Hi,
I’ve found my general dashboards are pretty useless: they’re always out of date and missing devices… or full of entities that are unavailable because Z-wave is unreliable and whenever a device is offline for a while it seems like the entities all need to be manually removed and re-added to the dashboard, etc. The default dashboartd is nice, except it’s poorly organized within rooms (lights mixed in with temperatures mixed in with weather, etc.), it gets completely swamped by a few overachieving devices with dozens of entities, and it takes forever to open (likely thanks to the handful of Unifi Protect cameras…
I’ve put together a plan to fix it but it’s a lot of work and I wanted to ask for advice/feedback before I put it into action. Basically: is there a better way? Or any tweaks that would make my idea better?
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My goal is to create a “Rooms” dashboard, with one tab per room. Within that tab there would be a set of category cards, whose contents were auto-populated to include all entities in that category and that room. So, for example, I will have a “lights and fans” card on each tab that just succinctly lists controls for any lights or fans in that tab’s room. I’ll also have a handful of “specialty” cards that are only applicable to one area (e.g., front yard sprinklers).
(I’ll keep other non-room specific dashboards too — like an energy dashboard — but this will be the main one.)
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My approach will be to do this using a combination of labels and the Auto Entities custom card. Here’s what I’m planning to do:
- Create a series of labels for each of the categories for which I want dashboard cards. For example “Lights & Fans”, “Air Quality”, “Energy”, etc. (I debated using a prefix like “dash-“ to avoid confusion with “real” labels, but I don’t actually use labels for anything else so…) Also create a “Specialty” label to capture those other 1-off devices.
- Manually go through every one of my hundreds of devices’ dozens of entities and add labels. (This is the labor intensive part that makes me want to get the plan right first.) Add at least one label to each entity that I want to show up in the dashboard, and do not add a label to entities that do not need to appear in a dashboard.
- Use auto-entities to create cards using the labels as filtering criteria.
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Questions:
- Does the general approach make sense? (I keep getting the feeling that what I’m trying to do should be pretty fundamental to the idea of home assistant and don’t want to reinvent the wheel badly… Is there a more-logical way?)
- This still means manually writing a card for each room and category (with combinations numbering 100+, e.g., “living room lights & fans, living room air quality, bedroom doors & windows, etc.) short of writing a program elsewhere to auto-generate the code for the dashboard, is there a better way to do this?
- Some things are better shown in graphs. Is there a way to use auto-entities to create a card that shows a history graph whose entires are the result of auto-entity filtering?
- Should I stay true to labels or auto-populate some categories using entity name criteria? For example, I’m planning a “Batteries” category showing battery levels for all devices in the room. Should I manually label each battery level entity with a “Battery Levels” label and populate that card (for each room’s tab) based on label… or should I make the “Batteries” card different from other cards and have it auto populate by including all entities whose name contains “battery level”?
- Should I handle exceptions manually or automatically? For things like the front yard sprinklers, I could easily go into the “yard” room’s tab and manually add a “sprinklers” card… or I could stick with just giving the sprinkler the “specialty” label and leaving the code for the “yard” tab identical to every other room’s…
- Any tips for “building for the future”? E.g., what if I add a new category?
- Finally, any advice on my list of categories? I was planning:
- Lights & Fans
- Blinds & doors - control (control curtains, control garage door)
- Doors/Windows/Occupancy (open/close status of doors and windows, status of occupancy sensors)
- Dehumidifies & Air filters
- HVAC (thermostats, space heaters, etc.)
- Air Quality (temp, humidity, particulate matter, etc.)
- Air Quality history (if possible, show a 72 hour graph of temperatures and humidities)
- Temperature sensors (e.g., freezers or temp in the server cabinet)
- Device health - last seen
- Batteries
- Cameras
- Alarms (leak detectors, smoke alarms)
- Energy (device energy usage)
- Energy history (graph of historical wattage by device over past 72 hrs)
- Media (speakers)
- IT (wifi access point clients, device CPU and memory usage)
- Specialty
(Again, I get scared typing this list, no only because it’s long, but because it feels like I must be badly reinventing something that someone has already worked out much better and may perhaps even be maintaining…)
Any advice?
Thanks!!!