Home Assistant 2022.12 Update
Just like clockwork, Home Assistant has done their monthly release for December 2022. As with many of their releases, this one has many new features, a couple of which I'm extra excited about.
Home Assistant has finally released their first Alpha, or as they call it, the "developer preview" version of the Matter integration. There has been a lot of chatter in the industry over the past year on Matter and how all devices will integrate and talk to each other. This is supposed to remove the barriers to making our home truly interoperable and smart. There is currently a lack of matter devices on the market, but that isn't stopping Home Assistant from getting ready.
You'll need a matter/thread-capable radio in your device in order to utilize this new integration. The Home Assistant Yellow has a built-in radio for this and you can get the Home Assistant SkyConnect, which has Zigbee and thread capability.
Tile Cards and History Colors
Tile cards are not new in this release. What is new are the features being added to them. The features available this release (as of this writing):
- Vacuum cleaner commands
- Slider controls for lights
- Tilting cover controls (shades, garage, etc)
- Colors depicting the state of the entity on the card
In addition to the colors on the tile cards, the logbook and history have also been updated to reflect the same color schemes used for the entity states in the tile cards. The yellow below reflects the "on" state of the lamp, which is the same yellow that appears on the tile card when the lamp is on.
Local Calendar
Home Assistant now has a fully featured, built-in, calendar. Not only can you have a local calendar, but you can also have more than one! Build one for yourself, your cat, your dog, and even your pet squirrel if you have one. These calendars can do recurring events, just like most other calendars.
New Sum Entities Helper
You know how you have to build templates and mess with yaml in order to sum up different entities? Well not anymore. There is now a new helper called "Combine the state of several sensors". With this, you can sum the value of two or entities into a whole new entity. It's super simple to do now!
My favorite features of this release are the local calendar and the matter integration. I've been looking for a way to automate things on a schedule and the calendar is a perfect way to do this. I am also looking forward to more devices playing nicely together and the matter standard (if it works as advertised) is the best I've seen in a long time toward this goal.
That wraps up this article. Make sure to watch my video on the 2022.12 update. Please also subscribe to my channel. It doesn't cost anything but helps with the whole algorithm thing and getting my videos out to more people. I would be forever grateful!