in today's video we're going to be having a look at five new
features in the recent 2021.10 update check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well it is indeed that time again happy birthday
what home assistant's birthday was last month what oh can i at least buy the hat oh
so last month was home assistant's eighth birthday and with that eighth birthday they had a big
announcement to make and that big announcement was home assistant amber home assistant amber is a new
bit of hardware designed by the home assistant guys and it's aimed at both beginners and home
automation enthusiasts as the most simplest and easiest way to run home assistant if you're
interested in getting your hands on home assistant amber or maybe you want some more information
i'll have some links in the description below so back to it it is the first wednesday of the month
which obviously means a brand new home assistant update and if you are interested in finding out
everything that was announced then head over to the official home assistant youtube page
every first wednesday of the month home assistant do a live stream presented by the founder of home
assistant and some of the developers working on it during the live stream you've also got the
chance to ask the developers any questions that you might have and you can also take part in the
ongoing live chat or maybe more of an audio person in which case go and check out the home assistant
podcast it's available on all major platforms and it's going to contain everything you need to know
about this release you'll find links to the home assistant youtube and podcast in the description
below in addition to this i'll have a link to the home assistant blog post which contains a written
breakdown for everything new in the update just at the bottom of the blog post you'll find arguably
one of the most important sections of the update the breaking changes so just make sure you have
a read through these before you do the update as it could save you a headache and some time kicking
this off then we've got the first commit of the new two-year integration into home assistant core
the new two-year integration has been in the works now for a few months it utilizes a better
api and supports a lot more devices it's also a lot quicker compared to the original integration
if you were running the original 2-year integration you can't just switch over to the new
v2 integration as it's not a direct upgrade it's a brand new integration with a brand new code base
because of this this makes updating to you a breaking change as you're gonna need to
set everything up from scratch there is a well-documented written guide for actually
setting up the new integration but if you'd prefer to see a video then i've also created a video on
that and you can find that just above and also in the description below in that video i give
some information about the integration as well as go through an in-depth walkthrough of setting up
your two-year developer account and the two-year integration so if you're interested in that go
check that out almost half the live stream was spent talking about two-year and we had some
guest appearances from the guys over at two-year and this was really nice to see especially as it
was past these guys bedtime they gave a short presentation and shared some information on the
development process of the integration and they also listed a couple of dates for some new core
updates if you were hoping for local control then unfortunately that's still not a thing
and from what to you said in the livestream it doesn't seem to currently be a priority of theirs
it's all in progress and in our roadmap but it's not ready to go now so if it's ready
we will make the announcement with home assistant team officially for this feature yeah yeah that's
great so the important part in here is it's not a no right so a lot of these questions
it's it's not a no but it's not yet at this point so yeah we'll see what the future holds right
if you want to catch up with everything that was said by two year or catch up on any of the other
conversations be sure to check out the home assistant release party video moving on then
we've got some updates to the material design icons material design icons has been updated to
version 6 which gives us nearly 400 new icons as well as 75 which have been specifically designed
for home assistant a lot of these icons are going to be very useful and they're going to
look good on your dashboard there is also some breaking changes associated with this update
in version 6 some icons have been renamed or removed in particular things to do with corporate
branding have been removed if you're making use of any of these renamed or removed icons then you'll
start to see warnings in your home assistant logs now as of 2021.12 they'll be totally removed so
you're going to have two updates to actually change them carrying on we've got some updates
with z-wave js the z-wave js or z-wave js however you want to say it integration now supports the
s2 security standard the s2 standard has a lot more benefits when comparing it to s0 you've
got things like less latency improved battery life better security and more reliability if you
want to know more about the s2 security standard i'll have a link to it in the description below
on the topic of security esp home has also had some security updates the creator of esp home
otto winter has been working on adding an encryption layer to the esp home api
this allows esp home devices to communicate with each other in an encrypted manner and it
utilizes the noise protocol if you're a fan of esp home and you want to know a bit more about this
then be sure to catch the live event in a couple of weeks time and our final feature
is some updates to the switchbot integration with this update there's some new support for switchbot
devices and entities the integration can now be fully set up from the ui and you'll get access
to a little drop down that's going to allow you to easily select a detected switchbot and set it up
i'll be diving into this integration in a bit more detail in the coming weeks as i've got some
switchbot devices to set up and that's been five new features in 2021.10 but these aren't the only
new features and changes there's a whole list of different changes including things like updates to
amcrest dependency updates zha improvements decons improvements and new home kit support we also got
some new integrations in the form of air things amber electric crown stone what time and whirlpool
sixth sense don't forget to read through the breaking changes before committing to the update
don't be that guy if you've enjoyed this video and found it useful 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 if there's a particular feature or improvement in this update
that you want to see me cover in a video then let me know in the comments below as always a massive
thank you to these awesome dudes these awesome dudes are my patreons if you're interested in
supporting my channel which helps me to create content like this then there'll be a link to
my patreon in the description below thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers
gonna put my hat back on now
you