I would be nice if we can invert the open and close functionality for the cover entities. I’m coming from domoticz where this was possible. For some entities it’s unlogical, for example:
We have some roller shutters in our house. No I need to “open” them for the window to be 100% covered. For us its more logical to “close” them.
But for our folding arm sunshade it’s more logical to “open” it and shield us from the sun on our patio. (This is now the default in home-assistant)
I’m all for this one.
I found it strange when building a blind cover in esphome yaml and controlling it in HA or pressing the hard buttons - watching my blind go up (opening) and the cover position move towards 100 (filling the bar) and vice versa, closing and the pos moving towards 0 - just feels wrong
I’ve attempted to compensate this in lambda code but it seems HA has a tie into the cover position and open closed states, the HA button (open / close) controls dont seem to function correctly when i did this. (Reverted my code now)
I would also love to see additional flexibility with the Cover template.
However, I may be wrong but I think that it’s quite complicated. I don’t think that the problems would be completely solved by being able to invert the 0% and 100%. The way that the front end interprets 0 and 100 needs to be flexible too.
At the moment there is a link between: (a) the concepts of “open/closed” and “up/down”; and (b) the concept of being “not closed” and being “active”.
Apologies if I’ve got this slightly wrong but it goes something like this:
In the back end:
In the front end
These semantics make perfect sense for blinds/shades. Not so much for projector screens or awnings where opening is downward and closing is upward.
Also, as it stands, reversing the meaning of 0 and 100 can break the semantics front end. E.g. no up/down button when you need one.
I raised this on Discord last year and they suggested that I raise the topic in the architecture forum but it really didn’t get any attention at all. FYI, here is my post. Maybe some upvotes there may get this some attention?
In the post I suggest that device class could be used to define the semantic mapping of the back end to the front end. However, for full flexibility, I think that there needs to be some way to map the “extension” of the cover (whether it be 0 to 100 or 100 to 0) to the concepts of “up/down” and “open/closed”, “active/inactive” (or “on”/“off”) in the back end, removing all logic from the front end.
Obviously I’d be happy if alternative, better suggestions were to come out of this too.
Thinking about it, I remember why I was suggesting additional device classes. A cover only has one state in the back end so device class sees like the best way to tell the front end how to interpret it.
I’m surprised to find that this doesn’t exist yet, as the need seems common enough to warrant the feature. I would love to see this at least in the customize section of configuration.yaml if not also in the entity config UI.
A workaround exists to make template entities to invert the behavior of position and open/closed, however that’s adding a lot more complexity to config and has proven to be problematic for average users to accomplish, or even discover the workaround. In my case of 8 blinds I want to invert, that’s doubling my blind entities, adding more yaml to manage, and adding confusion when I need to reference them in scripts, automations and dashboards.
Adding a simple toggle to invert the behavior would be a great improvement.
Any news about this?
Just to be sure, only workaround is using cover template right? Or am i missing a HACS repo
I’m adding here since my request was closed as a duplicate. I don’t feel that a simple inverting of open and close is sufficient. Blinds are closed both downward and upward therefore 0 should be closed down, 50 fully open horizontal and 100 closed upwards. This shouldn’t be difficult as this is exactly how the new SwitchBot blind tilt motors work. Currently if I use HA to simply close an open blind, I have no way of knowing if it will close upwards or downwards. It seems like this addition would better differentiate blinds from shades which are currently the same thing and function the same way.
I would also really love to see this feature. I have a lot of covers that work inverted. One simple solution would be just to have custom icons on the cover card (it’s a workaround, true cover customization would be better).