I’m new to HA and YAML, and I’m in particular I’m having trouble with the syntax, and remembering what everything is called (states\entities, etc), and I’m dipping in an out of it a lot so I’m forgetting half of what I used to know.
I’ve got a lot of sensors to program, does anyone make a wizard\gui that will help me to built templates using a GUI, something that has a drag and drop code building feature or some other simple interface that will allow users to set things up without having to remember where all of the brackets go or what type of quote to use?
And before anyone says anything sarcastic, yes, I’ve read the documentation, and I’ve only understood half of it, so I’m looking for something to help me to get started, because half of the time I’m falling over on the structure and syntax, not the logic or structure.
If it is template sensors you are after, they can be configured in the helper section in the settings, along with several other thoes of sensors. The value template for the template sensor still requires text input to write a jinja2 template. This is not something a gui could assist with, so this is as close as you’ll get.
What kind of sensors do you need to program? That will help us point you more clearly in the right direction.
I’m not sure if it’s a template sensor or not, as I’m struggling with how Jinja2 and HA define things, my background is in OO and Assembler, which is are booth structured completely differently. My mind keeps going back to function calls returning values, and to object arrays. Which don’t exist in the same was in HA\Jinja2,
What I’m looking for is a GUI where I can tell it what my devices are called and what information they hold, and it puts together the syntax for me. putting the { ( and ’ in the right place and making sure that they’re balanced.
For example, I have several dozen binary door sensors, and they all have a name, a binary state (Open\Closed) and a battery status (Percentage). I want to store this data “somewhere” that get’s updated each time the binary state is changed, and to store the last time that the binary state was changed, so that I can calculate the difference between the last state changed and the current date\time to see how long a particular door has been left open\closed.
This you can see in developer tools, status page, but not while editing. It seems like you’re looking for a GUI to help you write sensors that you do not need to write yourself, because a lot is already there.
This already happens in the recorder, you do not need to do that yourself
This you can read from the state object, the GUI can display it for you: