Create a way to visualize complex automations

I enjoyed the presentation from Thomas Lovén on smarter automations. I was reading the Github repo about it and tinkering with some existing automations and then it hit me. When creating some choose options the overview of an automation can become difficult, especially for people who are new to HA and/or not technical. In his post he visualizes the flow of his automations. It would be really helpful to have something like this on the side when editing automations or eaven have this as the main interface for creating automations (make it optional for advanced users to use the current interface).

I’ll try to link the images if Github allows this. Else look at Make Smarter Automations - Not More Automations

If you want visual automations, take a look at node-red.

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I want to stay away from Node-Red. I really want to be able to use pure HA. Learning curve for NR is to high for the non-tech user.

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The demand for this is probably low due to node-red being available. And the automation editor needs some other more important things to be fixed before you can even think about a graphical automation representation.
P.S. vote for your own request :slight_smile:

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It’s really not though. It takes an hour or two to figure it out, and once you do, making automations is not just easier, but significantly faster and you can make more elaborate automations than you can with pure Home Assistant. I consider myself knowledgeable in technology, but I’m no expert. I really recommend checking out Node-Red.

Couldn’t agree more. I recently moved all my HA automations to Node-Red. Once you learn NR, things are just faster and easier to configure. Or even edit and tweak.

What you mean with this? I used to use AppDaemon for my automations and recently moved everything to native HA automations, now that they got many more features. I still havem’t found anything that is possible with AppDaemon and not with native HA automations.

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Necro vote.
I’ve recently began moving away from Node-Red bit by bit due to the great built-in debugger within HA. I’ve run into a few issues debugging slightly more complex flows I’ve created in node red, usually using function or some type of change node. There were also other issues encountered with some nodes with HA makes a breaking change.

The main issue I have with the automation builder is that each object takes up too much space on the screen, so when I am stringing together an automation of more than a couple actions/triggers/conditons, it is easy to lose track of the portion of the automation I am looking for. This results in me having to change to YAML mode when the script gets to a certain length, which could easily be rectified by having some sections able to be collapsed/minimized. For example, I dont need to see all of the light options for every light.turn_on action…

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