Among the platforms for smart home and home automation, Home Assistant is one of the most used and appreciated of all. Who chooses Home Assistant he never goes back because he can count on a reliable open source solution capable of integrating and controlling a vast range of intelligent devices and services, from the most diverse manufacturers, within a single interface.
With Home Assistant you can create a unique central hub for the management and monitoring of smart devices, freeing itself from proprietary solutions and having the possibility of automating various domestic functions, creating customized scenarios. The application allows you to focus on the concept of offline smart home to abandon the closed, difficult to interoperable systems typical of many manufacturers.
What’s new in Home Assistant 2024.2
L’update 2024.2 of Home Assistant Core presents several interesting new features. Among these, the integration of local TuYa support: This is a big step forward because users can now manage these devices without being dependent on cloud servers anymore. Local support eliminates the dependence on the Internet connection and fully embraces the concept of smart home offline mentioned previously.
Extended and improved support for drag-and-drop operations in automations
Furthermore, with the new release of Home Assistant, the drag and drop complete within the automations. Users can now more intuitively drag and drop triggers, conditions and actions within theautomation editor. Before this update, drag and drop support was not always enabled, but with version 2024.2, this feature has been improved to provide a smoother and more efficient experience. user-friendly in creating and modifying automations.
Export of sensor data
Assuming you have integrated one or more into Home Assistant sensors capable of continuously collecting and recording data, just click on it dashboard main, select “Show more data” then select the icon in the top right to export all information in format CSV. In this way, the data can be processed with any software: for example a spreadsheet as well as with libraries Pandas of Python, just to name a name.
Maximum compatibility with ZHA devices
ZHAacronym for Zigbee Home Automation, is a wireless communications standard designed to enable the connection and control of low-power devices within a smart home network. Zigbee is a wireless network protocol based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and is often used to create sensor networks, smart home devices and other smart gadgets.
The great news about Home Assistant 2024.2 is that the platform now allows you to directly manage your devices firmware updates for ZHA devices, thanks to a convenient dedicated panel. At the moment not all manufacturers are supported: the devices that are certainly interoperable with Home Assistant via ZHA are the branded ones OSRAM, Ledvance, Sonoff, Inovelli e ThirdReality. Even the devices IKEA are also supported, but updating is not enabled by default in order to avoid any problems.
Integrated digital assistant and new icons
L’digital assistant it is in turn the recipient of a large number of new features: it can manage user errors, provide suggestions and accepts the setting of specific answers and scenarios when the user asks a very specific question.
The new icons introduced in Home Assistant 2024.2 and implemented in several areas of the user interface, they improve the clarity and aesthetics of the system. Icons can be used in multiple contexts, such as to represent devices, entities and functionality within the environment.
The complete list of what’s new in Home Assistant 2024.2 is on this page. However, it is also a good idea to take a look at incompatibilities introduced, for various reasons, with products that were previously perfectly compatible with the platform. The reasons for these “destructive” changes are summarized in the document “Backward-incompatibile changes“.
Home Assistant setup tips say the quickest and easiest way to get started using the platform is to purchase the hub plug-and-play Home Assistant Green. However, you can install the product, for example, on a Raspberry Pi board or using an Odroid device.
The files provided also allow you to configure Mini PC e server x86-64 based on Linux, Windows or macOS: the choice of the preferred path is left to the user.