Home Assistant brings in 2024 with a fresh take on the automation UI builder

New Features

• New Onboarding Flow for Automations
  If you’re just starting out with Home Assistant in 2024, the automation editor is going to be easier to understand.
  
  A new automation robot will explain what automations are and point you to the documentation.
  
• Automation Editor Tweaks
  Once you get started adding an automation, the editor is arranged to a “when” “and if” and “then do” areas to make it easier to understand how to make an automation.
  
  Clicking add new trigger/condition will now bring up a dialog allowing you to choose what type to add to the automation. There’s nice little descriptions to explain what you’re adding.
  
  Conditions and actions have a new button next to them: “Add building block”. Click this allows you to add logical elements to your automation, like “and”, “or”, “If”, “choose”, etc. These used to be mixed in with the conditions and actions, but now have their own dedicated button. This makes it easier to find them, and declutters the list of conditions and actions.
  
• Descriptions and Due Dates for To Do List Items
  Does what it says on the tin
  
• New Entity Type: Valve
  The valve entity in Home Assistant provides an interface to control valves such as water, gas, or air valves.
  
  When a valve entity is created by an integration, there are several services is may respond to includingvalve.open, valve.close, and valve.toggle. Valves that allow setting a specific position may also be controlled with valve.set_position and valve.stop
  
• Swappable current/target on thermostat & humidifier cards
  Thermostat and humidifier cards now support setting current temperature/humidity as the primary information to show in the card.
  
  Enabling this option, will result in the target temperature/humidity to be swapped.
  
• Fan Modes on Cards
  Can be used with both the thermostat and the climate card. Adds buttons to the cards to set the fan mode of the device.
  
• Update Actions
  For update entities with a card, you can now add buttons to the update entities to trigger a firmware update on a device, without leaving your Home Assistant Dashboard.
  
• SleepIQ Foot Warmers
  Apparently this is a thing?
  
  A new select entity is made available allowing you to set the off/low/med/high temperature for your feet. A new number entity allows you to to how long the foot warmer should stay on for
  
• France gets support for Picnic Groceries
  

New Integrations

• A O Smith and OSO Energy
  Integrate and control your A. O. Smith and OSO Energy water heaters.
  
• Blue Current
  Monitor your Blue Current EV charger charge point(s).
  
• DROP
  Manage your DROP Smart Water System with Home Assistant. Includes support for Leak detectors, changing the hardness of your water with integral water shutoff, triggering a protection valve, and salt sensors.
  
  Uses MQTT, so can be locally controlled without the cloud
  
• Holiday
  Add holiday calendars to Home Assistant for powering automations.
  
  Example automation: Don’t open the blinds on public holidays, etc.
  
• Tailwind
  Operate your garage door openers connected to a Tailwind smart garage door controller. (thanks frenck)
  
• Tessie
  Integrate, monitor and control your Tesla vehicle connected to the Tessie platform.
  
  
• Vogel’s MotionMount
  Control the position of your Vogel’s MotionMount TV mount. It provides information about the current position of the mount and allows setting a new position.
  

Breaking Changes

• Reolink
  The Reolink Infra red lights in night mode entity has been migrated from the light to the switch domain.
  
  This means the entity ID also changed and automations and dashboards may need to be adjusted to use the new entity ID.
  
  If you want to go back to the light domain, use the switch_as_x “Show as” option on the new Infra red lights in night mode switch entity and select light.
  
• Shelly
  The minimum supported firmware version for generation 1 devices is 1.11.0 (2021-07-15). The minimum supported firmware version for generation 2 devices is 1.0.0 (2023-08-03).
  
  You must update your devices to the firmware versions listed or newer.

Links Discussed

• Scrypted