2022.5 – Another configuration menu change and Insteon rolls its shutters

Cloud Strikes Again – Insteon

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2022.5

• New Configuration Menu Things have been reorganised again.The Home Assistant team did some testing amongst users to try and get the best config menu layout.

• ZHA can now configure power on states for supported devices If you have things like Philips Hue bulbs, you can now configure what state they will be in when power is restored, right within Home Assistant.
• New Quick Bar Icon for tablet users If you’re used to the quick search tool by pressing e on your keyboard, you can now access this menu using the new magnifying glass icon in the top right corner of the screen.
• Gauge Card Now Has segments If you’re familiar with Grafana, you can now have multiple segments in a guage card.
• IF Else for YAML There is finally support for if and else conditions in YAML. You could previously do this via a choose block, but now makes more sense.
• Continue on error! Ever get frustrated when an automation/script doesn’t finish executing because of an error? You can now tell your automations and scripts to keep processing when an error occurs.
• Ability to stop a script/automation There is now a stop button, allowing you to kill an execution of a script or automation while it is running.
• Parallel Actions! A script or automation can now make service calls to multiple things at the same time! This is great for things where you don’t need to wait for an action to complete before the automation continues on.A goodnight routine can now lock everything down and turn everything off at the same time, instead of doing one by one.

• New Match Any for state conditions Allows a quicker way to define multiple entities that could be in a condition. For example if any of these doors are open, this condition passes. Previously these had to be grouped over an or condition block
• New triggers for not_from and not_to You can now have an automation trigger on a negative state, for example trigger every time a motion sensor doesn’t detect motion, which could include the device going offline
• Ability to disable trigger and condition blocks If you need to test an automation, you can now mark a trigger or condition block as disabled
• UI can now select multiple entities for a trigger
• New Calendar Trigger You can now have a trigger when a calendar event starts. This could previously be done by having a state trigger when the calendar entity goes to “on”
• Database optimizations If you have many sensors generating statistics, as compiling statistics now takes 30-100x less time.The number of database queries needed for most sensors with a fixed start time is 99% less.Additional improvements to the history APIs to speed up retrieving from the database, reducing API response times by 15-35% on average.

• Scripts now get a unique ID Every script now automatically gets an unique ID, which means you can edit their name, icon, and assign them to areas straight from the UI!
• ZwaveJS server discovery If you run Z-Wave JS server manually in for example, a Docker container, it will now be automatically discovered on your network.
• Backup services available for docker users added the backup.create service to the backup integration allowing you to create an automation to create backups on a schedule.
• Sonos Favourites Sensor now has a favorites sensor, so you can access and use your favorites in your automations, scripts and templates.

New Integrations

• Meater The Meater Smart Meat Thermometer integration allows for communicating with the Meater Temperature Probe from Apption Labs.Uses cloud polling

• nVent RAYCHEM SENZ The SENZ integration allows you to control and monitor your nVent RAYCHEM SENZ-WIFI thermostats.Uses cloud polling

• SlimProto (Squeezebox players) The SlimProto integration allows you to control a Squeezebox music player directly from Home Assistant, without the need for an external Media Server such as Logitech Media Server.This lets you control Squeezebox hardware like the Classic, Transporter, Duet, Boom, Radio, and Touch and software players like Squeezelite, PiCorePlayer or Max2Play. For the real DIY enthusiast, there even is a player for the ESP32.

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Breaking Changes

• Zwave JS requires a version bump If you use the zwave_js add-on, you need to have at least version 0.1.56. If you use the Z-Wave JS 2 MQTT add-on, you need to have at least version 0.38.0. If you use the zwavejs2mqtt Docker container, you need to have at least version 6.7.0. If you run your own Docker container, or some other installation method, you will need to update your zwave-js-server instance to at least 1.16.0.
• Text to Speech (TTS) The TTS base_url option is deprecated. Please, configure internal/external URL instead.
• Templates Trigger based template sensors are now initialized to the last known state at Home Assistant startup, instead of to “unknown”.
• Recorder Home Assistant will now automatically repack your database once a month, on the second Sunday of the month.Repacking allows to shrink the database in file size, resulting in smaller backups. It also frees up the space that has been freed up by the database optimizations made in 2022.4.