Philip (is looking for work)

Hey #HomeAssistant nerds, can someone explain to me this recent release (https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2026/04/01/release-20264/#infrared-becoming-a-first-class-citizen-of-home-assistant) which gets hyped about infrared?

How does this differ from the IR Blaster I have sitting on my shelf sending signals to my dumb heat pump?

Did they just build a protocol for companies to add in their own pre-configured IR codes?

I'm definitely missing something in my understanding of this setup.

2026.4: Infrared never left the chat

Infrared support turns your old remotes into smart home controllers, purpose-specific triggers and conditions almost feature complete, Matter lock management with PIN codes, background colors for d...

Home Assistant
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Show threadMieszko Ślusarczyk8h ago
@mez I think they’re making the system to make it easier. I’ve been playing around with ESPHome IR and the RM4 mini. Finding codes on your own is not that easy for everyone. I’d love to see it add support for bidirectional remotes (I.e. some AC remotes do it).
Show threadPhilip (is looking for work)8h ago

@spitfire How does this solve that? Integrations that have the codes built in?

That still means someone has to go digging around for codes to build an integration. In my experience and research for my heat pump, no one had them. There was just arcane research around how they were maybe encoded and put together. It wasn't worth rebuilding them, so I just recorded them using the receive on the IR Blaster and hoped for the best.

I think it doesn't help that I'm not really familiar with the terminology of what all the different parts of HA do - integrations etc, and where ESPHome fits.

Show threadMieszko Ślusarczyk8h ago
@mez you and I may have enough knowledge to do that, to reasearch this or build your own solution using ESPHome or something similar. Home Assistant is now better at being user friendly and the learning curve is not as steep as it was before. I guess this is for people who may not be as tech savvy. Look a the purpose specific triggers in automations. They are not about achieving something that could’ve not been done before. It’s about making it easier/more accessible.
Show threadstojg3h ago
@mez My IR blaster is a text field for sending code, a read only field for read code and like some buttons in my HA. It would be better if there was a system level integration (like they did with thi) so I could an easier integration for like Heatpumps. With like preprogrammed buttons we can click in the interface, at some point. Well that’s how I read it. Like lights are a thing in itself, not just an on and off switch with a color option.
Show threadNiall O'Callaghan42m ago
@mez yeah I think the idea is that rather than having an IR integration, you can have individual integrations for different things that just happen to use IR as a protocol. So far, pretty useless as there's nothing really out there, but it'll be nice not to have to mess around with recording individual button press codes!