Hi! Welcome to the April 2024.4 update for Home Assistant! I’m thrilled to bring you some exciting new features and enhancements today. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!
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The upcoming April release, version 2024.4 of Home Assistant, is scheduled for launch on the first Wednesday of April. Currently, the beta version is already accessible. If you’re eager to explore the new features of Home Assistant, you can opt to install the beta. However, please be aware that the features showcased in this video are based on the beta and might undergo minor adjustments before the final release next Wednesday.
Organizing your Home Assistant
The most requested feature in Home Assistant’s history has undoubtedly been the ability to “Group Automations” on the front end for better organization. Your voices have been heard! With this release, the Home Assistant team introduces tools to streamline the organization of your Home Assistant setup. The team has gone beyond merely addressing grouping automations. Next to that, three new organizational structures within Home Assistant are being introduced: Floors, Labels, and Categories.
Before I’m going to show you those, let me show you the all-new user interface designed for tables.
Improved user interface for tables
Expanding the ways you can organize your Home Assistant setup is fantastic! However, ensuring easy viewing, filtering, and navigation of information is equally essential. To achieve this, all tables are completely redesigned within Home Assistant.
Each table now features a search bar, enabling quick retrieval of specific items, can be sorted by any column, and has a fresh new look and feel.
Furthermore, tables now offer the ability to group rows based on various criteria, such as entity state, and can be filtered with powerful options. These filters allow you to display only the rows relevant to your needs. For instance, you can filter based on areas or utilize the new organizational structures floors, labels, and categories.
Floors of your home
Let’s delve into the new organizational structures, starting with floors.
Currently, Home Assistant utilizes areas to group your devices according to the living spaces in your home, such as the living room or kitchen. However, if you consider your home layout, you may have multiple floors, each with its own distinct areas.
This is where floors come into play. Floors introduce another approach to organizing your areas based on the different levels of floors in your home. The more familiar Home Assistant becomes with your home’s layout and structure, the more effectively it can assist you.
You can incorporate floors into your automations and scripts as a target for your actions. For instance, you can instruct Home Assistant to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you retire for the night. Additionally, for advanced users, floors can be utilized within templates to craft sophisticated automations.
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Label anything
While floors and areas serve as excellent representations of your physical home, what if your requirements vary? This is where labels step in!
Labels introduce an organizational structure that is entirely customizable to your preferences. You have the freedom to create numerous labels with any naming convention you desire and apply them to virtually anything within Home Assistant. Whether it’s areas, devices, entities, automations, scripts, or helpers, the possibilities are endless! Moreover, you can assign multiple labels to the same item, providing even greater flexibility and granularity in organization.
Similar to how floors function, labels can also be employed in your automations and scripts to serve as targets for your actions. This level of versatility offers so much flexibility, allowing you not only to organize your Home Assistant effectively but also to automate various tasks throughout your home!
For instance, you can create a label “Away” and turn off all devices with the label “Away” when you leave your home.
Organize using categories
Finally, we now have categories. These categories serve the purpose of grouping items for organizational purposes and are exclusive to specific dashboards within Home Assistant.
For instance, on the automations dashboard, you have the flexibility to create multiple categories and organize your automations accordingly. This enables you to view your automations grouped by these categories or filter them based on them.
Since these categories are unique to each dashboard, you can establish distinct sets of categories depending on the place you’re organizing. This implies that you can have different categories on the automations dashboard compared to the scene, or scripts dashboard.
Map dashboard
The map dashboard is a new addition to this release. There was already a map integration in Home Assistant, but the Map dashboard provides more flexibility.
With the introduction of the map dashboard, you now can incorporate multiple map dashboards with diverse entities and settings. Moreover, if you prefer not to use the map feature, you have the option to remove it altogether. Upon upgrading, Home Assistant will seamlessly migrate your current map integration to a map dashboard, ensuring a smooth transition.
Webpage dashboard
Yet another dashboard type debuting in this release: The webpage dashboard!
The webpage dashboard enables you to incorporate and embed a webpage onto your dashboard. This webpage could originate from the internet, a local source, or a webpage hosted on a local server.
This dashboard supersedes the outdated iFrame panel (iframe_panel). If you have existing panels configured in your YAML configuration, Home Assistant will seamlessly migrate them to the new webpage dashboard upon upgrading.
Please be aware that you cannot embed HTTP webpages into HTTPS environments. So, if you use Nabu Casa, for example, you cannot show an HTTP webpage dashboard.
Define the columns in the section view
In the last release, sections were introduced. In this release, the number of columns for each section can be defined.
Adding matter devices from other controllers
The process for integrating Matter devices from other controllers into Home Assistant is improved. Now, when you add a Matter device to Home Assistant, you’ll be prompted to choose whether you want to add a new Matter device or one that is already connected to another controller, such as Google or Apple Home. If you opt to add a device that’s already linked to another controller, Home Assistant will provide step-by-step guidance to assist you throughout the process.
Lock behavior improvements
When it comes to unlocking a lock, you do not want to accidentally open the door caused by misclicks while you’re away from home. To address this, the behavior of locks is enhanced within the user interface, now requiring confirmation for such actions.
Other noteworthy changes
These were the major changes in the April release of Home Assistant 2024.4. Additionally, you can find the noteworthy changes in this list. The link to this list is available in the description of this video. Amongst other things, Home Assistant got faster again, and the Reolink integration keeps getting more and more functionality like PTZ patrol start/stop, Package detection, and controls to play quick reply messages.
New Integrations
And of course, a bunch of new integrations have been added to Home Assistant, as you can see in this list. There’s now a new Motionblinds BLE integration for those who use the Bluetooth version of Motionblinds. Be aware that this integration does not work for the Motionblind Eve motors.
Breaking changes in Home Assistant 2024.4
Always make sure to review the list of breaking changes for each release, as it can be found here. It’s essential to read through these breaking changes before updating to avoid potential issues. Please note that this video is based on the beta version of Home Assistant 2024.4, so there may be slight variations from the final release scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday.
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