Home Assistant 2022.9: Top 7 new features

Home Assistant 2022.9 is bringing some great new features and I will try to show you the most interesting ones in this article.

If you have hard time understanding some of the Smart Home words and abbreviations that I’m using in this article – don’t worry, I got you covered with my Smart Home Glossary. You can download it absolutely for free from my other website – https://automatelike.pro/glossary

Now, without any further ado let’s get started.

New helper: Weekly schedule

The first new feature in Home Assistant 2022.9 is the weekly schedule helper. As you may already know, there is a Helpers menu inside Home Assistant settings where you can create multiple helpers including toggles, buttons, numbers and many more.

In this exact helpers menu the schedule helper is now also available.

Creating a weekly schedule helper is very easy and intuitive, you can set a name of your choice, you can select a MDI icon and then you can drag your mouse over the time slots that you are interested.

You can do that for every day of the week, but the real question is:

What can I do next with that weekly schedule helper?

The newly created schedule is now available as Home Assistant entity that have on or off state depending of your selection during the schedule creation.

If for example you marked a slot from 9a.m. to 10a.m. in Tuesday and the current day & time is Tuesday, 8:59 in the morning the state of the schedule entity will be off.

But during 9a.m. and 10a.m. the state will become on.

So, you can use that weekly schedule helper as Home Assistant automation trigger and based on your custom schedule you can start & stop things or send notifications or whatever you actually wish.

New look of the automation editor

While I’m talking about Home Assistant automations let’s move to the next new feature in Home Assistant 2022.9, which is a new look of the automation editor.

This is how the automation editor was looking before 2022.9:

And this is how it looks like now:

In essence, the process of creating automations is exactly the same. You have to set your triggers, optionally conditions and to add one or more actions.

The new editor is much more minimalistic and it has some new automatic naming of the automation parts that I really like. Of course, it is possible to rename them from the three dots menu

Quick challenge for You!

I have a quick challenge for you. Can you please read this article till the very end and let me know in the comments which new Home Assistant 2022.9 feature is your favorite?

I will also share mine later.

ESPHome Bluetooth Proxies & BTHome

Next two things are not part of the Home Assistant 2022.9 release, but they are closely related and they are brand new, so I decided to share them with you.

The first one is ESPHome Bluetooth Proxies.

If you go to this website – https://esphome.github.io/bluetooth-proxies/ with a Chrome or Edge browser. And you have a spare ESP32 board, M5Stack Atom Lite or Olimex ESP32 Power-over-Ethernet device, you can install ESPHome on that device and start using it as Home Assistant Bluetooth Proxy expanding the Bluetooth coverage in your home.

The other new thing is the BTHome which is a new open standard for broadcasting sensor data over Bluetooth Low Energy. For now BTHome is supported by Home Assistant, ATC MiThermometer & b-parasite sensors, but hopefully it will be embraced by many others soon, so the Bluetooth communication & integration with Home Assistant to become even easier and more reliable.

Home Assistant Webinar

Do you know that there are four official methods to get Home Assistant?

I’m discussing them in details in my free Home Assistant webinar. Along with the official methods in the webinar, I’m also sharing one not so popular, but super simple way to start experimenting with Home Assistant in under 5 minutes.

If you are interested check it on my other website – https://automatelike.pro/webinar

As I said it is completely free.

Z-Wave JS Firmware updates

Next new feature in Home Assistant 2022.9 is for the Z-wave JS lovers, If your Z-wave devices added in Home Assistant have an update, you will be notified and you will be able to update them right from the Home Assistant.

Zigbee backup and restore + migration

Zigbee fans are not left behind in Home Assistant 2022.9. From now on, you can create a backup of your Zigbee devices and network and you can restore that backup on a new Home Assistant device. Even Zigbee2MQTT is supported.

Which is really convenient.

Processor and memory usage

Next, If you press the “c” button while you are inside your Home Assistant and start typing hardware and then select navigate hardware you will see the new Processor and Memory usage section in Home Assistant 2022.9. Of course, you can use the My Home Assistant Link below:

This is very good and quick way to see how much your Home Assistant is loaded.

Outro

My favorite Home Assistant 2022.9 feature is the weekly schedule helper, please share what is yours in the comments below.

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I’m Kiril and I’m done writing. Bye!