Home Assistant

2024.3: Drag 'n Drop it like it's hot! 🎉

Franck Nijhof Comments

Home Assistant Core 2024.3! 🎉

Yes, you read the title right! I’m super stoked about this one. It has been talked about for ages… I promise it is real:

Drag ’n drop for dashboards is finally here! 🎉

A first experimental version of the section dashboard that supports drag ’n drop. A tremendous step forward and an even bigger milestone for Home Assistant!

But don’t be blinded by these Dungeons ’n Dragons; there is a lot more!

New intents for Assist (I can finally tell my vacuum to start cleaning!), using script inputs/fields from the dashboard, and a new energy graph for individual devices. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: A big thanks and shoutout to @bramkragten & @balloob for organizing and running the beta and everyone who helped out making these release notes happen during my absence this beta. 🥰

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 6 March 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

A new experimental sections view

Our dashboard currently comes with three view layout types: Panel, Sidebar, and Masonry. Since the past year, we have been working hard to research and ideate on how to make dashboards easier to customize and use, and we learned that our current layouts are not the best for such purposes. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards cannot work well with the Masonry layout.

We came up with a few solutions, and the first thing we would like to share with you is a new view layout type called “Sections”.

Home Assistant dashboards are robust and packed with information. Users will often place dozens of cards for all sorts of buttons, switches, graphs, indicators, and more.

Example of a dashboard section Example of a dashboard section

By grouping cards into “sections”, you can reduce the number of items you need to scan through when you are looking for a certain card, as you’ll be able to look for the relevant group title first and then reduce the scope to scan that particular group for the information.

By packing cards in a section into a grid with a fixed number of columns, the relative positions of the cards within a section are not affected by changes in screen sizes, and so the spatial memory of the cards is retained, leading to a faster and less cumbersome experience.

A fully populated dashboard in Sections view layout A fully populated dashboard in the Sections view layout

Cards in the new sections view type are all aligned in a tidy grid to ensure consistency and predictability of their positions when the screen size changes. We currently have three cards reworked to fit the grid: Tile, Sensor, and Button cards. These cards will occupy the right amount of space in the grid, while other cards will occupy the full width of a section by default at the moment. Moreover, we have tweaked our “Add Cards” dialogs to recommend Tile cards by default when the sections view type is in use.

The new Sections view is experimental! Please do not build your daily dashboard on top of it yet! We are releasing this early so that we can collect your feedback.

To get started with the new Sections view type, create a new view on your dashboard and select Sections (experimental) as the view type. We currently do not have the option to migrate your current dashboard over yet.

For more information, check out our blog post about our new series A Home-Approved Dashboard: Chapter 1.

Amazing work! Thanks Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!

Drag-and-drop rearrangement of cards and sections!

Wow! At long last!! The stars have aligned, and our experimental drag-and-drop feature for dashboards is finally here! 🥲

With the new sections view type, we can finally implement a way to arrange cards and sections that is intuitive with drag-and-drop gestures and predictable with how the cards will rearrange while creating a dashboard that is easy to navigate and remember. You will no longer need to pray and guess where the cards will land when they change their order!

How to drag and drop

While your dashboard is in edit mode:

Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange sections, tap and hold the Edit icon Move handle and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location. Other sections will move out of the way for where the selected section will drop.

Rearranging cards with drag-and-drop Rearranging sections with drag-and-drop

  • To rearrange cards, tap and hold anywhere on the card and then move your cursor or finger towards your desired location.

Don’t you love it when instructions are so short? Simplicity FTW! 🦄

Thanks again Paul, Matthias, and Madelena!

Running script from your dashboard with user input

ScriptsScripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.
[Learn more] in Home Assistant allow you to capture a sequence of actions and choices in a reusable way. Scripts are extra powerful because they can have input fields, allowing you to send in data for when the script runs.

Script fields can be defined in the script editor and show up when you call the script in your automation. In this release, script fields will be available in the more info dialog when tapping a script on a dashboard.

This allows you to provide the input fields and run the script, unlocking a whole new dimension of possibilities.

To accompany this new functionality, we’ve created two blueprints to help you get started with using scripts on your dashboard:

Announce message: This blueprint allows you to create an announce script for your dashboard pre-configured to a specific media player and text-to-speech engine. When activated, it will ask the user for the message to play.

Add to to-do list: This blueprint allows you to create a script to add an item to a to-do list pre-configured to a specific to-do list. When activated, it will ask the user for the item to add.

New energy graph for individual devices

Digging into your energy data is a very interesting way to find ways to reduce your household’s energy usage and environmental footprint. 🌱

One of the missing bricks was the ability to see the energy consumption of individual devices over time. Thanks to @karwosts, we have a brand new graph on the energy dashboard that provides this insight!

Using this new graph, you can now easily spot which devices are responsible for which part of your energy usage over time.

Screenshot showing the new energy stacked bar graph of individual devices over time.

For example, in the above picture, it is very easy to see that the dishwasher was responsible for the morning spike and the oven for the spike in the evening.

New sentences for Assist

Assist, our private voice assistant, learned a few tricks this month.

Support for valves has been added. You can now ask Assist to adjust the position of a valve, or just open or close a valve completely.

Also, cover support has been extended to support the control of the position of your devices. Currently, most languages only support a single use-case as a starting point. Setting the position of a single device by targeting its name:

Set the curtain position to 80%

We are working on extending the use-case coverage to set the position of multiple devices or complete areas, similar to what is possible with the open and close sentences.

Screenshot showing a few of the new Assist commands.

The next new trick could be considered a bug fix: Until today it was not possible to start or stop a vacuum cleaner by voice; Now it can! Assist knows how to start a vacuum and return it to its base. Here are some example sentences, in case you have a vacuum cleaner named Dusty:

Start Dusty

Return Dusty to base

The biggest set of changes is for media players. Assist can now pause playback, resume playback, skip to the next media, and set the volume of media players!

Be aware that currently, these sentences are limited to targeting a single device by its name, for example:

Skip to the next song on the TV

We are actively working on extending the logic of these new intents to allow you to target areas and only affect the desired media player(s).

Disabling the remote activation of the Home Assistant Remote UI

If you are using Home Assistant Cloud, you can access your Home Assistant instance remotely using the Remote UI feature.

Suppose this feature is, for some reason, disabled, and you are currently not at home. In that case, you can enable the Remote UI feature remotely by logging into your Nabu Casa account and request your Home Assistant instance to turn it on.

Feedback from the community has shown that this feature is not always desired, and this release adds a new option to disable the remote activation of the Remote UI feature. Once disabled, the Remote UI feature can only be enabled locally from your Home Assistant instance.

Screenshot showing the new advanced option that allows disabling remote activation of the Home Assistant remote UI.

Translating states in your templates

Are you using templatesA template is an automation definition that can include variables for the service or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions.
[Learn more] to send notifications in automations? If so, @PiotrMachowski might just have added something new you need!

A new template method, state_translated, to translate entity states directly from your templates! Consider this template example:

# Untranslated
{{ states("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }}  # Shows: on
{{ states("sun.sun") }}  # Shows: below_horizon

The above example shows the raw state of two entities. However, with the new state_translated method, you can get the state in a human-readable form:

# Translated
{{ state_translated("binary_sensor.movement_backyard") }}  # Shows: Detected
{{ state_translated("sun.sun") }}  # Shows: Below horizon

Even better, it uses the default language of your Home Assistant instance. So, if you use Home Assistant in a different language, the translated state will be in that language.

Home Assistant boots twice as fast

In case you didn’t know, every release @bdraco improves the performance on some aspect of Home Assistant. He has been on it for a long time and keeps pushing to improve it.

As a matter of fact, it has become so regular that we don’t always highlight his enormous efforts toward this goal in our release notes. Sorry! 🙏

However, in this release, his efforts are so noticeable that we wanted to call it out: Home Assistant now boots on average twice as fast! 🚀

That is a huge improvement @bdraco!! Thank you for your continuous work on making Home Assistant faster and faster! ❤️

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • The climate entity now has a toggle service (climate.toggle). Thanks @arturpragacz!
  • Matter lights now support transitions, nice! Thanks, @marcelveldt!
  • We heard you like downloading CSVs! So, we added the ability to download the energy dashboard data to a CSV file now as well! Thanks @karwosts!
  • After feedback and reports on the automatic Zigbee device firmware updates introduced in a previous release, this release brings a stricter and more robust update system to ZHA. Thanks @dmulcahey & @puddly!
  • The Tessie integration now provides charging and range sensors. Thanks @Bre77!
  • myUplink devices can now be updated directly from Home Assistant. Awesome @astrandb!
  • DuneHD media players now support browsing media files and playing them. Thanks @iliessens!
  • The Bring! now brings in a new “recently” list. Nice @miaucl!
  • @lellky added setpoints as number entities for fans to the Flexit Nordic (BACnet) integration, thanks!
  • The dialog to adjust long-term statistics now has automated outlier detection! That is a very smart and helpful addition. Thanks @karwosts!

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has new virtual integrations. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integrations have been added:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integration us now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2024.3.1 - March 14

Release 2024.3.2 - March 22

Release 2024.3.3 - March 22

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2024.3