Hey there, Home Assistant enthusiasts! Welcome to the Home Assistant February 2024.2 update! I have some exciting new features and enhancements to share with you today. So, let’s dive right in!
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Ed
The new February version 2024.2 of Home Assistant will be released on the first Wednesday of February. At this moment the beta is already available, so if you want to see the new features of Home Assistant, you can try and install the beta. Please note that the features I show in this video are based on the beta and may differ slightly from the final release next Wednesday.
Improved drag & drop support for automations
We have taken another step forward with drag and drop in Home Assistant. No, it’s not yet available in the dashboard, but drag-and-drop functionality has improved in automations. You can now even move components from one nested section to another. For example, you can now move a condition from the “And if” section to an “If-Then” action in the “Then Do” section!
Download data from the history dashboard in Home Assistant 2024.2
From the community, there were regular questions about how to export historical data from Home Assistant so that you can use it in Excel, for example. In the past, you had to do this by establishing a connection with the database and extracting the data with complex queries. From now on, it’s super simple. There is now a download button in the history interface that allows you to easily export a CSV, which you can then import into Excel!
Shipping on a new Python version
This change happens completely automatically. Home Assistant now runs on Python 3.12. What you will particularly notice is that Home Assistant runs faster. If you have no idea what this is about, you don’t have to worry about it. It is mainly interesting information for technicians!
Update entities for ZHA devices
ZHA, or Zigbee Home Automation integration in Home Assistant, now also provides update entities. This means that you can now update the firmware of your Zigbee devices from within Home Assistant when using ZHA. It was already possible to do this through a setting in the configuration.yaml, but now it can also be done directly from the device itself. I recently switched entirely to Zigbee2MQTT, but updating can now also be more straightforward from ZHA. Keep in mind that updating one Zigbee device may take a few hours at times!
Matter diagnostics and actions in Home Assistant 2024.2
If you use Matter devices, you now have the ability to view more information about your Matter devices. Additionally, you can now start the commissioning mode from Home Assistant, allowing you to add your Matter device, for example, to Apple HomeKit.
Show all known assist devices
If you go to the Voice Assistant Configuration dashboard from Home Assistant 2024.2, you will now see a link to all your Assist devices. This allows you to quickly view the entities of all your Assist devices.
Better errors when using Assist
In the past, the error messages you encountered in Assist were not very clear. Now, you will see better error messages when using Assist. For example, see this instance where I ask to lower the heating in the office.
Custom response in the automation editor when using a sentence trigger
Wow, this is awesome! A while back, we could already use custom phrases as triggers for Assist. From now on, it is also possible to define a custom response in an automation so that Assist provides an answer that you have defined yourself.
Icons everywhere in Home Assistant 2024.2
Well, it seems that this change doesn’t do much at all, but nothing could be further from the truth! Because icons can now be linked to a state, integrations can display different icons for different states. Additionally, icons can now be linked to areas, so they will also be shown in the area target pickers and the area dashboard.
Integration authentication issues are now shown in the repairs dashboards
In the past, it could happen that an integration stopped working because something went wrong with the authentication. Sometimes it wasn’t immediately clear why it no longer worked. You could then see this in the integrations dashboard. Starting from now, authentication errors will also be displayed in the repairs overview.
Other noteworthy changes in Home Assistant 2024.2
These were the major changes in the February release of Home Assistant 2024.2. Additionally, you can find the noteworthy changes in this list. The link to this list is available in the description of this video. A useful new addition is that you can now invert the status of a lock, cover, or valve when changing the type of a switch.
New Integrations
And of course, a bunch of new integrations have been added to Home Assistant, as you can see in this list. By the way, the proximity integration is now fully configurable through the user interface as well.
Breaking changes in Home Assistant 2024.2
Always ensure you read the breaking changes for each release, which you can find in this list. Make sure you read the breaking changes before you update, or you might run into trouble!
Conclusion
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