Finally announcing my suite of Lovelace plugins

I started a while back with my fan-control-entity-row Lovelace plugin (used to control standard three speed plus off fans) and people seemed to like it pretty well.

Since then I’ve had a few requests to make similarly themed plugins for dimmable light entities and cover entities that take variable positions (thanks @jazzyisj an @ktownsend-personal for the suggestions) .

In doing those I figured I’d go ahead and fill out the ability to button control rows for other controllable entities that can be set up to use a similar user interface and themes.

I’ve never really put out anything on the forums to let people know they existed and only used HACS as the default “marketing” tool. :laughing:

The biggest benefit to using these is for the convenience of no needing to open a “more-info” box to reach the extra controls for some of these. The others are just for a consistently looking front end where possible.

So here are the other different control rows I’ve made:

light-brightness-preset-row: This can be used to set up to three preset brightness levels to control dimmable lights and an off setting.

binary-control-button-row: This can be used to switch on/off any binary type entity (lights, switches, booleans, etc).

cover-position-preset-row: this can be used to set three pre-programmed positions for variable position covers (blinds, awnings, etc).

cover-control-button-row: this can be used in place of the built-in open/stop/close controls to make those controls thematically consistent if you use my other stuff and want everything looking the same.

Each one is completely theme-able including custom colors and text. And you can now even reverse the order of the buttons (off/low/med/high <-> hight/med/low/off, etc) if you want.

Here is how the buttons look for the various entity types (both normal and reverse order using my default Slate theme):

And here is how it looks with a default custom theme:

I think I’ve gotten all the possible entities that it makes sense to control with buttons. If I’ve missed something that you might want then let me know.

Most of these are available as default repo’s in HACS. The other two will be soon too, hopefully, but you can still add them via custom repositores in the meantime.

And for the people who are already using these (all three of you…:wink: ) I apologize for the breaking changes. I wanted to make the config options consistent across all plugins as much as possible.

30 Likes

If you haven’t tried these plugins out yet, they are a godsend on a mobile and small tablet interfaces if you’ve got big fat fingers incompatible with little sliders! Thanks for the work you’ve put into these @finity.

1 Like

Thank you very much, I look forward to trying out the new ones. I’ve used the fan control entity and it’s awesome.

1 Like

I love fan control row. Thank you so much for sharing.

If you’re looking for ideas, the only other thing I could use buttons for would be my roomba. I’m currently using the multiple-entity-row to handle it. Works fine as is, but maybe it gives you some inspiration:

Screen Shot 2020-08-16 at 7.40.40 AM

1 Like

what services does it use to control it?

Different ones use different services. Check out the docs to see all services, but I’m not sure how to detect them.
Mine works with vacuum.start, vacuum.pause, vacuum.locate, and vacuum.return_to_base

That’s what mine uses too. I’ve got a Roomba 980 and am using the Roomba integration.

Since there are so many different services which are different depending on your vacuum it’ll be hard to come up with a generic control for them all

However, it might be possible to create the control button services to be configurable in the options.

To do that it would be necessary to get a consensus on 4 buttons that would perform the most useful features of any vaccuum system.

looking at the docs it could be something like: start, stop, return to base and locate.

Or it could be something else entirely. Since I don’t use one I’m not sure what the commonly used features are.

For the other less used stuff you could still use the “more info” pop-up I would assume?

would that service be equivalent to vacuum.stop or vacuum.turn_off on other platforms?

Yes, it would. Although on platforms with advanced cleaning algorithms, pausing doesn’t clear that it currently has a job, and stopping makes it forget that job completely.

I just installed this for my blinds. That was the missing UI for them.
By default you could only have 3 positions. I needed 4. So it is perfect

I have one wish. I would love to use this also on a picture entity card. You know, the kind of card where you have an image of the ground plane of the house, and then place all the entities with coordinates

The cover_position_preset_row can be placed like this but always showing the icon and name in front of the 4 buttons. To be used in a picture_entity you would normally only want the 4 buttons and icon or text. It would be a nice enhancement if you could disable those.

I’ve had tht request already for another one of the plugins.

I haven’t had the time to fully look into it but I’m not sure I can do anything about that with the functionality of the plugin. These plugins only control the look and function of the “operator” part of the entity row. The rest is controlled by the entity card or picture card. I think… I don’t use any picture entity cards so I’m not exactly sure how it works.

Once I get the time I might look into it further.

But I’m glad you’re getting good use out of these.

1 Like

No worries.

By the way. I wrote the wrong card name

I meant Picture Elements card

That is the type of card where you define a background image for the card and then you can place stuff on that card. Typical use is an image showing the ground plane of the house and then you place all the different sensors and lights and switches etc using simple X/Y coordinates. But you can also place custom cards on it. Playing with button-card at the moment

I’ve been meaning to start looking at that for ages but I just haven’t been motivated enough.

I just kind of really like the “control panel” look of my frontend. I’m not sure that I’d like having to look at a floor plan of the house to control stuff. Especially on a small mobile device.

But Who knows, Maybe if I try it I might like it better.

Is there a way to hide the icon? That would be awesome.

I’m not really sure but I don’t think I could do it.

Again, these plugins only deal with the control portion of the entity. the rest is controlled by the entities card (or whatever other card you are using).

At least I think that’s the way it is.

I’ll definitely look into it when I get the chance. It seems to be a popular request.

For anyone using the cover-control-button-row…

I had an issue on github that said the “close” button isn’t working but the other two were ok.

Is anyone else seeing this?

Hey cool Plugins!

I’ve built a group of two cover the buttons are working correct but the status on the button is wrong. Do you have any suggestion?

Is it possible to set the tilt position?

6 7

  - closePosition: 0
    customClosedText: 0%
    customMidClosedText: 10%
    customMidOpenText: 50%
    customOpenText: 100%
    customText: true
    entity: group.schlafzimmer_jalousien
    midClosePosition: 10
    midOpenPosition: 50
    name: Jalousien
    openPosition: 100
    type: 'custom:cover-position-preset-row'
  - closePosition: 0
    customClosedText: 0%
    customMidClosedText: 10%
    customMidOpenText: 50%
    customOpenText: 100%
    customText: true
    entity: cover.schlafzimmer_links_jalousie
    midClosePosition: 10
    midOpenPosition: 50
    name: Jalousie links
    openPosition: 100
    type: 'custom:cover-position-preset-row'
  - closePosition: 0
    customClosedText: 0%
    customMidClosedText: 10%
    customMidOpenText: 50%
    customOpenText: 100%
    customText: true
    entity: cover.schlafzimmer_rechts_jalousie
    midClosePosition: 10
    midOpenPosition: 50
    name: Jalousie rechts
    openPosition: 100
    type: 'custom:cover-position-preset-row'

As an FYI, a couple oif things…

First, I just released an update the fan control row to allow the medium speed button to be hidden for use with two speed fans.

the two remaininjg speeds need to be “low” & “high” for the row to work.

And I also released an update to the Covcer Control Row so you can hide the “Stop” button. I never realized some covers don’t support that function and it was a FR.

I had a request (A LOOOOONG time ago…sorry) to create a single button toggle control for controlling binary type entities.

I finally got around to finishing it.

Here it is:

I just submitted it to be included in HACS so it should be there soon.

Here is how it looks with the different config options described at the github site:

toggle_row_default

toggle_row_custom_default

toggle_row_custom_theme

toggle_row_custom_text

I’ve had a few requests to make the buttons resizable so I finally got around to doing it.

All of the plugins buttons should be completely resizable now with the latest updates.