2024.9: Sections go BIG

Gordon Cameron September 4, 2024

• Core
• Release-Notes

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Home Assistant 2024.9! 🎉

Many community members based in the northern hemisphere have taken advantage of the nicer weather to take a little time off. Home Assistant releases have continued to grow for some time, and this one might not be as gargantuan in size as previous releases, but it still packs some really cool features and announcements.

This release includes bigger sections, smarter energy monitoring, and a new LLM option. We’ve added five new integrations, along with one existing integration being added to the UI. On top of all that, we’ve announced a new Works with Home Assistant partner, and the culmination of a project to ensure our project is truly open source.

We hope you’ve been able to enjoy some time in, and away, from your smart home this month as well.

Enjoy the release!

• Sections go BIG
  • Wider sections
  • Full span cards
  • Badges
• Tracking your untracked energy
• LLM agent options grow
• Aqara joins Works with Home Assistant
• Open source compliance
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Now available to set up from the UI
  • Farewell to the following
• Patch releases
• Release 2024.9.1 - September 6
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Sections go BIG

In the drive to give our users more customization and organization options for their dashboards, we’ve added some new options to our Sections view that really lets us take big advantage of resizable cards. These powerful customization features can affect the predictability of where cards or sections will go, especially when switching between desktop and mobile views, and we have found it works best with large cards. As always, the choice of how to use it is up to you.

Wider sections

Sections can be expanded to span multiple sections. Now you can, for example, have your security camera feed span two sections or have a massive three-section wide map.

Cards and sections will continue to follow the Z-Grid rules, which can lead to blank spaces if the new wider sections don’t fit on a specific part of the screen. If you don’t like those blank spaces between sections, you can choose a dense layout. A dense section layout option will attempt to follow the Z-Grid rules, but will fill blank spaces whenever possible. This can affect the order and predictability of your sections, but will maximize screen real estate.

When switching to smaller screens, these larger sections will revert to one section wide (if this causes issues for certain big cards, we would recommend using our device visibility settings).

Full span cards

Larger sections mean larger cards. Instead of just stretching out the layout of a card, there is also a new option on cards to have them always use the full width of the section.

Badges

Talking about dashboards, the newly styled badges we introduced in last release, are now more configurable.

Instead of using display mode, you can decide for yourself what element you want to show. This allows you, for example, to hide the icon of an badge and only show the state of the device you want to show in your badge.

Tracking your untracked energy

In April, we introduced a new energy graph for individual devices in our energy dashboard. This allows you to aggregate all your energy monitoring into one graph, giving you a quick way to see your house’s biggest energy-using devices. Big thanks to @karwosts, the original creator of this graph, who has now updated it.

We can’t all have energy tracking for every device, and if you have whole-home energy tracking (like a smart meter or something more DIY) the updated graph will calculate the difference and show your home’s untracked usage. So hop onto your energy dashboard and start to tackle your phantom energy load.

LLM agent options grow

When we added the ability to use Large Language Models (LLMs) in our Voice Assistant, it began with a limited number of conversation agents. These included the cloud-based OpenAI and Google AI integrations, along with the locally-run Ollama integration. All three can now control the devices in your home.

@Shulyaka has now added another cloud option with Anthropic - thanks again for giving us another option for experimenting with AI in Home Assistant. Setting it up can be a little different than other conversation agents, so take a look at the documentation.

We have updated our LLM leaderboard to include Anthropic. Both Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Sonnet score very high on our benchmarks and now rank among the top. Based on the results of the benchmark, we have set the cheaper Claude 3 Haiku as the default model for the Anthropic integration.

@allenporter added the ability to configure the context window size of the Ollama integration. The default size was increased, making it perform 20% better!

Aqara joins Works with Home Assistant

We recently announced that four Aqara devices are joining our Works with Home Assistant program. What’s really exciting is that these are all Matter devices, and Aqara will be the first partner to use our “Works via Matter with Home Assistant” badge, giving some great options to use with Home Assistant’s amazing Matter integration.

What’s more, this will be the first partner to join since our recent update to the program, meaning device-by-device certification that we tested ourselves. This makes it really easy to see what will give you the best experience in Home Assistant.

Open source compliance

We have put a lot of work into making sure that Home Assistant is truly open source, from top to bottom. This means ensuring that every library our integrations rely on uses the compliant license. We’re now at more than 2,800 integrations, so as you can imagine, this was not a small task. Working with code owners and library developers, we have painstakingly checked that every library is now using an OSI-approved license.

This might seem like a small procedural thing, but it is critical to keep integrations and Home Assistant functional far into the future. If you’re not aware, libraries are what many device and service integrations rely on to function, by calling in additional protocol specific code that purposely sits outside of the Home Assistant project. If an individual or corporation can no longer maintain libraries, a proper open source license allows it to be picked up and continued by others.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Anthropic Conversation, added by @Shulyaka
  Use AI by Anthropic, like the Claude 3.5 Sonnet as a conversation agent in Home Assistant.
• Nice G.O., added by @IceBotYT
  Integrate with compatible garage door and gate openers from the Nice.
• Fujitsu FGLair, added by @crevetor
  Fujitsu HVAC devices that use the Ayla IoT platform (controlled with the FGLair app).
• SMLIGHT, added by @tl-sl
  Manage SMLIGHT SLZB-06 adaptors from Home Assistant.
• Roth Touchline SL, added by @jnsgruk
  A new integration for the Roth Touchline SL underfloor heating system.
• Yale, added by @bdraco
  The Yale Home brand now has its own integration and will no longer be using the August integration. If you use a Yale Home device with the August integration, you should migrate to the new Yale integration.

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with discoverability. These ones are new:

• ArtSound, provided by LinkPlay, added by @dukeofphilberg

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• The Mosquitto MQTT broker add-on can now be installed and started automatically when you setup MQTT. Great work @jbouwh!
• @allenporter added event entities to the Nest integration.
• @bdraco made it easier to add battery operated Shelly devices, you no longer have to manually set an outbound WebSocket configuration.
• MotionBlinds now has a button for your favorite position. Thanks @starkillerOG.
• @joostlek added the abilitiy to update your AirGradient devices from Home Assistant.
• @CM000n added diagnostic binary sensors to the APsystems integration.
• The Mastodon integration now shows information about your account, like how many followers you have. Thanks @andrew-codechimp!

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

You can now add a number template helper from the UI Thanks @dougiteixeira!

Farewell to the following

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] are also no longer available as of this release:

• Asterisk Call Detail Records and Asterisk Voicemail. Previously deprecated and now removed. They have been using a deprecated mailbox feature that is no longer available.

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2024.9 in September. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch every week (around Friday).

Release 2024.9.1 - September 6

• Fix BTHome validate triggers for device with multiple buttons (@thecode - #125183) (bthome docs)
• Improve play media support in LinkPlay (@silamon - #125205) (linkplay docs)
• Revert #122676 Yamaha discovery (@joostlek - #125216) (yamaha docs)
• Fix blocking call in yale_smart_alarm (@gjohansson-ST - #125255) (yale_smart_alarm docs)
• Don’t show input panel if default code provided in envisalink (@gjohansson-ST - #125256) (envisalink docs)
• Increase AquaCell timeout and handle timeout exception properly (@Jordi1990 - #125263) (aquacell docs)
• Bump aiorussound to 3.0.4 (@noahhusby - #125285) (russound_rio docs)
• Add follower to the PlayingMode enum (@silamon - #125294) (linkplay docs)
• Don’t allow templating min, max, step in config entry template number (@emontnemery - #125342) (template docs)
• Fix for Hue sending effect None at turn_on command while no effect is active (@marcelveldt - #125377) (hue docs)
• Lyric: fixed missed snake case conversions (@dalinicus - #125382) (lyric docs)
• Bump pysmlight to 0.0.14 (@tl-sl - #125387) (smlight docs)
• Bump pypck to 0.7.22 (@alengwenus - #125389) (lcn docs)
• Increase coordinator update_interval for fyta (@dontinelli - #125393) (fyta docs)
• Fix controlling AC temperature in airtouch5 (@danzel - #125394) (airtouch5 docs)
• Bump sfrbox-api to 0.0.10 (@AlexT59 - #125405)
• Improve handling of old firmware versions (@tl-sl - #125406) (smlight docs)
• Set min_power similar to max_power to support all inverters from apsystems (@mawoka-myblock - #124247) (apsystems docs)
• Update frontend to 20240906.0 (@piitaya - #125409) (frontend docs)
• Bump pyatv to 0.15.1 (@postlund - #125412) (apple_tv docs)

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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

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

• New returning type in LawnMowerActivity
• Validation of entity action schemas
• Changes to the icon translations schema
• Template.hass is no longer automatically set when rendering templates

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 2024.9