home assistant releases

Everything New In Home Assistant 2022.10!

Home Assistant 2022.10 includes better discovery of integrations, even more Bluetooth support, dashboard features and several new integrations!

Lewis Barclay

Oct 5, 2022 • 6 min read

We are getting into the final couple of Home Assistant releases of the year now that Home Assistant 2022.10 is here.

This month, as always, we have some exciting new features to take a look at - including even more Bluetooth updates as domination of all the Bluetooth devices continues, an update to the way integrations are displayed, a new handy dashboard feature and of course we need to talk, What The Heck?

What The Heck!?

I’d like to first start off by mentioning that this is the month of What The Heck - an event that was done 2 years ago - that is returning this year, much to the rejoice of Home Assistant fans!

The long and short of What The Heck, is that for the month of October, it is even easier than ever before to contribute to the Home Assistant project, by lowering the barriers of entry to report a bug or request a new feature.

This is done with a new section on the Home Assistant Forum, where you can head over to and suggest a new feature or vote for your favourite one someone else has already suggested. This is not to say that all suggestions will be added, but this makes it easier for users of all abilities to contribute instead of having to put a feature request in on GitHub or get into filing proper bug reports.

So, if you have a killer new idea that is not currently in Home Assistant and you think it should be, then this is the month to do it!

First up, we have a slight but helpful change to the way interactions are displayed.

Previously, when you would go to add a new integration, you would go to Settings, Devices and Services, click the add integration button and search for the name of the integration you wanted to add. This was assuming you knew the name of the integration for your device, since sometimes integrations support more than one device.

With 2022.10, when you go to the integrations menu now, you can search for the brand of the device or software instead. If there is more than one integration available for that brand, it will show up in a secondary menu that you can then select.

The re-designed integrations menu with secondary menu - notice how many more appear for this search!

This makes it easier to find integrations, especially for beginners and the good thing is that even if you search for the name of the integration like before, it will still search and display the one you are looking for which is a nice addition!

EVEN MORE Bluetooth!

We again have another big update to the continued and impressive Bluetooth train that Home Assistant is currently on with 2022.10.

The much anticipated active connections for the recently added Bluetooth Proxies has arrived!

If we backup for just a second, Bluetooth Proxies was added in the previous release, and essentially this allows Home Assistant to communicate with Bluetooth devices even when they are out of range, through these remote ESPHome devices.

However, some Bluetooth devices need what’s called an active connection to communicate properly with them, which was missing in last months update - 2022.10 now adds this functionality in, meaning even more devices should be available for you to work with.

Devices such as the SwitchBot Curtain, LED strip lights and maybe even door locks and other such devices now have the potential to integrate with Home Assistant.

This is a really nice step in the right direction to working with all the Bluetooth devices!

To create a Bluetooth Proxy ESP32, you can either use the handy website to easily install dedicated Bluetooth firmware onto an ESP32 device, or if you have existing ESPHome projects you’d like to use, then it is a simple case of adding an additional line to your Bluetooth proxy configuration to get this working:

bluetooth_proxy:
  active:true

All in all a very nice little addition to Home Assistant and ESPHome!

iBeacon Tracking

Another addition semi-related to the Bluetooth updates is a new integration for iBeacon Tracking.

This allows Home Assistant to track iBeacons that you may attach to your person or to items such as car/house keys, which Home Assistant can then approximate the distance of that iBeacon away from the nearest Bluetooth adapter - this could open up the potential for some rather nice automations, especially around personalisation!

Sub-Views

Home Assistant Dashboards also get a nice new little feature too called Sub-views - a way of improving the organisation and usability of more complex dashboards.

If you’ve watched the tour of my mobile dashboard video, you will see that I have room based navigation that has a back button to be able to quickly navigate back and forth between different rooms and the main page.

This was possible by adding some more complex code to your Dashboard or if you were using a community made dashboard for your Home Assistant like Mushroom, but now this is a native feature inside of Home Assistant so you can now very easily add this with minimal effort.

Simply add a new view to your Dashboard, and you will notice you now have a new option for a Sub-view:

To navigate to this room, you can create yourself a button on your Dashboard which will navigate to your Sub-view like so:

Notice how Sub-views also do not appear in the navigation bar at the top - great for organization. You will also see that your Sub-view has a built in back button in the top left hand corner, which will take you back to the main page, neat!

Manual Automations...with migration!?

Next up we have a rather cool addition for people who like to do their automations manually in YAML!

If you created a manual automation using a code/text editor in something like VSCode or something similar, then you probably have ran into a problem where your automation is not visible in the the UI.

With 2022.10, you can now view your manually created automations in the front end, alongside any UI generated ones. You won’t be able to edit them however and everything will be greyed out, remaining in a read-only mode...

Unless, of course, you use the other new button that also appears on this page, which will automagically migrate your manually configured updates to the UI where you can then edit them as you please:

Really nice addition for those of you who have legacy automations setup from years ago who were maybe avoiding converting them over to the UI - now you can do that with a single click!

The Minor Updates

This month there is also the addition of a new template filter that can now be used to do quick and easy calculations on version numbers.

This will be useful if you want to do more advanced things with the Home Assistant update feature, allowing you to easily compare different version numbers in your automations, using templates.

There has also been some work done to standardise the styling of all of the dialog boxes throughout the UI, to make them more consistent with each other.

New Integrations!

There have also been an additional 9 new integrations added this month, including the previously mentioned iBeacon tracker, along with Google Sheets:

We also see a further 2 integrations now available to configure in the UI instead of the old config files:

As always, make sure to check out the breaking change before hitting that update button, a very small list this month which we love to see, and nothing major standing out to me at all, but just make sure to have a glance at that to see if there is anything related to your setup - great work on this release everyone!

Until next time...