Frenck joins us to see out 2023 and break down Home Assistant 2023.12

New Features

• A rebrandedLogin Page
  When loaded on your local network, you’ll be able to select your user from a nice list with avatars.
  
  When loaded from outside your network, you’ll need to provide a username and password (if using that for authentication)
  
• To-Do’s Get Bigger
  two new services available:
  A new service to list all items on a to-do list (todo.get_items).
  A new service to remove completed items from a to-do list (todo.remove_completed_items).
  
  To-do lists now support due dates and descriptions. (No UI support for this available yet)
  
  Lastly, integration started to add support for the to-do list feature. For example, the CalDAV integration now supports adding to-do items to your CalDAV server, and with Picnic and OurGroceries you can now manage your shopping list. In case of Picnic, it will even look up the product you add to your shopping list and add the product in your shopping cart
  
• New Thermostat Card
  A brand new thermostat card is here, which is also available for humifier and water heater cards.
  
• Numbers for Tile cards
  The tile card now has a “number” new feature you can use, that works number entities and helpers. This allows you to control the number entity from the tile card directly, and provides the choice to use it as a slider or as an input with up/down buttons.
  
• History Dashboard showing long-term stats
  Previously, the graphs would only show the state history, which is limited to a few days, until the data is removed. This is not always very useful, for example, when you want to look back further in time.
  
  @karwosts came up with a solution for this, and the history dashboard now combines the state history with the recorded long-term statistics to provide you insights into the past.
  
  
• Default dashboard options
  The default dashboard Home Assistant generates for you, now has options that will allow you to change the behavior of it. You can now configure the default dashboard to hide certain areas, hide entities that don’t belong to an area and the option to hide the energy summary card.
  
• Re-import Blueprints
  You can now re-import a Blueprint from where you originally found it, which will overwrite the current version with the latest available.
  
• Height Sensor for the IKEA IDÅSENdesk
  
• The official Roborock integration can now display maps
  
• Better YAML Error Messages
  @emontnemery worked hard to improve all error messages that originate from manual YAML configuration. The messages should now be more detailed, more readable, and point out correctly which file and file line the error is located at. Awesome!
  

New Integrations

• Linear Garage Door, added by @IceBotYT
  Lets you control and automate your Linear garage doors.
• MyPermobil, added by @IsakNyberg
  Provides various sensors for your Permobil wheelchair.
• OurGroceries, added by @OnFreund
  Integrate with the OurGroceries shopping lists.
• V2C, added by @dgomes
  Monitoring and control of a local V2C Trydan EVSE.
• Devialet, added by @fwestenberg
  Control your wireless Devialet speakers.

Breaking Changes

• Breaking changes now “backward incompatible?”
  
• calendar.list_events 
  uses an outdated response data format and is now deprecated, pending for removal in Home Assistant 2024.6.
  
  Please use calendar.get_events, which supports multiple entities, instead.
  
• weather.get_forecast uses an outdated response data format and is now deprecated, pending for removal in Home Assistant 2024.6.
  
  Please use weather.get_forecasts, which supports multiple entities, instead.
  
• Home Assistant API
  When calling a service from the Home Assistant REST API, the service used to be cancelled on connection drop. If you relied on that behavior, you would need to revisit the logic. With this change, a connection drop will not cancel the service call.
  
  Also, a REST post to call a service with the /api/services// endpoint will no longer timeout after 10 seconds.
  
• Open Exchange Rates
  Remove rounding of the exchange rate.
  
  Exchange rates are generally more sensitive to small changes and some quotes need many decimal numbers to be accurate. The Open Exchange Rates service will provide different number of significant digits for different quotes.
  
  You can change the display precision or use a template sensor if you want to customize the rounding of the value.
  
• SMTP
  The SMTP integration will send images as attachments to a plain text email instead of HTML in-line when the html field is not set.
  
  The previous behavior was to send all images as HTML in-line even when the html field was not set. To continue sending images as in-line, please set the optional html field and include the images as  within the HTML block as described in the documentation.
  
• MyQ Gone
  
• eQ-3 Bluetooth Smart Thermostats
  The integration has been in a non-functional state for a long time.

Links Discussed

• https://github.blog/2023-11-30-securing-our-home-labs-home-assistant-code-review/
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbX3YkedQunLt7EQAdVxh7w