I have searched, read, looked until I am blue in the face and am burnt out for the night on how to do this. I have looked at cookbook configurations trying to glean how it is done, but am not able to put the pieces together.
I’m a little frustrated at this point and need to stop after several hours of this.
All I wanted to do was to take the gazillion little circles across the top and group them into weather, internet performance, etc. The way this person did with his Internet card or whatever they are called.
To be honest, I am not sure. I saw the information on groups, and I tried one and got it to work, but instead of creating the ‘card’ as shown in the image it created a new ‘tab’ like “sensores” and “media” in the picture.
What I am trying to do is created sections like that shown in the image I linked to called “Internet” and “Settings”. In fact, I have speed test set up in my HA and it works, its just shows up as the orbs along the top of the home screen.
To create the tab (in your picture named as LES PLANES / SENSORS /MEDIA) have the view flag as “yes”
to create the group (in your picture named as INTERNET / SETTINGS) have the view flag omitted.
Thank you both for your help. I guess that is where I got lost somewhat. On that page, the example shows two cards, “Light” and “Media Player” yet in the code examples there is no such thing with those titles or even just that name. So it was a bit confusing in that regard as nothing seemed to correlate with each other.
At any rate, thank you all for the help. Now I have something to pursue and work with, time to get started.
I struggled with this exact same problem for the last few days and now feel like I know my way around enough to see what’s what.
The documentation is, like most OS projects, poor, but I’ve seen far worse. Of much more use were the cookbooks, although those are also not simple to follow as you’ve found.
The route to understanding the groups is to first get your head around the icons, which you seem to have done, so you’re past what I would call step 1.
The next step is to remove everything you’ve created by implementing a default view. This is the gateway to what you’re after.
groups:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
sensor.x
sensor.y
This will remove everything from the page apart from sensor.x and sensor.y
Try this first before moving on.
Next, you need to create a group to encapsulate sensor.x and sensor.y. That will put it in a box like you want.
Awww SNAP!!! THAT is the kind of info I spent HOURS looking for yesterday. You are simply awesome @LeeJS. Thank you for that information.
I need to learn and tackle this and then splitting the configuration file. I have a complete setup now run by SmartThings but have been put off by the lack of advanced and even granular control over my devices and automations. So here I am trying to learn HA now.
Indentation and spacing has been something of a bear as well, but I think I have grasped that now after trying so many different things yesterday and restarting HA like, I don’t know, a billion times or so, LOL.
Tell me about it. I’ve got restarting down to a fine art now and just rely on the command line to do it rather than faff about with the service restart from the webpage.
I’ve lost count of the number of times the config was wrong for some reason (too many spaces, not enough spaces, missing this, missing that) and just wouldn’t come back up leading me to comment out every line of code see what went wrong! This was before I discovered the log file, which has helped tremendously.
I’m going to put together a beginner’s guide tutorial covering what I’ve managed to find so far. Something the project is sorely missing as far as I can tell.
Ahh, yeah, the log file, very helpful indeed. I have read many log files and I feel confident in saying that HA’s is among the most informative and probably easiest to read. I have made great use of it in my configuration set up.
I made life much easier for myself, I feel, by setting up Samba on the RPi and linking the HA folder to it so I could access all the files from my main desktop PC. A little Putty use, samba to see the files with remotely and Geany to read and edit the config file.
I will be watching for your guide. While it is something sorely needed here, I think the lack thereof forces one to become rather intimately knowledgeable of their home automation set up. Something I don’t really get from SmartThings, though it is a good system, just lacking. HA seems to give you an incredible amount of fine grained control and very customizable and specific automations, but the price is the learning curve.
I think it’s worth it, even if it is a bit frustrating at times working through that process.
A few tips from someone still learning but with a head start on ya only because I got here sooner… :
YAML is very syntactical so if you miss a colon or an indent, it’s going to tell you. But you can use any one of a number of online syntax checkers to figure out where the issue is before you even do a restart.
Use Google site search to search for answers. I have a feature request in to add search to the site because a lot of documentation is buried and not linked in places that make sense. I use site search here a lot and you’ll find a lot of what you’re looking for is documented; it’s just hard to find. They are working on this but with a project that updates a version every 14 days, it’s hard to keep up. I’m hoping to get to a point where I can contribute to this and have already started spidering the site to see if a better menu index can be created.
But in the meantime:
site:homeassistant.io _whatever you are looking for_
Is a HUGE hack and has saved me hours of frustration!
Get to know Ben! @brusc - he has one of the best YouTube Channels and most of his videos are about HomeAssistant. I’d suggest watching this one right away as it explains everything we talked about here:
Plus he’s funny as hell and extremely friendly. I can’t tell you how many people I have pointed his way. I’m going to start asking him for a referral ID…
Look at other user’s config examples in GitHub - looking at how they have accomplished getting things formatted or working, then going to the documentation, will make a world of difference in getting the hang of things. I learned about splitting config files from looking at @brusc’s original configs.
Realize what many here already know; the first month of working with HASS is about starting small, screwing up and having fun learning. HASS isn’t like any other platform out there so going into it with the expectation that you should somehow be an expert right away because you were an expert at SmartThings or OpenHAB or because you’re a coder so you “should know this” is just going to lead to frustrations. Part of the reason I became so involved in the HASS community was the sheer fun of learning new things and seeing how investments I made could all be tied together in a more heterogenous environment.
I’ve been involved in other open source projects before, I was really into Joomla for a time and got away from it. There’s little drama here; just a bunch of folks who love to make their home do cool things, and like to share that with others. Don’t be too hard on yourself and ask lots of questions, no matter how dumb they may seem - the only dumb question is the one you were too afraid to ask.
Spend some time reading questions in the forum that may not apply to you or your setup. You will always end up learning something and often will find an answer to some other project that you stopped forward momentum on. Just happened to me yesterday with this Laundry notification project I’m trying to get working and someone asked a question about ranges in automations. Suddenly a light went off and I had to stop and thank the OP and the user that was helping him (who provided the answer to my issue).
Once you start to get the hang of things, get involved. Promote. Look for questions here and on Reddit/G+ that you can answer. Even if it’s just to point someone in the right direction to documentation. Not only are you helping the community at large, but you also develop a reputation and devs tend to answer you quicker; they see you’re trying to help them out and they want to help you out too.
And most of all, continue doing what you both did here - sharing knowledge and contributing. If we do that, the devs writing the code have more time to do what they do best. Namely produce the best home automation platform out there.
