Welcome to Home Assistant’s latest update: December 2023.12! Get ready to discover some exciting new features and improvements that will take your smart home experience to the next level! Let’s do this!
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The new December version 2023.12 of Home Assistant will be released on the first Wednesday of December. 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. This December 2023 release of Home Assistant has some exciting frontend changes plus some groundbreaking changes that I’ll talk about at the end of the video. Let’s start with the first front-end change!
Redesign of the Login page
The login page has undergone a redesign. When logging in locally, you can choose from the users who are permitted to access your Home Assistant instance. When accessing your Home Assistant server remotely, you will encounter the “old” login page to ensure that no privacy-sensitive information is exposed to the external world. Additionally, you have the option to change the language on the login page.
New Thermostat card
In the September edition of Home Assistant, a new entity dialog for thermostat entities was introduced. This showcased a beautifully designed thermostat entity; however, the design of the thermostat card remained unchanged at that time. Now, the thermostat card has been updated to mirror the entity dialog for thermostat entities, resulting in an impressive look! Additionally, you have the ability to incorporate features such as HVAC modes and preset modes.
Long term statistics in Home Assistant 2023.12
This is something that many people have been eagerly anticipating! The history dashboard now displays long-term statistics. It combines statistics from the past few days with data from an extended period, allowing you to view sensor statistics over a more extended timeframe.
Number feature for tile cards
The Tile card now features a new number functionality, enabling you to directly control a number entity or helper from the card. Additionally, you can choose whether to utilize a slider or up/down buttons to manage the number value.
Options for the default dashboard in Home Assistant 2023.12
Creating a dashboard in Home Assistant has been a bit challenging, especially for beginners. The default dashboard provides a wealth of information but was not very user-friendly for editing. However, with the December 2023.12 release of Home Assistant, several options have been introduced to enhance the default dashboard experience.
When editing the default dashboard, you’ll now find options to hide entities that do not have an assigned area. Additionally, you have the ability to hide the energy card. Furthermore, you can adjust the order of the areas, ensuring that your most frequently used areas are displayed at the top. This marks the initial phase of making dashboards more configurable, with more options anticipated in future releases.
Furthermore, when adding a new dashboard, you now have the choice to start with an empty dashboard or create a new default dashboard.
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More To-Do functionalities
The To-Do lists, introduced in the previous release, have now received two new services.
A new service allows you to list all items on a to-do list. This service returns a list containing all the to-do items on the selected to-do list. You can choose to display completed and/or uncompleted items.
In addition to this service, there is another new service that deletes all completed items from the to-do list of your choice.
Furthermore, when viewing a to-do list in Home Assistant, you can bookmark the URL, enabling you to directly access your to-do list.
Last but not least, the integrations for OurGroceries and PicNic now create to-do lists and sync their lists and shopping carts with Home Assistant. When you add an item to the PicNic to-do list, it will even fetch the correct product from the PicNic site! Isn’t that cool?
Re-Import Blueprints
You can now re-import a blueprint as soon as it has changed. This applies only to blueprints that you’ve downloaded from the blueprint community page. It does not work for blueprints installed manually, such as the blueprints I created for this fantastic desktop clock for Home Assistant.
Simply navigate to the Blueprints page and click on the three dots next to the blueprints. Here, you can select “Re-import Blueprint” if it’s from the blueprint community page of Home Assistant.
Other Noteworthy Changes in Home Assistant 2023.12
In addition to these major changes, there are several other noteworthy updates. You can find them listed below. The link is available in the video description. The one that I find most exciting is that Roborock maps can now be displayed in Home Assistant!
New Integrations
And, of course, there are new integrations in this Home Assistant 2023.12 release that you can view in the list below. Currently, these include:
- Komfovent
- Linear Garage Door
- MyPermobil
- OurGroceries
- V2C
- Devialet
Additionally, the following integrations can now be set up directly from the UI:
- CalDav
- Fast.com
- Ping
If you have configured these last three in your configuration.yaml, you will receive a message indicating that this configuration will be deprecated in 6 months. It’s time to set them up using the UI!
Breaking changes in Home Assistant 2023.12
Always ensure you read the breaking changes for each release, which you can find in this list. There are two breaking changes that I want to specifically mention:
The first one pertains to the calendar service calendar.list_events, which has been changed to calendar.get_events. If you utilize the list_events service in your automations or templates, be sure to update them accordingly. The same applies to the weather.get_forecast service, which is now renamed to weather.get_forecasts. If you followed the instructions in my video where I explain how to work with the weather forecast in Home Assistant, you will need to rename the weather.get_forecast service to weather.get_forecasts to continue using it.
Additionally, if you use my blueprints for this Desktop clock, make sure to upgrade the blueprints after installing Home Assistant 2023.12; otherwise, some of your automations may cease working over time. All the links are available in the description of this video.
Conclusion
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