TOP10 Home Assistant 2024.1 New Features

Happy New Year guys and happy new Home Assistant 2024.1 release here are the most important things that have been delivered.

New Automation Editor

The Home Assistant automation editor got a facelift! It’s easier to use now, thanks to lots of little changes. Earlier, when you went to the automations page on Home Assistant, it was empty, which wasn’t great if you were new.

But now, there’s a friendly robot explaining what automations do and offering links to learn more.

When you’re starting a new automation, you’ll find clearer explanations and terms to help you understand each part better. And there are temporary images that disappear once you add things. The big difference is in the buttons for adding triggers, conditions, or actions to your automation.

There’s a new button beside conditions and actions named “Add building block.” This helps add logical elements like “and,” “or,” “If,” and “choose.”

Before, these were mixed up, but now they have their own button, making it easier to spot and keeping things organized. 

Earlier, there used to be a dropdown for all these buttons. Now, there’s a new box with descriptions and a search tool.

These descriptions explain what each trigger, condition, or action does. When you add something, the most commonly used ones appear first, while others are neatly categorized.

Finally, “service calls” are now included with all other actions.

So, when you add an action, you’ll see them grouped by what they control and where they come from. They also come with descriptions and can be searched easily.

I don’t want to read anymore…

Do you want to watch the whole fun effortlessly on your screen – no problems, check the my YT video

Home Assistant Webinar

I will be talking about Home Assistant a lot and if you didn’t join the fun yet, now is a great time to start your Home Assistant journey. If you need a little help getting started – join my totally free webinar where I will share the official ways to get Home Assistant, some pros & cons and one one super simple way to start on a PC in 5 minutes. 

Link and QR code to the webinar registration can be found below:

Reserve your Free seat now – https://automatelike.pro/webinar

Due Dates & Description

To-Do Lists were updated in Home Assistant 2023.12 release, but now they receive some love again.

In Home Assistant 2024.1 you’re able to put due dates and descriptions on every task in your to-do list right from the User interface.

These things were only possible before by using Home Assistant services, but not anymore. Adding due dates and descriptions from UI are enabled if the integration allows it or if you are using local to-do list.

Valve Entity

Do you have any smart valves that control your radiators, pools, irrigation systems or just some water pipes? If yes, you can now add them in Home Assistant 2024.1 and they will have their own valve entity. At the moment this could happen only if you have these valves in your MQTT broker or if you have some Shelly Gas devices but this is just the beginning and I’m pretty sure soon a lot more will follow.

Also valve entities can be exposed to Alexa and Google Assistant which is pretty nice.

Swappable info on thermostat & humidifier cards

Starting from Home Assistant 2024.1 the thermostat and humidifier cards now allow you to set the current temperature or humidity as the main information displayed on these cards. When you activate this choice, the target temperature/humidity will switch places with the current readings.

Simple as that but good to have option and it seems that it was requested a lot. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Fan Mode Feature & Update buttons

Climate fan mode feature is also added in Home Assistant 2024.1.

Also you can now add update buttons right in the tile cards and guess what will happen if you press on these buttons – Home Assistant will try to update your device firmware or integration simple as that.

Other Noteworthy Changes

As always There are some other noteworthy changes in this update. Here are some of them: 

• Cloud speech to text engine was moved to config entry.
• Shelly Gen 3 devices support was added. I didn’t even know there was Shelly Gen 3 devices great
• consider home interval to ping.
• presets modes to ESPHome fan entities.

New Integrations in Home Assistant 2024.1

We have some new integrations as well in this latest Home Assistant release.Here are the most noticeable ones.

• A.O. Smith integration is added. I don’t know these water heaters.
• Holiday, that is pretty good one. This integration allows you to create a calendar of Holidays in Home Assistant. That’s a great one. I can’t wait to try it.
• Tailwind garage door openers.
• Tessie monitor and control your Tesla vehicle connected through the tessie platform. I don’t know what is this Tessie platform. Maybe if you have Tesla you will know that.

New Virtual Integrations in Home Assistant 2024.1

Some new Virtual integrations are also added virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other integrations and these are the integrations that are supporting these new stubs integrations or virtual integrations.

You can check them in the release notes. 

New UI integrations in Home Assistant 2024.1

There are there new integrations that can now be set up right from the UI and these are:

• Netgear LTE,
• StreamLabs,
• Suez Water,
• Swiss public transport,
• System Monitor – that is a good one.
• Trend this platform allows you to create sensor which will show the trend of numeric state or state attributes 

Backward-incompatible changes

Don’t forget to check the Backward-incompatible changes formerly known as breaking changes.

• If you have some automations or scripts based on shutdown of Home Assistant event you should definitely check this.

The event key in the (undocumented) trigger data for the homeassistant trigger platform is now the string shutdown for a homeassistant trigger configured to fire on shutdown instead of an Event object.

• if you are using Modbus configuration there are some updates here as well.

Setting swap: none has been removed from the Modbus configuration. It is identical to omitting it: swap:

• Reolink cameras infrared lights has been migrated from light to switch domain. That is not a big of a change.

The Reolink Infrared lights in night mode entity has been migrated from the light to the switch domain.

• And Shelly, If you have Shelly devices that are not recently updated you should update them if they are below these firmware versions if you wish your devices your Shelly Devices to work with Home Assistant.

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).

Get my Smart Home Glossary

Thanks for reading, I’m Kiril, and until next one. Bye!