2022.12 is out with official support for the next generation smart home protocol Matter. While Rohan is away on holiday Frenck is here to help break down the final release for 2022

Headlines

  • Home Assistant will speak Matter
    A developer preview of Matter is available, but no devices are currently available for sale. Commissioning via the companion apps; updates are expected to be available in the upcoming weeks. Get Matter devices into HA, not the other way around.
  • 2023 Year of the voice
    The goal is to make a voice assistant that works for IoT. MVP is to get the conversation integration to better handle text requests. Then use Android Wear and WatchOS to pump the speech-to-text into Home Assistant.

 

2022.12

New Features

  • Shelly Devices, which are ESP-based, can now forward Bluetooth connections
    It works with all second-generation Shelly devices that use firmware 12.0 or later. BLE advertisements only.
  • Tile cards gets state colors and features
    The tile card introduced in 2022.11 gets some more love.Entity states now have a standard color; for example, locked doors will have a specific color. This is also visible in the state history and logbook.The tile card also has commands for vacuum cleaners, brightness sliders for lights, and controls for covers.
  • Country and Language Support
    Matter will require countries to be known. Does not affect any settings at this time. Future development could use this for, for example, default units of measurement exceptions for your country.
  • Text Entity
    An integration can now create a text entity similar to the input_text helper.KNX and MQTT use this new integration. The text entity in KNX could, for example, create a text entity to display the message on its displays. (KNX is just like MQTT, where you have to define entities/protocol in YAML manually) Text is limited to 255 characters (same as with the helper)
  • Combine the state of several sensors
    An item that (partially) came from The Month of “What The Heck?!”. No more need to create a template sensor to sum multiple sensors together.
  • ZHA now supports the Aqara c1 pet feeder
    Combine with the litter robot integration to automate your pets!
    PS: It feeds your pet; it doesn’t feed off it 😄
  • Slack has a do not disturb sensor you can now automate on
  • Add items to your Grocery order
    For those that use Picnic, you can add items to your grocery order from within Home Assistant.
  • Scrape sensor can now be configured by the UI
    The scrape sensor can be difficult sensor to set up. Now the UI makes this sensor more accessible.

New Integrations

  • Local Calendar
    Recurring events, iCal standard compliant. The next level to the scheduler.
  • Twinkly Control the effects of your Christmas tree lights!

Breaking Changes

  • MQTTThe older main configuration is now managed in the UI. Things like server settings.Platform configuration of entities in YAML (e.g., an MQTT entry under the sensor domain), has been removed (after 6 months of warnings and repairs issues). Now only the new configuration format is accepted.
  • Media Player Groups
    Media player groups containing players that provide an invalid media player entity state, will now report an “Unknown” group state.
  • Hikvision
    The videoloss event has been removed from the supported list. The event has always been used as a keep-alive for most Hikvision devices, and the library uses it internally. Leaving it enabled as an option causes everything to break if the event is actually processed, so it was removed to eliminate confusion.
  • Logitech Harmony Hub
    The PowerOff state of the select entity will be changed to power_off.If you relied on this state value in your automations or script, you must adjust to this change.
  • Mobile Apps
    The events fired when the mobile app scanned a Tag that had an incorrect device ID; This has been corrected.As a result, the evens now contain a different but correct device ID. If you relied on the device ID in your automations, you might need to adjust those with the new device ID.
  • Google Chat
    Has been removed. It relied on the Google Hangouts APIs, which have been shut down, rendering the integration unusable.

 

Figma of new Home Assistant dashboard concept

 

How is Frenck’s war on energy going?

https://twitter.com/Frenck/status/1587742947293929473


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Phil is a Melbourne based web developer who lives and breathes technology. When he's not at his day job, he’s in his home office attempting to simplify his life through complicated tech.

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