The new version of Home Assistant 2024.7 is now available for download. This new version incorporates some very interesting new features regarding the graphical user interface. Since the beginning of the year, the development team has focused a lot of efforts on providing a very intuitive graphical user interface, both to view everything and to configure it, and to avoid a very high learning curve for new users. Of course, they have also taken the opportunity to incorporate new integrations and improve several existing ones. Do you want to know all the new features of this new version?
The Home Assistant development team doesn’t stop even in summer, and a good example of this is the new version that comes with quite a few new features. As it almost always happens with versions, we don’t have a revolution, but rather an evolution, something to be thankful for because little by little they are integrating new features and requests made by users in the forums.
Resize cards to your liking
In the new version of Home Assistant 2024.7, when we create a panel of the “Sections (Experimental)” type, we have the possibility of creating different boxes with the cards, until now it was not possible to resize the cards that we put, but they took the default size. A very interesting new feature to improve the appearance is that we can now modify the design of these cards, both horizontally and vertically. If by default we have the following:
Now we can edit these cards to the size we want, to perfectly adapt them to our display needs:
As you can see, we can not only resize the buttons, but also the cards that show some type of information, perfect for having a better visualization of all the information.
Customizing columns
Another new feature that the development team has integrated is the possibility of showing or hiding the columns that we want in the “Devices” section. We can show or hide the icon, area, integration, battery, model and manufacturer. In addition, we can also order these columns as we want, perfect for having greater customization in these configuration menus.
Although this change only affects the people who manage the home automation system, it is appreciated that they are incorporating these improvements that are so easy to implement and so useful.
Now we can edit the Blueprints
A Blueprint is an automation that is almost ready. By default we have two Blueprints that are basically: turn on a light if motion is detected, perform an action if a certain area is accessed by geolocation. If we want to add more advanced options, we had to create the automation from scratch with all the options.
Now if we have already created a Blueprint, we have the option to “Take control”, and the system will automatically convert this Blueprint into a complete automation, where we will only have to complete what we need to do what we really want.
As you can see, all the information to create an automation almost from scratch will be displayed, but we will have the information imported from the Blueprint that we have previously configured:
As you can see, it is now quite easy to reuse a Blueprint and turn it into automation.
New integrations and improvements
The development team has made new integrations natively, basically we have an Aquacell integration to control it centrally in the home automation system, we also have the “ista EcoTrend” integration to be able to use these devices natively, as well as the possibility of configuring Mealie which is a Docker container to make cooking recipes, and now we can integrate it into the Home Assistant calendar very easily. Finally, we also have the Knocki integration.
As for the improvements incorporated, we have an improvement in the Matter integration, as it could not be otherwise, the integration of TP-Link Smart Home has also been improved and modernized, as well as support has been added to view the front camera of a tablet if we use Fully Kiosk Browser, as well as improvements in the integration of Android TV Remote, support for UniFi Protect has been improved, as well as for Reolink cameras. Other integrations that have had relevant updates are those of Nanoleaf, Roborock for smart vacuum cleaners, as well as SwitchBot Lock Pro to manage the smart lock in Home Assistant.
Other new features that have been introduced in this version 2024.7 are the possibility of changing the username of the Home Assistant account, the possibility of repairing errors if an automation cannot be executed (there are syntax errors), and we can even link a template that we have manually configured to an existing device. We now also have the possibility of changing the radius of action in the “Home” area of our home automation system, something that we could not do easily before, because we had to edit a yaml file to do so.
