESPHome device in your home to relay Bluetooth traffic across your home.

This release adds support for using Shelly devices as a remote Bluetooth adapter as well!

It works with all second-generation Shelly devices that use firmware 12.0 or later. Those are able to forward Bluetooth advertisements to Home Assistant’s Bluetooth integration. Home Assistant is not able to use Shelly devices to connect to devices, something that is necessry to control devices via Bluetooth. For that, use our Bluetooth Proxies.

This can greatly help with extending the range of your Bluetooth network to help with things like Bluetooth temperature or plant sensors in your home.

In other Bluetooth news: The performance of Bluetooth has, again, been improved this release, and the memory usage should be lower. Always good!

New entity: text

Say hello to a new entity: text! The text entity is very similar to the Text helper (also known as input_text).

The difference is that the helper is configured and managed by you, while the new text entities are provided by integrations. This means integration can now provide entities that ask for a textual input in the UI.

Screenshot a text entity

The first integrations that can now provide text entities as of this release are KNX and MQTT.

Summing entities without templates

Let’s say you have two numeric sensor entities, and you like to have an entity that shows the sum of those two; how would you do that? Creating a template entity, right? Nope! 😁

You can now create a new helper entity that sums the values of two (or more) sensor entities into a brand-new entity.

When creating a new helper, select “Combine the state of several sensors”, pick the sensor you’d like to sum, and select “Sum” for the statistic characteristic. Voila!

Screenshot showing you can now combine and sum up multiple sensor entities

You might have noticed that this looks like the “Min/Max” helper. True! We have renamed “Min/Max” to “Combine the state of several sensors”, to make it more descriptive as it gets more features.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

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

Release 2022.12.1 - December 8

Release 2022.12.2 - December 11

Release 2022.12.3 - December 11

Release 2022.12.4 - December 12

Release 2022.12.5 - December 13

Release 2022.12.6 - December 14

Release 2022.12.7 - December 17

Release 2022.12.8 - December 21

Release 2022.12.9 - January, 2

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

Cloudflare

The Cloudflare integration no longer relies on ipify.org to determine your IP, but instead is using the whoami service.

This means that if you have configured your network only to allow traffic there, you would need to adjust it to allow for the new situation.

(@ludeeus - #81714) (documentation)

Elexa Guardian

The previously deprecated guardian.disable_ap and guardian.enable_ap service and the corresponding binary sensor have now been removed.

(@bachya - #81056) (documentation)

Glances

The scan interval (scan_interval) option in the Glances configuration is removed, and the update interval will use the default value (60 seconds).

If you have already configured Glances integrations, the previously saved interval option will still be used. To revert to the default update interval, you need to re-add the integration.

You can use the homeassistant.update_entity service in an automation for custom update intervals.

(@engrbm87 - #72748) (documentation)

Groups

Media player groups containing players that provide an invalid media player entity state, will now report a “Unknown” group state.

The list of valid media player states is available in our developer documentation.

(@epenet - #78465) (documentation)

HERE Travel Time

The HERE Travel Time integration now uses the HERE API v8. Travelmode publicTransportTimeTable has been merged into publicTransport. Your configuration will be migrated automatically; no manual interaction is necessary.

(@eifinger - #80892) (documentation)

The unit system is no longer controlled by an options setting of the HERE Traveltime integration but uses the built-in custom units configurable per entity.

The distance sensor now uses kilometers as a default and must be manually configured if it was previously using the imperial system.

(@eifinger - #79159) (documentation)

Hikvision

The videoloss event has been removed from the supported list. The event has always been used as a keep-alive for most Hikvision devices, and the library uses it internally. Leaving it enabled as an option causes everything to break if the event is actually processed, so it was removed to eliminate confusion.

Any customized options specified in the YAML configuration for a videoloss event will need to be removed, and videoloss entities will no longer be generated by the integration.

If you used any of these entities in your automations or scripts, you will need to update those to remove the use of these entities.

(@mezz64 - #81173) (documentation)

HomeKit

The HomeKit Air quality PM10 mappings between Home Assistant and HomeKit, have been updated to the latest US AQI standard.

(@stackia - #81217) (documentation)

Logitech Harmony Hub

The PowerOff state of the select entity will be changed to power_off.

If you relied on this state value in your automations or script, you must adjust to this change.

(@bieniu - #77491) (documentation)

Mobile Apps

The events fired when the mobile app scanned a Tag had an incorrect device ID; This has been corrected.

As a result, the evens now contain a different but correct device ID. If you relied on the device ID in your automations, you might need to adjust those with the new device ID.

(@balloob - #82820) (documentation)

Modbus

The name of the mapping keys used for defining HVAC modes in the Modbus climate integration (introduced in 2022.11) has changed. This was needed to fix an issue with the off key, which has a different meaning in YAML.

Instead of:

hvac_mode_register:
  address: ...
  values:
    off: 0
    heat: 1
    cool: 2

You now have to use:

hvac_mode_register:
  address: ...
  values:
    state_off: 0
    state_heat: 1
    state_cool: 2

(@avishorp - #81749) (documentation)

MQTT

YAML configuration of MQTT entities under the platform key (e.g., light), which was deprecated in Home Assistant Core 2022.6, is no longer supported. The configuration must instead be done under the mqtt key.

The legacy MQTT device tracker is no longer supported. See the documentation for the supported MQTT device tracker configuration.

As of this release, you should now use the modern configuration schema for all manually configured MQTT entities. Please note that this does not impact MQTT discovery, for example, Zigbee2MQTT.

(@jbouwh - #82102) (documentation)

The encoding configuration option for the MQTT camera set to b64 was previously deprecated and has now become an invalid configuration.

The new image_encoding configuration option is now used to set Base64 encoding. Please use the new image_encoding config parameter (set to b64) instead.

(@jbouwh - #82244) (documentation)

OpenUV

The previously deprecated openuv.update, openuv.update_uv_index, and openuv.update_protection_data services have now be removed.

(@bachya - #81055) (documentation)

Radarr

The previously deprecated YAML configuration of the Radarr integration has been removed.

Radarr is now configured via the UI, any existing YAML configuration has been imported in previous releases and can now be safely removed from your YAML configuration files.

(@tkdrob - #81210) (documentation)

RainMachine

The previously deprecated extra_water_on_hot_days and freeze_protection binary sensors, and freeze_protection_temperature sensor have now been removed.

(@bachya - #81053) (documentation)

Renault

The unit of measurement for the charging power sensor has been corrected. As the unit has changed, it will create a long-term statistics warning that you need to resolve in the statistics developers tools manually.

(@epenet - #81412) (documentation)

You will need to resolve the analytics warning by adjusting the previous unit.

Risco

The bypassed attribute in Risco zones has been removed and replaced with a switch. The matching services have also been removed, and you can bypass and un-bypass a zone using the regular switch services (turn_on and turn_off respectively).

For example, if you had a call to:

service: risco.bypass_zone
target:
  entity_id: binary_sensor.motion_bedroom

You can replace it with:

service: switch.turn_on
target:
  entity_id: switch.motion_bedroom_bypassed

(@OnFreund - #81137) (documentation)

SimpliSafe

The previously deprecated simplisafe.clear_notifications service has now been removed.

(@bachya - #81054) (documentation)

Statistics

The quantiles statistics sensor characteristic has been removed and replaced by the more versatile percentile characteristic.

If you use the quantiles characteristic, you will need to adapt your sensor configuration to recreate identical values with the percentile characteristic.

(@ThomDietrich - #81749) (documentation)

The configuration of statistics sensors has changed:

The state_characteristic configuration setting is now mandatory.

The sampling_size configuration setting is now optional and no longer defaults to the arbitrary value 20. You can now define sampling_size, max_age, or both depending on your use case. Existing sensors won’t behave differently by the change. However, you might want to check whether your currently defined sensors have a meaningful sampling_size configured or if you wish to remove this setting altogether.

(@ThomDietrich - #81749) (documentation)

Subaru

The Subaru API has changed and no longer returns values required by two sensors:

  • External temp
  • 12V battery voltage

These sensors have been removed from the Subaru integration.

(@G-Two - #83213) (documentation)

UniFi Network

As new PoE entities were introduced with 2022.11, this release, the old troublesome PoE client implementation that these entities replaced, has been removed. Upgrading will automatically remove the old entities.

Please note that the new PoE entities are disabled by default and represent each PoE-capable port without mapping it to a client.

(@Kane610 - #81749) (documentation)

If you are a custom integration or theme developer and want to learn about backward-incompatible 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 integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

  • Google Chat has been removed. It relied on the Google Hangouts APIs, which have been shut down, rendering the integration unusable.

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 2022.12