Home Assistant 2022.8: You can fix it!

Home Assistant Core 2022.8! 🏖

While many of you enjoy a well-deserved vacation around this time, it seems
like it didn’t slow down the development/contributions made to Home Assistant.
What a beautifully packed release this is again!

I’m super stoked about the added Bluetooth support, opening up a whole new
world of devices to Home Assistant. I’m even more excited about the new repairs
and supported brands features. Those are going to help out A LOT 😃.

Do you know what is really great about this release? All the major features and
changes announced in this release are a step forward to our current goal:
Streamlining experiences.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Introducing Repairs: You can fix it!
• First-class Bluetooth support
• HomeKit Bluetooth support
• Finding the integration supporting your device
• Better map colors
• Other noteworthy changes
• New Integrations
• Integrations now available to set up from the UI
• Need help? Join the community!
• Breaking Changes
• Farewell to the following
• All changes

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube today at 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CET!

Introducing Repairs: You can fix it!

A completely new feature we hope you are going to love: Repairs! 👷‍♂️

The repairs dashboard can be found in the settings menu and is a place where
Home Assistant can notify you of issues that you can (and should) fix!

From detected current issues on your system to future issues, e.g., caused
by the use of a feature that will be removed, and anything in between.
The problems reported by the repair dashboard are actionable and resolvable
by you.

These repairable issues reported can be anything and are specifically tailored
to your Home Assistant instance. Clicking on an issue will show you more
information about it and tell you what you need to do to fix it.

Sometimes, this needs manual intervention by, for example, updating your YAML
configuration; Other times, it will automatically fix an issue for you after it
asks you to confirm it or after asking you to make a choice.

This release can detect about 25 issues now, and additionally, if a
Home Assistant Alert is found that matches your system, it will also show up
in the repairs dashboard.

There are many use cases for the new repairs feature, and you can expect
it to be extended a lot, with more issue detections, in the near future.

First-class Bluetooth support

Today, we proudly announce that Home Assistant now has first-class
Bluetooth support! 🥇

A brand new Bluetooth integration has been added, which provides absolutely
amazing Bluetooth support to Home Assistant, including automatic discovery of
new devices and the ability to push device updates.

Integrations that implement device support can easily be built on top of these
features, meaning we now have a solid base in Home Assistant to unlock
support for many Bluetooth devices out there!

The screenshot below shows that the Bluetooth integration is set up, and it
discovered a new device. In this case, it discovered a Mi Flora Flower
care sensor device.

A good example is the SwitchBot integration. It has been updated to support
the new Bluetooth integration, and because of that, is now a push-based
integration providing a much more stable experience.

This release adds five integrations built on this: SensorPush,
Govee, INKBIRD, Moat, and Xiaomi BLE. The latter also provides
support for the reasonably popular Mi Flora plant sensors.

Suppose you are using the Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, or are
using a supported Bluetooth adapter. In that case, the Bluetooth integration
will work out of the box for new installations and is automatically discovered
on existing setups.

Shout out to @bdraco for creating this fantastic new addition, @Ernst79 for
providing implementation feedback, and his excellent work on the
ble_monitor custom integration, which was an inspiration for the
Bluetooth integration. Lastly, a shout out to @Jc2k for implementing the
Xiaomi BLE integration that greatly helped with testing. Thanks guys! 🙏

HomeKit Bluetooth support

To continue the story on Bluetooth, the HomeKit Controller now also
supports Bluetooth and leverages the above-mentioned new Bluetooth
integration 🎉

In case you didn’t know, the HomeKit Controller integration allows you
to connect to HomeKit-capable devices and integrate them directly into
Home Assistant. Allowing you to monitor and control these devices,
they support push-based updates and, above all: Are entirely local!

You don’t need to own or have an Apple phone or computer to use this!

Supporting HomeKit Bluetooth-capable devices is fantastic! It makes a lot of
devices out there compatible with Home Assistant that have no other way of
integrating. There are lots of door locks, wall plugs, and other smart devices
that you can use now.

Thanks for the work on this @Jc2k and @bdraco!

Finding the integration supporting your device

Some integrations work with multiple different brands. This can happen because,
for example, those devices share a communication protocol, are white-labeled
and sold under numerous brand names, or may carry different brand names
depending on where in the world they are sold.

For example, if you have a Luxaflex cover, you can actually use it using the
Hunter Douglas PowerView integration. And this is not the only example;
there are many more! The problem is, how would one know that?

To make setting up things in Home Assistant easier, integrations can now
support multiple brands! So, if you now add an integration in Home Assistant
and search for Luxaflex, you will find one!

When you add a new integration that is supported by another integration,
Home Assistant will tell you which integration provides the support and
guide you to set up that integration.

Better map colors

Maps shown in Home Assistant have had a slight makeover and now use a new color
palette. These new colors provide much greater contrast and significantly
improve their readability.

Especially if you are using the dark mode in the user interface of
Home Assistant, you will notice a big difference.

Thanks to @KTibow for getting the ball rolling on this one, @matthiasdebaat
for providing UX feedback, and @bramkragten for making this change.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other
noteworthy changes this release:

• “Z-Wave JS” is now shown and known as “Z-Wave” in Home Assistant.
• The “System Health” setting menu item, has been moved to the “Repairs”
  dashboard, in the overflow menu (three dots in the top right).
• In the background, a project has been started to standardize the names of entities and
  devices. This work is in progress and will take a long time to complete,
  as each possible entity has to be adjusted. But it will streamline experiences!
• You can now change the shown unit of measurement of number entities that
  provide a temperature. Thanks, @emontnemery!
• @frenck updated the events developer tools to use YAML instead of JSON
  and added syntax highlighting.
• The LIFX integration got a significant overhaul, making it much more
  reliable. Thanks for the work on this in the past releases
  @bdraco and @Djelibeybi!
• The UniFi Network now has update entities, allowing you to update the
  firmware of UniFi devices directly from Home Assistant. Great addition @J3173!
• The Material Design Icons have been updated to v7.0.96, giving you
  100 brand new icons
  to use 🤩 Thanks, @goyney!
• SwitchBot now supports Hygrometers (thanks @murtas) and door/contact
  sensors (thanks @bdraco)!
• @Noltari added update entities to the QNAP QSW integration! Nice!
• @frenck added multifactor authentication support for Verisure. So now you
  can add more security to your Verisure alarm system.
• HomeWizard Energy added support for Watermeters! Thanks, @DCSBL!
• Yolink now supports garage doors, nice @matrixd2!
• @simeon-simsoft for bidirectional Wallbox chargers, thank you!
• You can now view your current network connection details in the
  Network settings screen. Thanks, @zsarnett!
• Lutron Caséta now supports the Lutron RA3 Sunnata Keypads. Thanks, @danaues!
• @mkmer added a battery level sensor to Aladdin Connect, thank you!
• The Sensibo integration now supports the AirQ sensor. Thanks, @gjohansson-ST!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Bluetooth, added by @bdraco
• Govee Bluetooth, added by @bdraco
• Home Assistant Alerts, added by @emontnemery & @balloob
• INKBIRD, added by @bdraco
• Moat, added by @bdraco
• NextDNS, added by @bieniu
• Repairs, added by @emontnemery
• Rhasspy, added by @balloob
• SensorPush, added by @bdraco
• Xiaomi BLE, added by @Jc2k

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

• Anthem A/V Receivers, done by @Hyralex
• Bose SoundTouch, done by @kroimon

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.

Breaking Changes

Below is a listing of the breaking change for this release, per subject or
integration. Click on one of those to read more about the breaking change
for that specific item.

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