Creating a sensor for my receiver dongle, HA sending me round in circles!

Third party integrations
1

I've DIY'd a radio receiver to pick up the level information in my heating oil tank from its Watchman sensor. This is plugged in to a USB port (/dev/ttyUSB1) and outputs a JSON formatted string like so:

{"rssi": 124, "height": 60, "battery": 10}

Now I want to add this to HA but I'm falling at the 1st hurdle. Using Claude.ai and GPT as helpers, they both suggest adding something like this to configuration.yaml

serial:
  - name: "Oil Tank Receiver"
    serial_port: /dev/ttyUSB1
    baudrate: 9600
    sensors:
      - name: "Oil Tank Raw"

..but HAOS errors "The serial integration does not support configuration via YAML file.". with a link to set up the serial integration. Click the link gets me "This integration does not support configuration via the UI. If you followed this link from the Home Assistant website, make sure you run the latest version of Home Assistant."

Obviously this is going round in circles :face_with_spiral_eyes: How do I get started?

System info:

Installation method
Home Assistant OS
Core
2026.5.1
Supervisor
2026.05.0
Operating System
17.3
Frontend
20260429.3
2

That was your mistake. See the official docs:

Config is under sensor: not serial:.

1 Like
3

I know. But sometimes they're good to get a push in the right direction when you're starting with something completely unknown (well Claude, not so much GPT). Obs not in this instance...

Anyway, I've got it working now thanks.

1 Like