2024.2 and Apple Car Play

New Features

• Car Play is here
  Rohan have you tried it out yet?
  
• Home Assistant now shipping on Python 3.12
  As usual Home Assistant OS and Container users don’t need to do anything.
  
• Drag and Drop Support for Automations
  Dragging and dropping triggers, conditions and actions is now always enabled in the automation editor. Previously you had to enable re-ordering in the automation editor settings. No more!
  
  As of this release you can also drag elements in to nested elements. Got a condition that should be inside a child “and” condition block? Just drag it in there!
  
• History Data Export
  You can now export data from the history dashboard as CSV. This allows you to do whatever you want with the data in external tools. Charting, long term storage etc.
  
• Update Entities for ZHA Devices
  You can now be notified when a Zigbee device connected to Home Assistant via ZHA has a firmware update available!
  
  Inovelli, OSRAM/Ledvance, Sonoff, and ThirdReality devices are currently supported.
  
• Better Errors for Assist
  The Home Assistant private (voice) assistant will now respond with better errors.
  
  As of 2024.2, Assist provides much better errors in case your intention is understood, but something else is missing (An unknown name, area, device class, or domain).
  
• Custom Responses for Assist
  With the introduction of the sentence trigger recently, 2024.2 brings in a new action to send a custom response back to the conversation.
  
  Now if your sentence trigger is “what is the best podcast of all time?”, your automation can set the response back to the person being “the Home Assistant Podcast of course”.
  
  Before you would need to do complicated YAML, otherwise the response would just be “Done”
  
  The new response action can also accept templates, so you can get fancy and mix up your responses.
  
• Authentication Issues now shown as repairs
  When one of your integrations is having authentication issues, Home Assistant will now report this in the repairs dashboard.
  
• Automatic Cleanups of old/unused refresh tokens
  Any device that hasn’t used Home Assistant in 90 days will be logged-out.
  

New Integrations

• Tuya
  Not a new integration, but worth highlighting.
  
  Tuya have done some great work and you no longer require a Tuya developer account to link your Tuya devices with Home Assistant. Use the Tuya Smart or Smart Life app directly to integrate your devices with Home Assistant!
  
• AirTouch5
  Control your AirTouch 5 ducted air conditioning systems.
  
• Bang & Olufsen
  Control your Bang & Olufsen Beolab and Beosound devices.
  
• Bring
  Use Bring to create shopping lists and share them with your family.
  
• Elvia
  Import your historic energy usage from an Elvia operated grid.
  
• Epion
  Monitor your Epion air quality sensors.
  
• Govee lights local
  Control your Govee lights locally.
  
• Home Assistant Analytics Insights
  This integration allows you to monitor information from the public and open Home Assistant Analytics.
  
• Hong Kong Observatory
  Get weather information from the Hong Kong Observatory.
  
• Huum
  Control your Huum smart sauna heaters.
  
• La Marzocco
  Control your La Marzocco espresso machines.
  
• LeaOne
  Monitor your LeaOne health device under the Xiaogui and BAGAIL brands.
  
• myUplink
  Monitor myUplink supported devices in Home Assistant.
  
• Rabbit Air
  Locally control and monitor your Rabbit Air air purifiers.
  
• Rainforest RAVEn
  Pull in energy data from your Rainforest RAVEn energy monitor.
  
• Romy
  Control your Romy vacuum cleaners.
  
• Tedee
  Use your Tedee smart locks in Home Assistant.
  
• Teslemetry
  Pull in live telemetry data from your Tesla vehicle via the Tesla Fleet API.
  
• TechnoVE
  Control of TechnoVE Smart Charging Station using a local API.
  
• Traccar server
  Track your GPS devices by pulling data from a Traccar server.
  

Breaking Changes

• Authentication
  Refresh tokens will be automatically deleted when unused. A refresh token is considered unused if it has not been used for a login within 90 days.
  
  This means that if your logged in session hasn’t been used for 90 days, you will be logged out. You will need to log in again. If you need a permanent token, then we recommend using Long-lived access tokens.
  
• Cisco Webex
  This integration has been disabled. The upstream libraries used by Home Assistant are not compatible with Python 3.12.
  
• Vacuum Integrations
  The services vacuum.turn_on and vacuum.turn_off were deprecated in 2023.11. Support for the deprecated services has now been completely removed.
  
  If you are still using them, please adjust your automations and scripts and use vacuum.start and vacuum.stop instead.
  
• Proximity
  The proximity entity is deprecated and will be removed in 2024.8. It is superseded by sensor entities.
  
  For each tracked person or device one sensor for the distance and the direction of travel to/from the monitored zone is created. Further for each Proximity configuration one sensor which shows the nearest device or person to the monitored zone is created.
  
  With this you can use the Min/Max integration to determine the nearest and furthest distance.
  
• RESTful Commands
  Call to RESTful command services will no longer silently fail and will raise an exception on, for example, timeout or decoding errors.
  
  You could consider using continue_on_error for scripts and automations that use RESTful commands that are allowed to fail occasionally.
  
• TP-LInk Smart Switches
  To prevent overloading the power strips, the energy data is now polled every 60 seconds. If you need to poll the data faster, please use an automation that calls the homeassistant.update_entity service.
  
• Tuya
  Tuya has provided an easier and improved login method for Home Assistant users.
  
  Having a developer account with Tuya is no longer required; instead, you can scan a QR code with your Tuya Smart of Smart Life app to authenticate it with Home Assistant.
  
  After updating to this release, Home Assistant will ask you to re-authenticate your Tuya Smart or Smart Life account using this new method.
  

Links Discussed

• https://shop.everythingsmart.io/en-ca/products/everything-presence-lite
• https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/haier-threatens-legal-action-against-home-assistant-plugin-developer/
• https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/haier-europe-eases-off-on-legal-threat-and-seeks-dialogue/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayG7o74kdbc