What's new in the Home Assistant 2021.10 October Release - Tuya Integration, New Icons and More

another month has passed and that means it's time for a new home assistant update for those of you that aren't aware the home assistant developers released new updates on the first wednesday of every month and they're named by the year and month in which they're released so today the 2021.10 update has been released which is the october 2021 release let's take a look at what's new hey home automation guy start the show on the face of it the 2021.10 release is not as actionable feature-packed when it compared to some of the previous month's releases but there are still a range of improvements and changes that you should be aware of before you upgrade your home assistant installation we'll start with the updates made to z-wave js z-wave is a wireless home automation protocol that people can use to connect sensors and other devices to their smart home and z-wave js is the new standard for using these devices with home assistant we've seen a lot of updates made to this integration over the past few months and in this version they've made two major improvements firstly they now support the s2 security standard for zwave devices the s2 standard provides a higher level of security stability and battery life when compared to the previous s0 standard this update means you can now encrypt traffic between your z-wave devices and home assistant with the new standard assuming your device is already supported if you're already using compatible devices paired with a previous version of z-wave js then you'll need to re-pair them with home assistant in order to take advantage of this new s2 standard the second z-wave js update is a new migration wizard the old z-wave integration is going to go away soon so if you're using it you should switch to the new z-wave js integration as soon as possible before this update migrating to the new version looked like quite a daunting task and there were many many different steps to follow the latest update brings a wizard which will help you through these steps and show you exactly what you need to do and when i personally don't have any z-wave devices in my smart home but if you've done the migration to z-wave js yourself please let us know what it was like in the comments below tuyere are a smart device manufacturer that create a ton of cool home automation products that many other companies white label over the years we've seen a lot of smart home manufacturers lock up their ecosystems and thereby preventing third-party integrations like home assistant from working with them tui made an announcement a few months ago that they were bucking this trend and creating a direct integration into home assistant for their devices this integration has been in beta for the last few months but has now been directly integrated into home assistant as of this version unlike the existing two year integration this one automatically pushes updates from your devices to home assistant making it way more responsive the integration has also been developed by the twoyear development team so it's likely to be really stable and regularly updated with new features and devices as the two-year products evolve the new integration supports lights switches scenes fans and climate devices but unfortunately cover devices like automated curtains and blind motors didn't get finished in time i assume those will be included in the next 2021.11 release if you're using the older two-year integration you'll need to set this one up from scratch as it's built on top of a new set of apis that are not backwards compatible this integration relies on home assistant talking to the toyota cloud apis so you will still need an active internet connection and a two-year account until you have made suggestions that i'll be working on a local only version of the two-year integration so that devices can talk directly to home assistant without relying on an internet connection or passing your private information into the cloud but i'm not holding my breath that this is going to come anytime soon or even at all home assistant has had support for adding icons to your entities and devices for some time now and these have been provided by the material design icon project as part of this update home assistant has switched to a newer version of the material design icons that means you now have access to almost 400 new icons to play with 75 of which are specifically related to home assistant be aware though that alongside the addition of these new icons some have also been removed or renamed you should keep an eye on your log files as they will show warnings for any icons that you're using that are now unsupported they'll continue to work for the next two releases but after that they'll go away i'm sure you'll be able to find a suitable replacement icon amongst the sea of new ones available otto winter the founder of esp home which is now managed by home assistant directly has added support for encrypted communications between esp home devices and home assistant i always advocate full and recommend encryption on everything so this is a welcome change you'll need to ensure that you are using esp home 2021.9 or later to take advantage of this feature as with every release there are a bunch of other updates that aren't quite big enough to warrant their own section i highly recommend that you read the official blog post which is linked in the description below to see if any of them relate to devices or integrations that you use for me the highlights are improvements to the shelley and tp-link integrations the shelley team have added support for their new range of next generation devices and the casa smart integration has made some improvements to the supported devices and made it easier to configure and discover them via the ui the switchbot integration has also received some updates which is great news for me as i'm going to be doing a video about some switchbot devices shortly click the subscribe button below if you want to see how i'm going to automate my curtains using one of their products this update brings five new additional integrations with it we've got airthings which provides air quality monitoring sensors amber electric which is an australian energy retailer crown stone smart switches and plugs what time energy emission reporting and whirlpool sixth sense air conditioners if you have any of these types of smart devices you can now use them directly inside home assistant we once again have a few changes that may break some of your scripts automations or dashboards these are called breaking changes and are usually a result of the developers updating entities or attributes to a new standard this means that you may need to update your scripts and automations so they continue to keep working an example of this is the pi hole integration they have removed one of the attributes called domains blocked as this data now has its own sensor if you use this attribute in your automations you should switch it to use the new sensor instead so your automations keep working other integrations have had their configuration moved out of the configuration.yaml file and into the ui so you can clean up your config file by removing any references to these integrations i highly recommend that you read through the breaking changes in the official blog post which i've linked in the description below and see if any of these changes apply to integrations that you use today whilst you're there take a look at the list of icons that have been removed and renamed to see if you need to make any changes and finally there's been a couple of announcements about the home assistant project recently which are worth calling out september was home assistant's 8th birthday and to celebrate they announced the launch of a new piece of home assistant hardware called the amber the amber is a small computer based on a raspberry pi that comes with a built-in zigbee dongle ethernet port and ssd hard drive expansion slot the home assistant community wants to make the platform as accessible as possible to everyone and providing an off-the-shelf piece of equipment that people can just plug in and get started using home assistant will go a long way to increase the adoption of the platform unfortunately even if you buy one right now it won't ship to your house until june 2022 but still i've ordered two of them i might give one to mum and dad i also want to call out that home assistant is taking part in hacktoberfest which is a month-long hackathon encouraging people to contribute to open source projects if you make full contributions to an open source project such as home assistant you get a free t-shirt and that's a wrap on the october 2021.10 home assistant update as i mentioned earlier it's not the most jam-packed update but still contains a ton of improvements it still amazes me that an open source project like this can commit to making new versions available every single calendar month and i really thank everyone who contributes to these updates to make our lives better if you thought this video was useful then please give it a thumbs up to let me know i regularly release videos about home assistant and smart home automations just like these two videos here they show you how i use different sensors and devices to make things easier around my house whilst you're here why not click the subscribe button so you can see when i release new videos and then together we can make your home smarter [Music]

Channel: Home Automation Guy

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Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021