2022.2 – Streamlining Experiences and over 2.5k contributions

Streamlining Experiences

Home Assistant dropped a blog post over the break about what they want to focus on for 2022. For example, there should be a built-in way, for both YAML and the UI, to easily send a notification with a camera snapshot to your phone, pick a song to play for an automation, or use text-to-speech to notify you when something is happening. All these things are possible today but require too much knowledge of how the various parts work. As part of the 2022.2 release, some things that have been done to start the streamlining process include:

• When a integration has a single device or a single service, if you now click on the “1 device” shown in the integration card, it will directly go to that device (instead of showing the table with a single device)
• “Check for updates” in configuration screen. This will check for Core, Operating System & Add-on updates with a single click.
• Visit device/service and documention on discovered items.
• A new Search in top right of configuration dashboard
• Scenes now have a state, last activated timestamp (like a button entity, last pressed)
• Zones now have a state! Instead of “zoning” they now show the counter of the number of people entities in the zone. This means you easily automate when “someone” gets home, or when everybody left home.

New Features

• New media bar The media browser has been renamed to just “media”, and there is now a new media control bar that appears at the bottom of the screen, similar to other media players like Spotify VLC etc.
• Local Media Support Sonos, VLC and Roku now have support to play local media. Sonos can now even browse other supported media. For example, if you have set up the Spotify and Sonos integration, you can now browse your Spotify to play it on your Sonos devices. Cast also has support for Plex in the media browser.
• Changes to Device Tracker entities From this release, some components will no longer automatically add device tracker entities to Home Assistant. Think routers which would add a new entity to Home Assistant each time a device connects to your network.Only device trackers that match to an existing entity will be enabled moving forward.

• Immediate If function available for templates If you’re a heavy user of templates, a new immediate if function ( iif() ) is now available.Turns

  {% if is_state(’light.kitchen’, ‘on’) %} 
  Yes 
  {%else%} 
  No
  {% endif %}

  Into

  {{ iif(is_state(’light.kitchen’, ‘on’), ‘Yes’, ‘No’) }}

• Apple TV integration now supports tvOS 15, with app launching support also added
• New Electric Vehicle sensors for Mazda Includes charge level and remaining range
• Support for Soma Tilt Devices The bluetooth blind integration now supports the tilt/twist version

 

New Integrations

• Aussie Broadband Allows Home Assistant to track usage and statistics for Aussie Broadband customers, for both internet and phone accounts.
• Open-Meteo The Open-Meteo integration integrates the free weather forecast from Open-Meteo with Home Assistant.Open-Meteo offers free weather forecast APIs for open-source developers and non-commercial use. No account or API key is required to use this service.Open-Meteo collaborates with National Weather Services providing Open Data with 11 to 2 km resolution. Their high-performance APIs select the best weather model for your location.

• RTSPtoWebRTC The RTSPtoWebRTC integration registers with camera integration to provide WebRTC live streams for any RTSP camera. The integration initiates a connection to a RTSPtoWeb or RTSPtoWebRTC proxy server that converts an RTSP stream to a WebRTC stream.
• Steamist The Steamist will allow you to monitor the state of your Steamist steam shower and turn on and off the steam generator.

 

Breaking Changes

There’s a lot of breaking changes listed, however most of them are related to integrations moving from YAML → UI. These include:

• Flume
• Foscam
• Enphase Envoy
• Azure Event Hub
• Environment Canada
• OpenGarage
• Aurora ABB PowerOne Solar PV
• Efergy
• Magic Home
• Broadlink
• CO2 Signal
• DLNA Digital Media Renderer
• Nuki
• Honeywell Total Connect Comfort
• Google Maps Travel Time
• Philips TV
• TP-Link Kasa Smart
• Stookalert
• VLC media player Telnet
• Logitech Squeezebox
• Samsung SyncThru Printer
• Waze Travel Time
• SMA Solar
• NETGEAR
• Nmap Tracker
• Keenetic NDMS2

Other Breaking Changes

• Z-wave JS Due to a schema change, zwave-js-server version 1.14.0 or greater is required. Ensure you are using the latest version of zwave-js-server (or the add-ons that provides those).
• HomeKit HomeKit will now automatically exclude entities with an entity category such as a configuration or diagnostic entity unless they have been explicitly included.To explicitly include an entity:YAML: Add the entity to the filter in either the include_entities or include_entity_globs fields. UI: Select the entity in the UI in include mode. If you are using exclude mode, a second bridge can be created in include mode.

• GPIO Integrations As of this release, all integration interfacing with GPIO directly, have been deprecated.There are multiple reasons for this, which includes a general low usage of these integrations. For most Home Assistant installation, GPIO isn’t easily usable and more often the integrations are unmaintained.We do not forbid the use of GPIO, but we are merely deprecating and removing built-in integrations, providing GPIO functionality from Core. We welcome custom integrations (existing or new ones) to provide alternatives. However, for most cases we recommend on using dedicated hardware, like an ESP device, instead.

• Fan/Humidifer/Light/Remote/Siren/Switch/Vaccuum Previously, toggle-based entities (like fan, light, switch, remote, siren, vacuum, humidifier) could have the state on or off, and in case the device was unreachable: unavailable. However, compared to other entities, toggle entities aren’t able to have an unknown state, this now has changed.As of now, toggle-based entities can now have the on, off, unavailable, or unknown state.Also applies for binary_sensors

• iOS The Home Assistant iOS/macOS app supports notification actions defined in the notification itself; the old method of defining push categories in the iOS integration is now deprecated and will be removed in the future.
• Groups – Locks The behavior of grouped locks has been reversed such that “unlocked” is mapped to on and “locked” to off. This means that: A group with mixed domains will be considered on if any lock included in the group is unlocked. A group of locks will be considered “unlocked” if any lock included in the group is unlocked.

• Nest The Legacy “Works With Nest API” is deprecated and support will be removed in Home Assistant Core 2022.5
• Tahoma Has been removed as it was broken. Has been superseded by the Overkiz integration
• Arduino Gone
• EE Bright Box Has been broken and disabled for over a year now. It has now been removed.

 

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