Talking the Open Home Foundation and 2024.5 with Frenck

New Features

• Strict Connections
  REMOVED IN LIVE – 2024.6 FEATURE?
  A new security feature ensuring that accessing your home assistant instance remotely is even more secure.
  
  When enabled, Home Assistant will only accept clients that have already been authenticated. This means that unauthenticated connections will be denied without the possibility of logging in directly. To log in to a new device, you need to be either on the local network or use a temporary link generated by someone with administrator access.
  
  Comes in two modes: Guard page and Drop connection.
  
  Available for Cloud Subscribers, and self-hosted users.
  
  For self-hosted users requires YAML config.
  
• Datatables
  Groups can now be collapsed
  
  Multiselect and Assign to area
  
  You can now group entities by their domain in the entities panel.
  
  You can now filter by entity domain in the entities panel.
  
  Select and assign an area to multiple items at once in the automation, scene, script, and device pages.
• Create helper from the automation/script editor
  No need to navigate from the automation editor to create a new helper
  
• Locks now supported for tile card!
  
• New Debug mode for integrations
  Can help detecct thread safety issues which might make Home Assistant unstable.
  
  Previously these might have crashed Home Assistant. Now Home Assistant will raise an issue with stack traces, so you can raise an issue to get addressed.
  
• MQTT is now a platinum integration
  CloudMQTT shuts down
  
• Sending/receiving voice assistant audio via ESPHome native API
  There were some issues with the UDP server dropping some audio
  
• Allowing custom display name for energy devices
  
  
• ZHA Visualisation enhancements
  Better graphs
  
  

New Integrations

• Ambient Weather Network (Cloud)
  
• Arve
  Air quality sensor
  
• Energenie Power Sockets
  USB connected power sockets?!
  
• Epic Games Store
  Calendar entries to monitor free games and discounts
  
• eQ-3 Bluetooth Smart Thermostats
  Control them over Bluetooth
  
• Sanix
  Monitor water/sewage levels
  

Breaking Changes

• Recorder
  Previously, recorder.purge_entities called with no arguments would purge all entities. This PR makes this call raise an error instead.
  
• Relative Time in Templates
  The relative_time() template function has been replaced with two new functions: time_since() and time_until()
  
  relative_time() as a template function is a confusing name, since it implies that the difference in time will be either from a time in the past, or in the future.
  
  Currently relative_time() supports only time differences from the past. This can be replaced with time_since(), and time differences for a time in the future can use the time_until() template function.
  
• Epson Workforce
  Bye bye – package not supported