How Home Assistant’s new update eliminates the worst pain point of DIY automation – Automated Home

Home Assistant has long been the backbone of DIY smart home automation. It gives you unparalleled control, local privacy, and the freedom to integrate nearly any device into a unified system.

But if we’re being honest, there has always been one major pain point that frustrated both beginners and power users: identifying the right target when building automations.

Every Home Assistant user has been there: you open the automation editor, try to create an action, and suddenly find yourself staring at three entities named “Ceiling Light.” Or you tap “Living Room” as a target and silently hope the right lamps, sensors, and switches will be included.

The platform’s flexibility has always come with a trade-off: complexity, especially when your home grows from a simple setup into an expansive network of smart devices.

That’s exactly why the new Home Assistant 2025.11 update is such a big deal. This release directly addresses the problem that has plagued DIY automation for years. It gives you clarity and precision, eliminates guesswork, and makes automations easier, faster, and more reliable.

And best of all? It does this without dumbing anything down. It simply improves the tools you already use every day.

Let’s break down what’s new and why this update is being celebrated as the one that finally fixes DIY automation’s biggest headache.

The target picker that finally makes sense

The standout feature of the 2025.11 release is the brand-new target picker, a redesigned interface that solves one of the most frustrating issues in automation building: knowing exactly which devices you’re controlling.

In older versions, picking a device meant sifting through entity names, some autogenerated, some manually edited, some duplicated, and many confusing.

If you targeted an area like “Bedroom,” you often had no idea whether Home Assistant understood which specific lights, climate devices, fans, or plugs you were referring to.

The new target picker fixes that instantly.

Now, when you choose an area, floor, or device, Home Assistant shows you all included entities, along with their locations and types. You get:

• A visual breakdown of everything that will be affected
• Clear grouping by entity type
• Immediate awareness if something is missing or mislabeled
• Automatic adaptation when devices are added or removed from a room

This change is huge because it does something Home Assistant has never done before: it lets automations scale effortlessly as your home grows. No more editing automations every time you buy a new lamp or move a smart plug.

DIY automation just got smarter and a whole lot less frustrating.

A cleaner, faster, more powerful automation editor

The target picker isn’t the only improvement. The automation editor has gone through a quiet but important transformation over the past few releases, and 2025.11 pushes that momentum further.

The interface for adding triggers, conditions, and actions has been completely redesigned. Instead of cramped menus and scrolling lists, there’s now:

• A larger, cleaner dialog
• A two-pane layout with better descriptions
• Faster navigation
• Clear separation between actions and advanced building blocks

Building blocks such as loops, branching paths, and conditional sequences now live in their own tab. The editor feels less cluttered and much more intuitive, especially for users who build complex routines.

This isn’t just a cosmetic upgrade. It genuinely speeds up the process of building automations. Tasks that used to take minutes now take seconds because everything is easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to organize.

Want a deeper look at the recent Home Assistant 2025.11? Then check out this in-depth video:

Dashboard improvements that bring order to big smart homes

Alongside automation fixes, Home Assistant 2025.11 includes major usability updates to dashboards, especially for people with large or multi-floor setups.

1. Entity name controls

You now get fine-grained control over how names appear on dashboard cards. You can show:

• Entity name
• Device name
• Area
• Floor
• Any combination of the above

This simple change solves another long-standing irritation: dashboard clutter. With clearer naming, you can keep large dashboards readable without sacrificing detail.

2. Floors and areas are organized automatically

Areas are now grouped by floors throughout the dashboard. If you’ve configured floors, basement, ground floor, and first floor, they’re now neatly separated everywhere they appear. Browsing large homes feels natural and intuitive.

3. Smarter suggested & favorite entities

Suggested entities and your manually marked favorites are now merged into a single intelligent section. Instead of juggling between lists, you get one streamlined view showing what matters right now.

4. Dedicated dashboards for core categories

Lights, Climate, Security, and Media Players now have their own dashboards, accessible directly from Settings. You can jump straight to key systems without digging through menus.

Small changes add up, and together they make Home Assistant feel more organized than ever before.

Energy dashboard gets a new “Pie View”

If you monitor power usage, the new pie chart view is a welcome addition. You can instantly switch from bar graphs to a clean pie layout, making device-level consumption easier to analyze.

This is especially handy for users who track solar panels, EV chargers, high-draw appliances, or off-peak usage patterns.

System updates finally show progress

One of the most overlooked but most appreciated updates in 2025.11 is the new system update progress tracker.

In the past, “Updating…” was all you saw. You had no clue whether Home Assistant was downloading, unpacking, installing, or getting stuck.

Now, updates display a proper progress bar with clear stages. It’s not perfectly linear, but it gives you a real sense of timing and makes maintenance far less stressful.

A fix that saves your SD Card from dying

If you run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, pay attention to this one.

Home Assistant used to double-log events, writing logs both where the OS stored them and inside the configuration folder. This caused unnecessary wear on SD cards, and long-term users often experienced corrupted cards and failed installations. 2025.11 eliminates the duplicate logs.

Home Assistant now keeps logs in a single, efficient place, but still lets you view and download them from Settings. This not only saves disk space but also dramatically reduces wear on SD cards.

This alone will save thousands of Pi users from unexpected failures.

New integrations worth noting

The November update also brings a wave of new integrations and upgrades:

• Actron Air
• Fing (network scanner)
• Nintendo Parental Controls
• OpenRGB for PC lighting
• Volvo vehicle location and controls
• SwitchBot garage door opener support
• Xbox image support (game art, avatars, Gamerpic)

Plus, several integrations have moved from YAML to the UI for easier setup.

DIY automation just got a whole lot easier

Home Assistant 2025.11 isn’t just another incremental update; it directly attacks the biggest frustration users have had for years: the confusion and uncertainty around targeting the right device in an automation.

With the new target picker, a redesigned automation editor, clearer naming options, dashboard organization tools, and much-needed system improvements, Home Assistant feels more user-friendly without losing any of its power.

If you’ve ever hesitated to build complex routines or worried about breaking your automations as your smart home grows, this update changes everything.

The worst pain point of DIY automation is finally gone, and Home Assistant just became easier, smarter, and more reliable than ever.

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This article was made with AI assistance and human editing.