5 new things that you should know about Home Assistant 2022.12

The last Home Assistant release of the year is knocking on our doors and I’m talking about Home Assistant 2022.12 release. What are the new features and changes in this latest release that the developers and contributors cooked for us?

I must say that there are few completely new things and some things are greatly enhanced, so it is a quite exciting release in general.

Home Assistant Local Calendar

Without further ado let’s get into the first new thing in Home Assistant 2022.12, which is a Local Calendar.

Until now, to get a calendar functionality you had connect your Home Assistant to some Cloud services like Google Calendar or CalDAV, but after Home Assistant 2022.12 release you can have a calendar locally.

Adding a Local Calendar to your Home Assistant instance can be done very easily via the user interface (UI).

• Press the “c” button to invoke the HA Search Bar.
• Type “integrations” and select Navigate Integrations.
• Click on Add Integration and type “calendar“.
• Select Local Calendar and type a name of your choice for that Calendar.

Alternatively, you can use the My Home Assistant button below that will do the same for you:

The Local Calendar integration allows you to create a calendar of events in Home Assistant that can be used as triggers in the automations. For example, you can have the following automation: send a persistent notification 20 minutes before an event. And this is how easily you can create such automation.

alias: 20min before a Home Calendar event
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: calendar
    event: start
    offset: "-0:20:0"
    entity_id: calendar.home
condition: []
action:
  - service: persistent_notification.create
    data:
      message: Your event start in 20minutes
mode: single

Smart Home Glossary

By the way, If some of the Smart Home words & acronyms that I’m using are not so clear for you, do not worry and get my Smart Home Glossary that I created just for cases like these.

You can download the Glossary from my website https://automatelike.pro/glossary absolutely free of charge. 

Bluetooth proxy using Shelly devices

With Smart Home Glossary or not, here is the next new feature in Home Assistant 2022.12. Namely, it is a Bluetooth proxy using Shelly devices.

What that means is the following: If you have a second generation Shelly Device with the latest firmware (that means FW 0.12 or higher) you can use that particular Shelly Device as a remote Bluetooth adapter for your Home Assistant.

It also means that you can extend the range of your Bluetooth network that way and you don’t have to buy anything additionally.

On top, If you don’t have Bluetooth support on your Home Assistant device at all, this procedure will unlock the Bluetooth support for you.

Just buy one Shelly Gen 2 device (see my full article about it – Gen 2 Shelly devices as Home Assistant Bluetooth Proxy) or an ESP32 board and use it as Bluetooth Proxy.

You can find more details about what Bluetooth proxy is, and how to have one on an ESP32 board by reading the following article of mine – How to turn an ESP32 board into a Bluetooth proxy for Home Assistant | ESPHome Bluetooth Proxies

Text helper

With or without Bluetooth proxy from Shelly device, the next new thing in Home Assistant 2022.12 is a Text entity.

But what Text entity actually is?

There is already a Text helper that you can create & manage by yourself. The text entity is somehow similar, but can be used and modified by different Home Assistant integrations like MQTT for example. Using text entity in MQTT allows you to integrate devices that show text, which can be set remotely. It is also possible to monitor the state of that text as well.

The other possible use case for the newly introduced Text entity is that some integrations can now provide entities that can ask for a textual input in the UI.

We’ll see in the future how this new Text entity is going to be used exactly and is it going to become as popular as the next feature in Home Assistant 2022.12, which is not completely new, but it is greatly enhanced. 

Home Assistant 2022.12

Tile Card Features

I’m talking here about the Tile Card that was introduced in the previous Home Assistant release, and now it received additional extras a.k.a Features. These Tile Card Features can provide additional controls or information for the entities that the Tile card is actually showing.

As example, these features can be:

• Command buttons for vacuum cleaners,
• Brightness slider for lights,
• Controls for opening/closing and tilting covers
• and more. 

• Demo https://rc.home-assistant.io/dashboards/tile/#tile-features 

As additional bonus, Tile Card now have colors as Feature, which helps showing additional visual indication of what the current state of the entity is.

Open Home Assistant Webinar

Before I move on to the next new feature in Home Assistant 2022.12, I want to personally invite you to my Home Assistant Webinar, where I’ll talk about the official & supported methods that are available to install Home Assistant + one super simple way to get started with Home Assistant on a PC in under 5 minutes.

The registration to the Webinar is now open and everything is completely free – https://automatelike.pro/webinar

So, pause the reading, go register right now and come back, so we can continue with the Summing entities without templates feature, which is the next new feature in Home Assistant 2022.12 that I want to show you.

Summing entities without templates

Before this release, there was a Min/Max helper which is now renamed to Combine the state of several sensors helper and it is enhanced in a way that allows creating a new helper entity that sums the values of two (or more) other sensors.

That can be very useful to combine several utility sensors to get the total consumption of the electricity or other utilities for example which is kind of cool.

Outro

If you reach this point, then you may want to see some more articles from me. Click here and you will get my Home Assistant Category, which is full of wonderful and useful articles in my humble opinion.

Thank you for reading what is new in Home Assistant 2022.12, I’m Kiril and I’m done writing for this week. Bye!