2023.9: New local weather entity dialogs, a lot of tile options, and template sensors from the UI!

The tile card gets many new features this release.

The features of a tile card are a great way to bring more functionalities directly into your dashboard, without needing to open the more info dialog.

• HVAC mode
• Water heater mode
• Temperature control
• Cover position
• Cover tilt
• Lawn mower commands
• Color temperature

Screenshot of tile cards with the new features.

A new entity type was added this release: the lawn mower!

You can now integrate your lawn mower into Home Assistant!
Never worry about the lawn mower when it starts raining, you can now automate the lawn mower to stop and go back when it rains.
For now, just MQTT is supported, but keep an eye out for other integrations!

Screenshot of the more info dialog of a lawn mower entity.

When setting up a helper, sometimes it can be useful to see how the entity that you are creating looks while you are setting it up. That’s why we added a preview when you create or change a group helper.

It will show exactly what the entity will look like with the current settings.

And talking about groups, we also got a new group, the event group!

Screenshot of creating a sensor group.

We also added preview support to another helper that finally made its way into the UI, the template sensor.

From the UI you can use a template to set the state of the sensor.
You can pick a unit of measurement, set the device class, and select a state class.
Both sensors and binary sensors are supported.

This will make most of the use cases for template sensors available through the UI and one less need for YAML!

Other more advanced fields, like attributes, are unavailable from the UI. You will still have to set those up in YAML.

With the preview, you see a live update of the sensor value while writing the template.

Screenshot of creating a template sensor.

Trigger template entities can now have an action block that is executed after the trigger but before the entities are rendered.

This will allow users to fetch things like calendar events and weather forecasts using services with responses and use them in their template entities. You can even use OpenAI to set the value of your entities now!

All variables from the action block will be available in the template.

An example that checks at midnight if you have something on your calendar tomorrow and sets a binary sensor:

template:
  - trigger:
      - platform: time
        at: "00:00:00"
    action:
      - service: calendar.list_events
        target:
          entity_id: calendar.calendar
        data:
          start_date_time: " today_at() + timedelta(days=1) "
          duration:
            hours: 24
        response_variable: events
    binary_sensor:
      - name: Calendar events tomorrow
        state: " count > 0 "

We added a new service for weather entities, weather.get_forecast, that responds with the weather forecast.

Previously you would have to look at the forecast attribute of a weather entity to get the forecast, now this can be done by calling a new service, weather.get_forecast, that will respond with the forecast.
You can also specify what type of forecast you want. Do you want to see the forecast by day or do you want to know it for every hour? This means you no longer need separate entities for every forecast type, but it can all be done in 1 entity.

All weather integrations are updated to support this new service.

Screenshot of service developer tools showing the weather forecast service.

If an entity supports multiple forecasts, you can choose which forecast you want to see in the more info dialog.
In the weather card in your dashboard, you can also now pick what kind of weather forecast you want to show in that card.

Screenshot of the weather more info dialog.

With this change, the forecast attribute of the weather entity is deprecated, and will be removed in Home Assistant Core 2024.3.

This will make it possible to have on-demand forecasts, that update when you want them to, instead of them being updated all the time.
It will also make the system faster; all state data gets sent to your browser or mobile app every time it is opened so the frontend has the latest states of your entities. The forecast attribute makes the state of weather entities very big, causing everything to be loaded slower.

While the way to access this data has changed and may impact your automations, you will not experience any loss in functionality. Even with this change, rest assured that the forecast cards in your dashboard will still work, they will now just use the service to retrieve the forecast data asynchronously instead of reading it from the state attribute. The end result is that your dashboards will load faster, and the frontend will be leaner.

You can use the newly added action part of a template entity to fetch the forecast and use it in your template:

template:
  - trigger:
      - platform: time
        at: "00:00:00"
    action:
      - service: weather.get_forecast
        target:
          entity_id: weather.home
        data:
          type: daily
        response_variable: forecast
    binary_sensor:
      - name: Is it going to rain?
        state: " forecast.forecast[0].precipitation > 0 "

While it is certain that Home Assistant is a great tool once you understand how it works, one part that was often overlooked is its associated learning curve.
We are now actively working to flatten that curve so that you can get more from your home faster and simpler.
This release shows the first result of that effort, a new onboarding flow.

Something you probably have not seen for a while, but we gave our onboarding a fresh new look! It is shortened to get users in Home Assistant as fast as possible, so they can enjoy tinkering with their home faster!

Screenshot of the onboarding screen.

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

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