Everything New In Home Assistant 2023.11!

this month brings us to the second last home Assistant release of the year with 20231 which of course is the November release and this month is a pretty big one with lots of quality of life improvements including tile card upgrades for your dashboards the matter 1.2 update big additions to the conditional card easier setup of ESP home devices and one that lots of people have been requesting proper shopping list support if you have ever used shopping list before in home assistant you would find that on the surface they seem to work well and were pretty simple to use but you probably noticed that you would quickly run into certain limitations with them such as not being able to create multiple shopping lists for one or not being able to reference the items in a list from automations at least not directly for another most of the issues seem to stem from the fact that the shopping list integration didn't actually provide any entities in home assistant and instead did something in the back end to store the state of your shopping list but now in 20231 we get a brand new entity type called the Todo entity type which now means that shopping lists created in home assistant are just now regular entities which opens up a lot more possibilities for interacting with them such as being able to reference them in your automations and scripts with this update if you now go to the shopping list integration you will notice that we now have an entity there which was automatically converted from your original shopping list when you updated home assistant the state of this entity will be a number corresponding to the number of uncompleted items on the list which you could then use in your automations unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way yet to reference the contents of a list I was kind of hoping that the attributes field would contain the items in my shopping list which would then allow you to Output that information directly in a notification but hopefully this is just the groundworks and we will see that added as a feature later down the line you also can't create a second shopping list just yet either even though there is a button inside of the UI for it at least not using the shopping list integration directly if you head over to the new to-do list dashboard in your sidebar you will see that the shopping list that you created earlier appears in here and you can create a new list which allows you to essentially create a second shopping list it's not going to show up in the shopping list integration but it does create another entity and can be managed using the to-do list Services meaning you can pretty much create multiple shopping lists just now even if they don't technically appear in the shopping list integration so you may have realize then that the new to-do entity isn't just limited to shopping lists but rather it can be anything you would want to store in a list format such as a task list a goal list maybe a bucket list or perhaps a movie watch watching list basically anything you want really you can store using the to-do entity now as with any new entity that gets added to home assistant we do need to wait for Integrations to actually implement this type of entity however with this release we also get the new local to-do integration which allows you to create lists right from the UI using the to-do dashboard in your sidebar or by using Services if you want to do so using automations or scripts also along with the local to-do integration todoist and Google Tasks have already gotten support for the to-do entity type so you really can do quite a lot with the new to-do entity in home assistant already using this release one thing I do like is that all of your lists are shown in the to-do dashboard regardless of which integration added them which is really cool as it means you can see all of your lists in one place okay that was a lot all about lists but there is a lot of other good stuff in this release too including two updates for your dashboards the first is improvements to the conditional card and if you haven't heard of the conditional card before basically it allows you to show or hide other cards on your dashboard based on different criteria for example if you wanted to only show information about taking the bins out if it's the correct day of the week which is a really good way to keep your dashboards cleaner however in previous releases it was kind of limited to the conditions being based only on the state of an entity this release however adds three new conditions to the possibilities the first is the numeric State condition so now you can check if an entity is above or below a certain value much in the way you can use numeric state in triggers in automations this could be useful for example if you want to display a button for an extractor fan when the humidity went above 70% or maybe display the battery level of a a zigby motion sensor when it went below 20% the next condition you can use is the user condition which allows you to check who the logged in user is this is really useful for if you want to display information or controls that are only relevant to a certain person for example maybe you want to display traffic information about your partner's route to work which allows you to give them kind of a personalized experience finally the last condition type is the screen condition which I think will end up being really powerful for some devices and basically it allows you to control cards based on the size of screen that is viewing the dashboard which is going to be really powerful for creating dashboards that work better on mobile tablet and desktops for example by having less information shown on mobile to keep things easier to read and simpler on a smaller screen then opening that up and showing more information on bigger screens like a tablet or dashboard the second dashboard update in this release is that you can now add extra information about a device to the tile card for quickly glancing at now when you add or edit a tile card you can hit the drop- down on the state content and select the information that you'd like to display either the state of the entity or any attributes of the entity and the really cool thing is is that you can select multiple options from the list depending on what you were looking for next up is a feature that I personally really happy about and that is that ESB home devices can now be set up even easier inside of Home assistant not that it was difficult before but I do think this makes things even more seamless basically if you have a device with ESB home or actually any other firmware that uses improv home assistant can now discover that device using Bluetooth so long as it's enabled in the firmware and let you set it up directly from the home assistant Integrations page including setting up your Wi-Fi credentials rather than having to visit anywhere else to get it added any discovered devices will show up in the devices and services page where you can configure the Wi-Fi credentials and add it straight to home assistant nice next up matter 1.2 was announced and released a couple of weeks ago which adds support for nine new device types which were very much needed and home assistant has been updated to include the matter 1.2 spec now there were no devices released that can actually use matter 1.2 just yet but home assistant should now be more prepared for when those devices do eventually come out next up is a really cool feature for scripts which they are calling Fields Fields essentially allows you to Define variables in your scripts using the UI that can then be passed in when calling the script and referen later this is great for creating reusable scripts that can be used in your automations or in in other scripts when you create a script you can enable fields in the top right where you can then Define your field once the find you can then reference this field in the actions of your script and finally whenever you call your script for example from a service call or an automation you will see your field pop up as an option and you can input data into it right from the UI this is a pretty cool little upgrade and I think it will open up some really nice possibilities finally for the things you can now restart home assistant in safe mode by going to the restart menu hitting Advanced and then selecting restart in safe mode which will cause it to restart with any of your custom Integrations disabled including any front-end Integrations just so you can make sure that they aren't causing you any issues this isn't something you will need to use often hopefully but it should be a nice little way to troubleshoot if you do ever need it as for the little things this month firstly the energy dashboard now has the ability to set custom date ranges so that you can see your usage over any time period there is also a new selector available for blueprints or script fields for countries templates now have the ability to check the type of variable used the calendar dashboard now shows the split view for multiple calendars like the to-do list dashboard does the system Bridge integration now supports media players and finally the Fitbit integration got an overhaul to show new nutrition sensors in terms of new Integrations this month we have five new Integrations available including the new local to-do list integration mentioned previously along with a couple of others and there's also two new Integrations have moved over to the UI in this release instead of yaml as for breaking changes this month we get another very short list once again in this release love to see it with nothing major jumping out to me but do make sure to have a read of them for yourself as always to make sure nothing applies to you and that is about it for this release this was quite a big release this month after a bit of a smaller update last month so that was good to see do let me know down in the comments what your favorite new feature was from this release for me I think the new to-do list stuff is super cool as I already use an app called to-do list so hopefully I can look to switch over to the new local home assistant to-do list integration which will be super cool I also really like the new script Fields those are pretty nice too and I think we'll open up some new possibilities I also really like how it shows your fields in the service calls for automations or just doing service calls in general that's really nice touch but drop your favorite new feature down in the comments and let me know other than that I hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much for watching as always please drop this video a like and get subscribed if you haven't already and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 69,182

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, home automation, home assistant new features, home assistant thermostat card, home assistant thermostat dashboard, home assistant 2023.11, home assistant conditional card, home assistant november update, home assistant november 2023.11 update, home assistant november 2023.11

Id: Nw8wLIkQXII

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023