Home Assistant 2023.4 is released and is full of new features. Let’s have a quick look at what is new in this release of April 2023!
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Home Assistant publishes a new release every 1st Wednesday of the month. Here are the new things in this release:
New Dialogs
Home Assistant is focussing more and more on the front end and added some new dialogs in this release. There’s now a new dialog for the alarm control panel which looks much cleaner. Also, when you arm your alarm, the interface looks very nice as well.
The cover dialog is changed as well. There are a couple of variants for covers. For instance, I showed a mushroom card in this video for Venetian blinds. This now looks like this by default in Home Assitant. The cover dialog adapts to the type of cover. I also have some roller blinds and the dialog for roller blinds looks like this. And I’ve got some blinds that can only go 100% up and 100% down. The dialog for these blinds looks like this.
Also, the dialog for fans changed. I do not have a smart fan yet, but the interface looks like this for fans.
All in all, the dialogs are getting much cleaner now and I feel that Home Assistant is getting a more professional look and feel with each release!
New features for the Tile card
The tile card got some new features now as well. If you use the Tile card for your alarm panel, you can enable the alarm modes on the card itself now. Also, if you use the Tile card for your fan, you can enable the fan modes on the Tile Card as well.
Macros for your templates
When you are a power user in Home Assistant and write templates, you will love this new templating feature in this new release. If you want to learn how templates work, please watch this video where I explain how you can create your own templates. Anyway, creating templates is really powerful, because you can create your own sensors in Home Assistant and do a lot of more powerful stuff with it. For instance, I’ve created a template that shows a list of all the device batteries that need to be replaced soon. Now, when you have created a lot of templates, it might be that a couple of them use the same logic. Let’s say you have multiple templates that check if it’s day or night and return a value based on that. I know, this might be a silly example, but I’d like to keep it simple for you to understand this.
So, what you can do now is create a “Macro” that tests if it’s day or night and returns the value “day” or “night”. You can then call this macro in other templates and return a state based on if it’s day or night. So, you do not have to write the same template code over and over again. I will create a tutorial about how to use macros in the near future to explain exactly how this works.
Next to this, there are some functions adjusted. The relative_time and today_at functions now update their state every minute, which will make triggering based on these functions a lot better. And there’s a new is_hidden_entity function now so that you can see if an entity is marked hidden or not. This way, you can filter out all hidden entities if you do not want to act upon them.
And there’s more!
There are some new functions, like the areas function, that will return a list of all the areas. And, we now have a break and continue option in for loops to make them more efficient! To top it off, there’s also a new has_value function, so that you can check if a sensor has a value or not. These are all very great additions to templates that will make your life easier if you write them!
Database changes in Home Assistant 2023.4
The Home Assistant database is optimized as well. Generally speaking, it’s faster, uses less disk space, and CPU usage is reduced!
New Blueprint features
If you are creating BluePrints, you know, these super handy automation templating thingies, then this new Constant selector might come in handy. The constant select provides an optional input, that provides a fixed value (the constant) or doesn’t provide anything at all. So you can use it instead of the Boolean selector for example.
Next to this, you can now use a list of filters in the Area, Entity, Device, and Target selectors. This makes sure that you can show only the specific options that you need in your selectors.
More Translations
With this release, it is now possible to translate entities! So, now the names of entities, the names of attributes, and the attributes themselves are being translated as well. It doesn’t mean that it is visible already, because the translations have to be created, but more and more entities will show translations in the near future.
Other noteworthy changes in Home Assistant 2023.4
Then we have the list of other noteworthy changes. One of the most remarkable things is the update of the Reolink integration. The Reolink video doorbell is the best video doorbell that you can buy. Check this video to view my complete review. In that video, I also showed the old HACS integration for Reolink, but it’s now native in Home Assistant and it has a ton of extra options in this release.
Also, the Spotify integration now supports podcasts, and ESPHome supports pairing Bluetooth devices. Furthermore, there are much more changes that you can read in this list.
Updating to Home Assistant 2023.4
As always, read the list of breaking changes before you update Home Assistant, so you know what to expect.
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Enjoy this fine release and I will see you very soon in my next video!
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Keywords:
home assistant, templating, templates, smart home, release, version, smarthome, iot