in today's video we're going to be having a look at five new
features in the recent 2021.11 update check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well now it's not quite the first wednesday of
the month and in fact it's not even a wednesday but update 2021.11 did release a couple of weeks
ago and it was jam-packed full of features originally i did plan on covering it but i've
been off for a couple of weeks due to being ill but i'm back now and i'm feeling good and
just in case you've been living under a rock and you're not sure what was included in that update
here's five new features that i really like up first we've got entity categories you'll know that
when you add a new device to home assistant you're going to gain a whole bunch of different entities
now some of these entities are going to be useful to you and you'll make use of them in your scenes
and scripts and some of them are just going to sit there cluttering up your home assistant and that's
pretty much where this entity categorization comes into play so you're going to easily be able to
view a device and you're going to be able to see what the device can do what options you can change
for it and what information you're getting back from that device and by default lots of things
that you're not going to make use of will be disabled with entities we've got two different
categories we've got configuration and we've got diagnostic if an entity isn't categorized it acts
as a primary entity a primary entity for a device would be a device's main control so for example if
that device happened to be a smart bulb then its main control would be turning on or off that bulb
and we can see that nicely categorized under controls just there and back to those categories
as i mentioned there's two different ones we've got configuration and we've got diagnostic
the configuration entity acts as an entity that's got some kind of option or setting that can be
adjusted and tweaked in order to affect the device and then the diagnostic entities are entities that
are going to give you information about the device so that could be some kind of information that's
reported whether it be a sensor or something else there's also changes with the ways that entities
are represented within home assistant and this is to do with that whole entity categorization
changes so with entities that are now non-primary entities non-primary entities are now going to be
hidden from your generated lovelace dashboards this is just one of those things that's going
to help reduce clutter in addition to this your non-primary entities are now no longer going to
be exposed to your amazon echoes or your google assistants so now when you add a new device you're
not going to be spammed with the different amazon echo or google notifications saying that all these
new different entities have been found and if you did want to expose some of these entities to your
voice assistants then you can you're just going to need to go in and manually do that as it's no
longer a default action non-primary entities are also not called by service calls that target the
device or area that the device is in and as these are all changes to the way the entities act and
work they are classed as breaking changes so after you've done the update if you're having issues
with some of your scripts and automations then this is more than likely the reason one of the
common issues that i've seen is that an entity's been disabled so an automation and scene or script
are now no longer seen that actual entity up next we've got configuration urls and device links
so i think this feature and the one that we're going to have a look at just after this one are
probably my two favorite features in the entire update and it's just going to make your whole
home assistant organization and management so much simpler and easier so integrations can now provide
urls to where devices or services can be managed and what this means is you'll be able to select
your integration and if it supports this feature you'll see this visit device link here and what
that link's going to do is take you to either the configuration page or the service page for that
particular device so for example i'm inside of the tractive integration just here and i can see that
this particular integration supports this new feature as it's got that visit device link just
there and if you're not sure what tractive is is it's a subscription-based gps service for tracking
your pets and if you're interested in finding out how that all works within home assistant i've
actually done a full video on that and you can find that linked above but back to this example
so if i was to click this visit device link here it would actually just jump me straight over to my
configuration page for the attractive service so if i click that it would take me to the attractive
website and from here i could just log in then and just edit all my different settings for my actual
tracker so integrations can link to external services just like i showed you with tractive
but it doesn't have to be an external service it could just be a configuration for a device
so let's take a tasmoto device for example so within tasma rather than having to remember the
ip address for our device we could just come into our device and we could just click visit device
and that will jump us straight over to the tasmota page for that particular device so this is going
to save us having to remember all those various different ip addresses or different web pages and
it's just going to make life super simple moving on to our third feature we've got the icon picker
if you watch the home assistant release parties then you may have seen me shouting out for this
feature as i've been doing it for the last few months material design icon picker support
i actually started on it um it's on a branch somewhere um like like many other things
so finally an icon picker has been added into home assistant so now when you're setting an icon for a
particular device or entity you're actually going to get a drop down list that's going to allow you
to select a particular device from the material design icon pack and a massive thank you to paul
bertain for the awesome work that led to this being added in and i'm sorry if i butchered your
name paul the implementation for the icon picker is super sleek and it's super quick to set an icon
you're just going to simply need to find a device or entity that you want to change an icon for when
you select it you'll notice that icon's now got a little drop down next to it and if you select that
drop down it's going to show you a populated list of all the different material design icons that
you can choose from and you can just simply scroll through this list until you find an icon that you
want or you can do a search for a particular icon so with this example i've got the bedroom light so
if i start typing light it's going to show me a list of all the different icons that are related
to lights and this is going to search for actual icons that i've got the word light in but it's
also going to search the metadata so anything that is to do with lights itself third-party icon packs
can also utilize the icon picker so if the author of these third-party packs adds compatibility
you'll be able to just search for an item that's in one of those packs and you'll just view it in
your list of icons feature number four is a big update to the two-year integration which was added
in 2021.10 in update 2021.10 the new two-year integration was added into home assistant this
new integration replaced the original one but it was missing a lot of features which made a lot of
users unhappy because so many users were unhappy with the integration and the overall experience
frank went out and absolutely blitzed it he added a ton of new features rewrote multiple parts of
the integration and added more product support for a wide range of products this gives the new
2 integration some solid foundations ready to be worked on with future updates the fifth and final
feature of this update that i really love is an update to the vlc media player integration and
add-on i really like this feature but i think it's one that might get overlooked a little bit
and i do have a full dedicated video for this particular feature coming out but essentially
what this feature allows you to do is to make use of the built-in home assistant text-to-speech
and have it played through a connected speaker and all you need to do is just connect that
speaker to your home assistant blue your odroid or your raspberry pi and there we go that's been
a quick look at five new features that i really like in 2021.11 there are plenty of other new
features integrations and more all crammed into this update but this happened to be five that i
personally really liked at the time of recording this video the latest version of home assistant is
currently 2021.11.5 so make sure you're running the latest version if you want to have all the
latest bug fixes and features one last thing if you didn't already see on december 11th
nabucasa home assistant and esp home are hosting an event for the state of open home this is going
to be a special event streamed live on youtube and it's going to cover home assistant's progress with
creating an open home over the last eight years it's also going to feature guest appearances from
the guys over at zed wave js and the guys at wled if you're interested in that you'll find a link
to it in the description below but we're going to wrap this one up here this has been a nice one to
get back into the whole youtube swing after being away for a few weeks let me know in the comments
below what your favorite feature was in this update if you have enjoyed this video or found it
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massive thank you to these awesome dudes these are awesome dudes to my patreons if you're interested
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patreon in the description below but thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers
you