2025.4 Time to continue the dashboards!

Suggest you to ask a question in a proper thread, here it should not be discussed.
Each popular custom card has a dedicated thread, ask there.
Note that a release thread is not supposed to be used for discussing custom cards.
Also, there still plenty of WTH threads, may be some of them are better for discussing “WTH we do not have such features in stock?”.

As Didgeridrew said, and in addition, when you create an automation from a device’s page,

you get a device action.

Also, using any other action type comes with the overhead of having to guess which action might work with the device/entity (I always refer to the device, not its entities when a device only has one “payload” control/sensor, and I guess most people do that. Who says “Turn on the light switch’s switch”?).

I like their basic automations. Like hey we noticed motion sensors and smart lights. Want them to turn on when motion is detected? Yes. Done. But they also need tweaking …

I was making a point (using examples) of what I’ve seen many non-expert users want and need -vs- what is being done in the latest releases. This ‘areas’ dashboard is good for beginners, yes… but its not critically important to have it. If cards were as easy as they should be, there would be zero need for ‘areas dashboard’ especially since auto-entities can do most of that, so can Mushroom, so can Dwain’s. (plus, I wasnt asking for specific coding help in this thread.)

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Clock card — it’s great that this has been created, because I’ve been generating the clock and date for the dashboard in a different way for a long time. But I still miss the option to display the full date, like “2025-04-13” or
“Thursday, 13 April 2025”.

I stand corrected. I should’ve kept my trap shut as a non-user of the UI.

Auto-Entities is a 3rd party card. (Also Dwain’s is 3rd party btw)
So it’s not something considered by the HA devs as the way beginners should start using HA I guess. :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s also not a beginner friendly way to onboard new users with a graphical representation of the devices in their home like seen in many commercial products.

Area Dashboards are a huge step in this direction to be honest, even that they might only be a starting point before users get more advanced.

And I think your questions about customizing the look of specific cards isn’t a beginner topic at all. You won’t find this possibility in many other smart home solutions.

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Hello,

Not sure if it is the right place but i noticed that after the 2025.4.2 update , the Kraken integration is not working anymore .

Is it a known issue ?
Thank you

Now I’m curious. How exactly is focusing on areas helpful? When I think of all the reasons to use HA, most center around function, not location. What are the temperatures in my home? Which doors are open? Who’s home? Which lights are on? What is my HVAC system doing? What is my current or historical energy utilization?

I very rarely think “Tell me everything about this one room.”

Sure, I may want to know just one data point from one room, but not all the others. Maybe right now I care about which lights are on all over the house. Later I may look at energy usage. I go into HA thinking function, not location.

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Well 2025.4.2 arrived as expected and being a glutton for punishment I decided to give it a go again. It applied, rebooted and goes through all of the normal starting integration messages, followed by HA restarted. I decided to be patient and let it do any post processing that was needed to left it untouched for about 14 hours. Same state as the last upgrade, no UI interactions work other than I can see the Settings menu.

After that long wait I logged in via SSH and tried to reboot. Again in the web UI I could see all the integrations start it claim HA started and NOTHING.

Reverted again to 2025.3.4 which appears where I am stuck until I punish myself again with 2025.4.3.

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I feel like this question has to be asked multiple times in every release thread:

Did you clear your browser cache after the update?

What you’re describing sounds like a typical cache issue. Try to update again and clear the browser cache when you see the “Home Assistant has started” message. Ctrl+F5 should work on most browsers

Yes, I tried that and no luck. Also, it is deeper than that as none of the automations are actually triggering which have no reliance on the UI.

Create a new thread and post your logs from before the restart there. Make sure to include all relevant details of your install so we can help you figure this out quickly

So to be clear I should apply the update, let it do its restart and then once I see the HA started in the UI capture the logs. What logs specifically and of course this cannot be through the web UI but only through SSH. Also not super confident that without a huge amount of effort I could scrub the log files to a point I would feel comfortable posting in a public forum but maybe.

Also not sure when I will be able to get to this, busy day today and then the weekend where most of the “free” time is will be over. Appreciate you offer for assistance of course and want it resolved so other do not run into and I can actually get to 2025.4.x which has some features I would like to utilize.

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SSH or access via Samba, go to config folder and grab home-assistant.log. This will be your log since the restart was applied. If you want the one from before the restart, it will be named home-assistant.log.1

Tom, agreed.

I think having a default Areas dashboard is nice and helpful for people who are 100% new to automation (not just the HA app) but when the ‘new car smell’ starts to fade, those new people will realize 1\ Areas are needed to categorize many things (they are not just for rooms) 2\ Area dashboard view is not going to be used often, if at all.

It would be far more useful to combine the Areas dashboard with ‘filters’ (like Auto-Entities has) so people can exclude things in a given area they dont want to see/control. For example, if you have a 3 or 4 way circuit… the current Areas dashboard will show all 3 dimmers, just adds clutter since that light only needs 1 control button… so the dashboard messy from the start. Now what if you have 10 rooms (like I do) and multiple multi-way circuits. What about scene switches, I have one of those with every dimmer (zooz double switch), now all of those are shown, again multiples when I only need 1 scene switch (per area) exposed in the dashboard…

Cluttered and Messy.

Areas view is good for Day 1 automation people, that’s about it.

The best solution is right under your nose… Labels

Labels are 99% under utilized in the HA. They need to be elevated to do more in automation engine and dashboards. Labels are the best way to group entities (group helpers are 99% useless anyway). If Labels were were properly loved in HA they could be used for filtering Dashboard card/sections, and tons of value in automations if they were leveraged properly in the automation engine (but they are not)

Like I said at the start… you are creating new stuff instead of just leveraging and enhancing existing features/functions properly.

From what I’ve seen so far HA has a lot of great coders, but needs some great system designers / engineers.

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You make another good point about areas, labels and their usefulness for new users.

Think about it; you’re new to HA and home automation in general. You’ve got a few odd devices you bought, or already had. HA discovers them. Great!

Now, what areas are they in? Have you already developed a deep enough understanding of HA that you’ve got a good naming strategy and a well-developed plan for how you’re going to use areas and labels as you build out your system?

No. So why use areas as the primary way to structure the UI for new users?

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I have two types of devices:

Those I interact with regularly. Those are on my custom dashboards.

Those that I rarely or never interact with, either because there’s nothing to do as they are from devices that are just in HA because it picked them up or are extra entities (e.g. voltage reading of a smart plug), or are handled by automations and not manually interacted with usually.

The second group are a pain to look at when you need to. I do try to maintain manual area pages, dumping all entities from devices there whenever I notice them missing. If I was consistent there, that would be the easiest way to find them, as they would be ordered room->device->entity. I am not, so going devices&services->integration->device->oops, wrong one as they’re named plug95787 and plug36452->right device->entity is what I do. (I rarely use the device/entity list as those require me to pretty well know the exact name of the device/entity to find it there. By filtering by integration first, I reduce the list to a size I can just scan with my eyes.)

In the beginning I used the Overview dashboard, but now that’s 5 miles long and rather slow because I pulls in some heavy cards like cameras.

However, the way the current Areas dashboard works, showing a seemingly random selection of entities, it’s useless for me. Trying a dashboard that may or may not show the device I need is an extra and wasteful step I’d rather skip and go to the device list (which can be filtered by area) directly.

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You show a new feature but never show where to find it. I have looked and cant find how to setup the parent/child energy sensors. Where is the setup located or instruction on how to implement

Kraken issue : Kraken integration failing to load 502 error · Issue #142857 · home-assistant/core · GitHub