Hi,
I am in the progress of moving from Openhab to HA. For what goes on in the background it is an easy transition, but when it comes to the user interface of the system, I find that HA lacks of flexibility, or at least that is what I see from the surface.
Basic user interfaces are quite easy to create, but one section that I haven’t yet found possible to recreate easily is the list of beers I have on tap on my Keezer.
Here is what I have today in Openhab:
For each tap I have the name, the beer style, the bitterness, the ABV and the quantity left in the keg and the beer colour.
I have attempted to create something similar, including the thumbnail of the beer label, but I have not been satisfied with the results so far.
The data comes from a Node-Red node, which extracts the data from the brewing software, and drops it into an entity.
I would love to do this in HA as well and your previous implementation looks awesome. I am using rpints currently and trying to come up with the best way to bring in data to HA besides a scraper. Rpints does already what you created. Can you elaborate on what hardware you have to get the information?
I get the batch data and photos from Brewfather using a rule in Node-Red. The beer quantity left comes from a set of load cells fitted to a 3D printed platform that sits under each keg. The sensors are connected through a HX711 to an ESP8266 which has Tasmota, and that relays the info to MQTT.
I have looked at the RPints, and similar tools, but they are either limited to six taps, or require a paid subscription, which is insane, as I already have the infrastructure.
I could just keep Openhab running only for this purpose, but now that I have eight taps, I struggle to fit it in the space, plus I have grown tired of that graphics.
I have looked at using info-beamer, but I can’t figure out how it works, and it looks like nothing works without opening the wallet.
I am now looking at writing my own custom card for HA, but that will take time, which means I can do that only after the summer.
At the same time, I know that Brewfather is also working on a On-Tap interface, which would solve my
UI problems.
Rpints I beleive does support more than 6 taps and is free (asides from the raspberrypi). Since you are using load cells and MQTT already, recent version includes a MQTT listener. You should be able to pipe in the values from the ESP’s load cells into RPints (maybe via Node-Red to conform to the data format. - see this post)
The Brewfather On-Tap is news to me. I’ll check that out!
I know I am reviving an almost year old topic, but as the subject didn’t really come to a conclusion at the time, I believe it could be useful for others to see an update on my findings.
I have found that creating a good UI in Home Assistant for this purpose is close to impossible using the normal grid/stack interfaces. I have tried all stack directions and nesting them to get there; I get close but there is always some absurd limitation of these UIs that makes it look odd.
This is until last week, when looking for something else, I came across the magic of picture elements.
It is still an insane way to create something that should be really easy to put together, but at least now I am getting close to what I find usable.
This is not the final version yet, but here are my workings:
Create an image to use as a background with a tool such as Inkscape or similar. It should include any graphical elements that delimit each section and any fixed text (in my case the tap numbers).
Create a new dashboard with only one element which is Picture element
Follow the instructions for Picture element.
Text can be added with the label type, and glyphs with the icon type.
The Style variable is the key here. It uses CSS to set color, size and position to mention a few.
Here are the most useful CSS variables I used:
color
transform (set to none, otherwise it will middle justify any text)
font-size
As done previously I get all the data directly from Brewfather once every few minutes through Node Red. The bottom bar shows what is currently playing on my Logitech Media Server.
There is more data I want to add to this interface such as color of the drink and quantity left in the keg. I just need to figure out how to include a bar graph in the picture element. and adjust the color of it based on the beer color.
