I have downloaded your conffiguration that you use. I wanted to load this on my fresh HA to have a look around and understand how you have set it up. this will really help me loads. I understand things wont work as we dont have the same switch lights etc. its more just to understand and see whats possible.
One issue. on loading your config i see the message below. I dont use Plex. where can i comment this out or put a dummy value in so the config loads, Do you know what it would be?
/config/configuration.yaml: Secret plex_token not defined
Well, if you copy everything in one go you will find a lot more errors. Its better to do this view by view (it is then where you will find the plex secret as well. It should be located somewhere in the media views. But I always advise against copying everything 1 on 1.
If you do want to copy, then do it view by view since that wont get you frustrated by trying to find all the errors
Thanks Jim. Yes taking it a view at a time is better. It gives me an opportunity to go over that and try and understand it bit by bit.
Is it possible for the for the pictures to be colour when at home and grey when away? I playing around with your code it knows i am home but the picture is grey.
Good morning,
to begin with: Iâm rather new with home assistant as well as with HKI. Iâm trying to set up a dashboard that fits my requirements. What I find extremely annoying is, that there seems to be no way to restart lovelace alone, but only make a full HA restart, which takes forever. I have some forty sensors, contacts and switches around the house, most of them connected via MQTT.
I have still the âstandardâ view from Home Assistant, but converted to yaml. My guess is, that this takes most of the time when doing a restart. What do I need to do to stop loading the âstandardâ view as well ? I already thought of renaming ui-lovelace.yaml (which contains this âstandardâ view), but what if this will sort of break Home Assistant and then I am locked out ?
BTW I am running HA OS on a RPi3.
If you donât want to use the default dashboard, you should open it with the RAW editor and then just remove everything in there (that way your standard dashboard will be empty and will speed up the startup times a bit). Though I will have to remind you that most of the startup slowdowns is caused by HKI (since HKI loads everything at startup). That is unfortunately just the way it was programmed and I wonât be able to change that behaviour unless completely rewriting the project. The upside is, that once it is loaded the interface is super fast and snappy since it doesnât need to load the pages afterwards.
I did post some tips on speeding up restarts while creating views on my youtube channel.
Thank you for your fast reaction.
In my view, your statement (" ⊠most of the startup slowdowns is caused by HKI âŠ") contradicts what you have written in your documentation under Tips And Tricks:
âObviously this would make you crazy if you have to edit your setup and restart every time. To solve this problem you should edit/create views one by one! Comment out your completed views (except the Home view, this is important!) and restart. You will find that restarting will only take a few seconds and this allows you to edit your dashboard super fast. Once your view has been completed and tested you can comment it out and create the next view. Once you are done with all the views just uncomment the views you have created and restart.â
As a novice user, my HKI-view is just the default view from your views.yaml in your original hki-user directory.
I cannot open the default dashboard with the RAW editor, because (as I have pointed out in my first message) it is in yaml mode. The view of the default dashboard is now in ui-lovelace.yaml. I took the risk and renamed ui-lovelace.yaml to ui-lovelace.yaml.xx and restarted everything. Restart took several minutes like before, with the default dashboard still there. So, how can I stop the default dashboard from loading ?
So my guess is that I have still not understood very well how everything works together âŠ
My current setup is based on MQTT (which I am happy with) and node-red. I am quite unhappy with my dasboard which is based on node-red as well â this was the reason to check (amongst others) Home Assistant and HKI in particular, since my first impression was that this could be a very good base for my dashboard requirements. I have now managed to migrate my automations from node-red (javascript) to HA (yaml) and got them working in HA.
For the main part (dashboard design) design cycles, which force a reload with delays of a couple of minutes after each small change (as a beginner I need to check even tiny changes - this may change with improved experience), I think I have to keep on looking for alternatives to HA - you have mentioned something similar in your Tips and Tricks (see excerpt above).
I apologize, because most of this is probably not related to your HKI (which I like), I just happen to be confronted with the issues mentioned above while trying to configure HKI to my likings.
Again, thanks a lot for your time and consideration
Jim, thanks a lot, but please take your time. I know that most (if not all) of the problems are due to my lack of knowledge and experience.
In trying to minimize issues based on a different and perhaps faulty basic setup, I reverted the default dashboard from yaml back to storage mode - as in your example.
As I mentioned before, my main âconcernâ is that I have to restart HA every time I want to check if changes in one of the config.yaml files have the desired / expected effect or not. This takes an awful lot of time.
I found that there is a service to reload themes without a full restart of HA, but a similiar tool for dashboartds seems to be missing - or am I mistaken ? This would be the ideal tool - at least for me, but I guess for other dashboard designers with a low level of experience like me as well.
my tip for this would be to buy a thin client from ebay, one of the big differences I noticed when getting a dedicated pc for ha was reboot speed and I mess around with a lot of restarts due to me doing custom css as well as custom icons for a git.
I understand that that is frustrating. You will indeed need the storage mode dashboard for HKI to function properly (you can set the default dashboard per user in the sidebar > profile page).
This will disable the default dashboard all together for that device only (you will have to do this for every device unfortunately, nothing I can do about that).
As HKI is a yaml style dashboard that uses lovelace_gen (a jinja addon for dashboards) it is unfortunately impossible for HKI to reload without a restart, everything gets loaded at startup. This can be a real pain in the behind and therefor I made some videos on YT showing how to minimize the startup times when developing the dashboard. The upside of this method is that once you use the dashboard in production it is really fast since it loads everything at boot. You should also be able to find basic tutorials on my Youtube channel.
The tip that @Richi_Bowzer gave is also very valid. I will always advise decent hardware, even if you donât need as much. You can always check out my current hardware in the list on this page Homekit Infused 5 | Homekit Infused 5 2022
I know this dashboard is a bit hard on beginners, especially since it has become this feature rich, but the following the very basic examples for each addon (can be found on the respective addons documentation page at the bottom) then you should be able to create the basic version of HKI (which is what you see in most screenshots from me).
I will also advise you to join the discord channel, you can check the link at the top of this thread or on my repo. You will have a quicker response there most of the time, I can also give live support on discord from time to time.
Good morning and thank you for your answer. In the meantime I was able to get the default views provided in your original hki-user/config/views displayed. Next moment of frustration: I tried to add an own view (as suggested in your comment) and copied a smal part from your personal setup. I changed of course the name of the sensor to one of mine (which shows up in the overview dashboard, so it exists and is working).
Here is my views.yaml:
views: # NEVER REMOVE THIS LINE
# Default views (you can edit them!)
# Home
home:
title: greeting
show_in_navbar: true
show_in_menu: false
icon: mdi:home
addons:
# welcome_message:
# - title: hide
favorites:
- title: hide
columns: 3
# Menu
menu:
title: Menu
show_in_navbar: true
show_in_menu: false
subtitle: "[[[ return `HKI 5 v.${states['sensor.hki_current_version'].state}`; ]]]"
icon: mdi:apps
addons:
favorites:
- title: Favorites
menu:
- title: Menu
# Add your own views below this line!
# Lights (example)
environ:
title: Environment
show_in_favorites: true
icon: mdi:thermometer
addons:
button_graphs:
- title: Temp Living Room
line_color: crimson
type: graph
entities:
- entity: sensor.temperatur_wz
view_layout:
show:
mediaquery: "(max-width: 350px)"
columns: 3
I then restarted HA. No erromessages, no error entries in the log, but also no temperature card with a graph. Where is it ? What is my problem here ?
It is also very frustrating that I get no hint from HA that there is a problem and so I have to bug people here in the forum. There is obviously a huge problem, because the card I have set up in my view (a copy of your set up) is not displayed.
And I am no beginner, having been more than 20 years in the IT business, part of the time as developer in communications and networking.
The card should be on your lights view as it is defined under lights. You will not find it on the homepage unless you define it under home.
So navigating to the light view should show you the card or an error message.
Thank you for your reply. I navigated to the light view, but this view is blank (black), so no card and no error message.
Anyway, I will stop bothering you. Itâs basically all my fault, since obviously I started with a too complex dashboard framework.
In parallel to try to find out how to deal with HKI, I took an empty dashboard and added a few cards one by one, just those which would fit my requirements. This worked from the beginning, without frequent and time consuming restarts of HA. Probably - at least in the beginning - it will not look as polished as HKI, but I will try to add some nice look to my âcreationâ - at the end, when I am happy with the functionality.
So, thanks a lot for the time you spent for me, but for me HKI is obviously not a route to follow.
So yesterday home assistant was working fine, and today I noticed it wasnât connecting or being super slow to load in the companion so I went to restart it manually (rpi4 power) and when it came back it went in to safe mode for some reasonâŠ
It wonât let me restart because of this, didnât even change anything so idk why it does this crap:
Anyone know whatâs up?
Configuration invalid!
Error loading /config/configuration.yaml: in "/config/configuration.yaml", line 4, column 15: Unable to read file /config/global_config.yaml.
Code in configuration.yaml:
#lovelace_gen: !include global_config.yaml
lovelace:
EDIT:
I get these errors with this config: đ«€
Package hki_configuration setup failed. Component lovelace_gen Integration 'lovelace_gen' not found.
Package hki_configuration setup failed. Component browser_mod Integration 'browser_mod' not found.
Yep I have both of those components already since like I said it was working the night before, coincidentally this happens after I come back from my cousins house⊠also I even tried reinstalling the files for them but that didnât work after a manual restart.
Guess Ill try a force restart, annoying to do since for some reason my RPI4 doesnât always start up again after rebooting the power the first time, takes a couple power restarts to get it to boot ever since I switch to an SSD from an SD Card.
I did a force restart before it went in to safe mode and it didnât work, but now doing it after it went in to safe mode like you suggested did work! Thanks again.
Now all I need to do is figure out why HA Cloud hasnât been workingâŠ