Hello!!
Following Entity Availability, this is my second integration from the “Entity” family, and it’s already available in the HACS default list!
Just search for Entity Distance and install it directly, no custom repository URL needed.
## What is it?
Entity Distance for Home Assistant tracks the distance between the people, devices, and places you care about, and answers the questions you keep asking yourself:
- *How far is my partner from home right now?*
- *Are the kids getting closer, or heading away?*
- *When will someone actually arrive?*
- *Is everyone in the same place?*
You pick two to five things to track: a person, a phone or tracker, a sensor, or a zone like Home or Work, and the integration figures out the distance between every combination of them.
Track your whole family with a single setup!
## The highlights
**Any combination**
Track person to person, person to a place, device to a place, or place to place. If Home Assistant knows roughly where something is, Entity Distance can measure it.
**Group tracking**
Pick two to five things and every pairing is tracked automatically. Two things is one pair, three is three pairs, four is six pairs, and five is ten pairs… all under one setup.
**Distance and proximity zones**
Each pair reports the distance between the two, and which proximity zone that falls into: Very Near, Near, Medium, Far, or Very Far.
You set the boundaries, and the defaults are sensible out of the box.
**Direction of travel**
Tells you whether a pair is approaching, moving apart, or standing still, so an automation can react to someone heading home before they arrive.
**Closing speed and estimated arrival**
When two things are getting closer, you get the closing speed and an estimated number of minutes until they’re together.
The arrival estimate only shows up when someone is actually approaching.
**Proximity and same-place sensors**
A simple on-or-off sensor tells you when a pair is close enough to count as “in proximity”.
Another tells you when both are in the same named place, like both being Home.
**Time together**
Keeps a running total of how long a pair has spent close today, resets it at midnight, and can also break that down by zone-minutes spent Very Near, Near, and so on.
**Altitude and same-floor detection**
Where the location data includes altitude, Entity Distance can tell you the difference in height between two people and flag when they’re on roughly the same level. Handy, with the caveat that altitude from phones is less precise than horizontal position.
**Group view for 3 or more**
When you track three or more things, you also get group-wide sensors: the smallest distance across everyone, whether any pair is close, and whether every pair is close.
**Reliable and accurate**
GPS is noisy, so there are filters to reject bad location fixes and impossible jumps, plus an optional “only react when the data is reliable” mode that waits for a few consistent updates before flipping the proximity sensor on. Distances use Home Assistant’s built-in high-accuracy calculation.
**Refresh button**
A button to ask phones to send a fresh location right now, so you don’t have to wait for the next automatic update.
## The cards
Entity Distance ships three custom dashboard cards, and they register themselves automatically after installation. All three have a visual editor, so you don’t need to write any YAML.
**Pair Card**: a data-focused card showing distance, direction, proximity status, and stats.
**Avatar Card**: a friendlier, people-focused version with the avatars of the two people side by side.
**Group Card**: a live graph of everyone in a group, shown as circles connected by labeled lines. Lines are colored by proximity zone and glow when two things are close, and each line shows the distance, a direction arrow, and the zone name. Tap a line for more detail.
## Screenshots
## Automation examples on the repo
## GitHub + full docs GitHub - italo-lombardi/Home-Assistant-EntityDistance: Track distance between 2–5 HA entities (persons, devices, zones) — direction, speed, ETA, proximity, group sensors. · GitHub
If you find this useful, I’ve built a few other custom integrations too:
- Entity Guard: Enforces device states using simple rules. Replaces hand-written auto-off, auto-lock, and kill-switch automations.
- Entity Availability: Know when your devices go offline, and how reliable they really are.
- Entity State Tracker: Tracks how long devices spend in each state over time, with per-state breakdowns, scoring, and a custom card.
- Fuel Compare: Tracks live fuel prices from 36 providers across 30 countries.
- WashWise: Helps you decide whether to wash your car, bike, or solar panels, and whether to run garden irrigation, based on the weather forecast.
- DashSnap: Home Assistant App to record or screenshot any web page via headless Chromium: HA dashboards, Grafana, public pages.
- DashSnap Integration: Trigger DashSnap from Home Assistant automations. See App above.
Happy to answer questions here. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on GitHub Issues too.