Hi! It’s finally here. We can now use drag and drop in dashboards. It’s only a first step, but it looks promising. Additionally, there are more exciting new features in this release. Let’s dive in!
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Ed
The new March version 2024.3 of Home Assistant will be released on the first Wednesday of March. 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.
Sections!
We have been waiting for this for a long time. The developers of Home Assistant have worked hard to create a first version for Drag and Drop. It is still in the experimental phase, so there may be breaking changes in the future on dashboards you are already creating using Sections.
You can now create sections on your dashboard and perform various drag and drop actions with them. At the moment, it is not yet possible to create headers and sidebars, but the developers of Home Assistant have told me that this will be possible in the future. Let’s create a dashboard view with sections!
- Go to one of your dashboards.
- Click the plus sign to create a new view in your dashboard.
- Give your view a name and select Sections (experimental) as the View type. Note: you cannot select the Sections (experimental) view type on an existing view that has one of the other types.
- Click Save.
- Your new view will be shown and the first section is already present.
- You can give your section a name first. In my case, I call it Living Room.
- Then you can add another section by clicking on the add section icon.
- I call this section Office.
- Now you can drag and drop both sections already.
- Within a section, you can add entities or cards.
- Click on the plus sign within a section.
- Now Select the By Entity Tab and filter the entities that you want to add.
- Select the entities that you want to show within the section.
- Click Continue.
- You will now see a suggestion on how the entities will look.
- Click Add to Dashboard.
- The entities are now added to the sections and you can start moving the entities around within the section.
- I will also add some entities to the Office section now.
- And I will add a map to the Living Room section.
- You’ll see that the map is larger than the tile cards that are shown in the section, but I can still move the map around within the section. The other cards wrap neatly around it.
- But, there’s more! You can even move entities from one section to another section!
This is a first step towards a complete drag-and-drop environment in Home Assistant, but it already looks promising. Once it becomes possible to create headers and sidebars, I will create a comprehensive tutorial showing you how to easily assemble a tailor-made dashboard.
Running Scripts from the dashboard
A few months ago, it became possible to add fields to scripts using the UI. In this release, you can call a script containing fields from your dashboard, allowing you to interactively fill in the fields. In this example, I have created a script with two fields that send a message to your phone. When I call the script via a button on the dashboard, it prompts me to fill in the two fields. This way, you can now create interactive forms in Home Assistant. If you want to learn more about how to use scripts, take a look at this video where I extensively explain how scripts work and how to use fields in scripts.
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New Energy Graph
The energy dashboard includes a new graph, allowing you to track the energy consumption of your devices over time. Next to that, you can export a CSV of your energy data now as well and import it into Excel for example.
New Sentences for Assist
New sentences have been added for Assist. You can now control the position of a valve using your voice. Additionally, you can set covers to a specific percentage. If you have a robot vacuum cleaner, you can now also control it through Assist. Furthermore, you can operate media players by starting, stopping, pausing, fast-forwarding, and adjusting the volume.
Disabling the remotely enabling of Home Assistant Remote UI
If you utilize Home Assistant Cloud, you have the capability to remotely access your Home Assistant instance through the Remote UI feature.
In cases where this feature is disabled and you are away from home, you can activate the Remote UI feature remotely by logging into your Nabu Casa account and requesting your Home Assistant instance to enable it.
Community feedback has indicated that this feature may not always be preferred, and this release introduces a new option to prevent the remote enabling of the Remote UI feature.
Translating states in your templates
You can now return the translated state of a template, so that the state is in a human readable form. Moreover, it utilizes the default language of your Home Assistant instance. Therefore, if you are operating Home Assistant in a language other than English, the translated state will be displayed in that language.
Other noteworthy changes
These were the major changes in the March release of Home Assistant 2024.3. Additionally, you can find the noteworthy changes in this list. The link to this list is available in the description of this video. One of the things that caught my eye is that there’s now a toggle service for climate entities making it easy to turn on and off your thermostat.
New Integrations
And of course, a bunch of new integrations have been added to Home Assistant, as you can see in this list.
Breaking changes in Home Assistant 2024.3
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! Be aware, that this video is based on the beta of Home Assistant 2024.3, so it might differ slightly from the final release that will be released this upcoming Wednesday.
Conclusion
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