Is there a way to automate the construction of a status overview of all devices? I’d like to include things like battery status, firmware, online status, etc. I’m particularly interested in a solution that will survey all devices/attributes and add items automatically. Ultimate aggregation into an overall Red/Yellow/Green status for the whole house would be ideal.
Apologies if this is obvious and I’m just missing it. I’m new to the HA world and still finding my way around. I’ve searched around in the integrations, HACS, and forums but can’t seem to find an example. I found some python integration tools, so I could probably build it, but again, this seems like something others would have already built. Maybe this is all moot due to some other built-in characteristic of HA that I’m not aware of yet.
Battery status?
How do you qualify that?
A wall thermometer might run fine with just 2.2V on its two AA batteries, but a radiator thermostat would not be able to operate the valve when it hits 2.5V on its 2 AA batteries .
Then there is the difference between batteries, so the wall thermometer might die at 2.3V with some batteries and manage to run to 2.1V on others.
There is also the different batteries to take in to account, like a 16850 Battery or different battery technologies, like lead-acid, LiPo, alkaline, Li-metal and so on, which all have different characteristics to take into account.
Firmware?
Some devices present a firmware sensor, but groupibg them all together makes little sense. 0.17 and AB292585458.203 does not mean much.
firmware grouped based on vendor and/or type could be something, like ESPhome grouped together, Philips Hue devices and so on.
Some of these might also provide an update sensor.
The task here is to know it and that might be hard to set up for a general usage.
Online status?
Some devices are easy, but especially battery powered devices makes a mess in this field.
Some goes off line forn6 hours, others for 12 hours, other again for 24 hours, so when is a device online.
If course you can just set it to some large number so when a device has been seen then it is considered online for a long time, but when is a device then offline?
You need to know your devices and there are no general standard to make a general solution from.
Thanks for the reply! I certainly appreciate what you are saying about specific thresholds, values, formats, and types from device to device. My curiosity was more about the automation of populating the general view/construct with all devices in the system. I completely agree that one would need either configurability or a translation layer in such a system.
These were my main objectives:
Reduce the manual effort of adding devices to the construct. This would be useful in the case where you already have a lot of devices in your system and any automation would save you time. Pre-population with the need to manually set a couple config values would still be an improvement in my mind.
Automate introduction of new devices. In the same spirit as #1 (efficiency), but also reduces the possibility of forgetting to add a new device to your health monitor system.
Maybe what you’re saying is that due to wide range of differences in these devices it wouldn’t be worth the effort to building a generalized construct to manage health. That such a system would be so complex and ever-changing that it would be a maintenance nightmare. That reporting of health and status information is extremely inconsistent across devices and not worth trying to finesse into a common structure.
If that’s what you’re saying, then I think that would definitely answer my question. And, would save me the frustration of trying to build something that won’t be worth the effort in the end anyway.
To be honest, I’m new enough to this ecosystem that I might also be looking in the wrong places for ideas and solutions.
I was trying to say that it would be too complex due to difference from device to device.
You can do it for similar devices, like ESPHome for firmware information, but not in general.
ESPHome devices can have different batteries and be set with different deep sleep cycles, so battery status and online status might not be possible.
