in today's video we're going to be having a look at 12 of my favorite
features that were added to home assistant across the course of 2021 check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well 2021 was a great year for home assistant
we received a whole bunch of new features new enhancements new fixes and much much more and
it didn't just end there every month we had a new update released from the developers and with each
release the home assistant developers did a live stream where you could tune in for free on youtube
and just watch it with the developers and run through all the new features and enhancements
and it also gave you the chance to talk to the developers and ask any questions that you might
have had about the update and as i mentioned those streams are all available on youtube
and you'll find them over at the official home assistant youtube page and i'll have a link to
this in the description below moving on then we're going to rewind this back to the beginning of the
year and we're going to kick this off with update 2021.1 as updates go 2021.1 was a relatively small
update and that's just due to the fact that the previous update 2020.12 was a massive update for
home assistant and of course it was the christmas holidays my favorite feature of the january update
was some of the new changes made to the new apple tv integration in a previous update the apple tv
integration was completely rewritten by pierre stall and it allowed you to make better use of
apple tvs within home assistant so the update in 2021.1 just gave it a bit more functionality
and some extra bits of information i also only discovered the apple tv integration at this time
so for me it was a brand new integration and it allowed me to control the various apple tvs in my
home stepping forward into february then we had the release of update 2021.2 update 2021.2 was
a great release it contained the first release of the z-wave or z-wave js integration it contained
some new cloud text-to-speech settings and also it contained a new python update moving to python 3.9
but my favorite update of this release is dhcp discovery dhcp discovery allows home assistant to
listen to your network for devices that request an ip address and based on the intercepted messages
home assistant can discover integrations that can be used with the discover devices
and you will have seen this in action within your own home assistant so in the bottom left of your
home assistant you'll see the little notifications tab and usually you'll see a little pop-up there
to tell you that you've got a notification and when you click that it will tell you that it's
discovered a new integration and from there you can just proceed to set up that integration and
get those devices and other bits added into your home assistant moving into march we had the 2021.3
update this update released with 13 brand new integrations as well as a whole host of other
fixes and improvements but my favorite feature of this update was the my home assistant feature
the my home assistant feature allows home assistant documentation forums chats web
blogs and other websites linked directly to specific pages in your home assistant instance
all without knowing the url of your instance and the reason this is so useful is the fact
that you can add a link somewhere on a web page or a bit of documentation and have that directly
open in someone else's home assistant instance so like in frank's handy example there there's
a link to the hue integration and when you click that in the home assistant documentation
it will take you directly to the hue integration but within your own home assistant
next up we've got the april release of 2021.4 now this one was a great one for advanced users
but also for new users just starting to experiment with home assistant automations the update added a
feature that's primary goal is to help you fix and correct automations that you create and write and
that feature is of course automation debugging and it does exactly that so you get presented
with this visual graph and on that graph you can see the root that an automation took and
you can click on the various interactive nodes to find out what the automation was doing at a
specific point in time moving forward another month we had the may release of 2021.5 added
a feature that finally answered the question of why is my home assistant taking so long to start
so startup visibility was added and what this does is it adds a little notification section to the
bottom corner of your home assistant and basically when it's starting up it just tells you what it's
doing at a particular point so you can see what section of home assistant is taking the longest to
starter and if you do happen to miss that startup notification you can head into your information
tab and you can view a breakdown for each of the integrations and see the setup time for each one
and find out which one is causing home assistant to take a long time to start we then have the june
update of 2021.6 this particular update didn't contain any big new features but it was jam-packed
full of small features and improvements and also some great new ui changes my favorite feature of
this update was the support for custom dark mode on themes and this gave front-end developers
a new way to create themes so you could have a single-page theme and it could have the ability
to have a light mode or a dark mode variant then along came july with the 2021.7 update
and this update brought us a similar feature that we have in the april update so in the july
update of 2021.7 we've got script debugging so similar to automation debugging except you could
now debug your scripts so the same thing here you could have that visual look at the graph
and you could break down all the different nodes to find out what your script was doing
at various different points and then into august with the 2021.8 update and i think the
biggest home assistant update of the year 2021.8 brought us lots of new features and additions
but the main focus of this update was energy management and long-term statistics the energy
dashboard allows home assistant users to quickly and simply set up a dashboard that provides you
with information about your energy distribution the dashboard allows you to just quickly glance
and find out what energy is being produced and what's being consumed and you can also track
individual devices and you can view a time scale of all the energy consumption and usage so if you
wanted to find out what it was over a set number of days weeks months or even years you can do
you can also create your own energy dashboards so if you want to visualize something in a specific
way or you want to have some kind of custom card then you can also do that if that's something that
you want to do then along came september with the 2021.9 update and they added a feature that i felt
should have always been part of home assistant usb discovery so gone are the times when you plug in
a z-wave or a zigbee stick to home assistant then you have to manually configure and set up the path
now all you do is just simply plug in the usb stick and it will automatically prompt you with
an integration to set up and get everything configured for you i personally love this
feature and it's just one of those steps that home assistant have taken to make it easier and
more intuitive for other users so you don't have to be super technically savvy to just plug in a
usb stick you don't have to do that configuration it's just more friendly and welcoming to new users
we then have the october release of 2021.10 and we've got a whole stack of new integrations
including the new two-year integration and even more improvements to the z-wave js integration
which at this point now it was time to bite the bullet and if you weren't already on z-wave js
it was time to move over to it home assistant also turned eight years old and the guys over at home
assistant had a huge announcement with the home assistant yellow which is some dedicated hardware
designed and customly made to run home assistant and if you're interested in picking yourselves up
at home assistant yellow you'll find a link to it in the description below back over in update
2021.10 my favorite feature of this update was the update to material designs icon bringing it up
to material designs icon version 6 and this gave home assistant over 400 new icons to make use of
within your home assistant dashboards i'm a huge fan of material design icons and it was
great to see that over 75 of those icons were all specifically made for home assistant and to
follow along with my love of the material design icons we of course got the icon picker the icon
picker is absolutely fantastic and not only is it super simple to just select an icon or search
for an icon it actually loads crazy fast and it's so much faster than going to the material
designs icon page and doing a search for an icon there it just takes ages to do that this is super
quick super simple and it just allows you that bit of freedom to customize and choose icons we
then had the final release of the year which was the december 20 21.12 update which i unfortunately
didn't get to cover in its own individual video this update was a great update to finish the
year on and it was just jam-packed full of new features we had the brand new configuration panel
we had the button entity we've got the redesigned area panel with the new area lovelace card
we got blueprint scripts we got a whole host of new integrations and we got my favorite feature
which was the ability to create a user account that could only log into your home assistant
if they're connected to your local network now this is personally a feature that i really love
and i've wanted in home assistant for a long time so i'm glad that it's finally here and glad that
it's part of the last update and there we go guys that was a quick look at 12 new features that got
added to home assistant in 2021 that i personally really liked if you've enjoyed this video and
found it useful then don't forget to drop me a like and if you're not already hit that subscribe
button and ding dong the notification bell you'll then be alerted to any future video that i do and
as always a massive thank you to these awesome dudes these are awesome dudes in my patreons if
you're interested in helping support my channel which in turn allows me to create content like
this then you'll find a link to my patreon in the description below and just one last thing
before we wrap this up a massive thank you to the guys over at home assistant and nabu casa
for all the work that they've done throughout 2021 to get home assistant to where it is and another
massive thank you to all of the community members that also put in work to help enhance and improve
home assistance so thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers
you