I have a number of locations where I have used either RGB nightlights or RGB puck lights as indicators for various things. They all work great and trigger when they should but they still identify as lights and so they appear in default dashboards as lights, and they are treated by home assistant (and Google/Alexa/etc) as lights for purposes of "all lights off" and similar.
Is there any easy (or hard) way to exclude them from that "light" context? Obviously I still need to be able to brighten/dim, on/off and change the color of the devices... I just don't want to group or control them with/as lights. (Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck... but isn't a duck).
Alternately, I suppose, is there a way to disable/override any default "all lights" and replace with a manual group that includes only the devices I want to call "lights"?
One option is to hide them in their settings so that they don't appear in an auto-generated front end. I do this with a few devices that have on board LEDs that would otherwise be subject to auto-generated area lights and the likes of area cards.
Change the visibility of the entity, that will remove it from your dashboards. Remove the lights from voice assistant configuration to remove them from Google home. All done through the UI.
I really hadn't thought about this before the overview appeared a couple monthly updates ago. It didn't surprise me that an RGB smart bulb that I was using as an indicator of outside motion would appear in the count of lights currently on -- it is a light bulb after all that I happen to be using as something else. OTOH, I was confused for a little bit as to why I saw there were lights turned on in the daytime when I was sure there weren't. E.g., my zooz chime has an LED that lights up when a sound plays -- I did not expect that to count in the summary . . .
Hiding the entity is a useful work-around -- it hadn't occurred to me that hiding it from the dashboard(s) would also hide it from the overview summary, but I guess that makes sense in retrospect. That's perfectly workable for indicator lights that are triggered by automations, etc., and that I don't need to see or change the status from the dashboards.
But as @bazfum re-iterated, it would be useful if HA were able to distinguish between indicators and illuminators in the "things that emit light" category.
The only reason visibility was added was to hide it from the UI. This is not a work around, that's the current intended way to remove things from the automated dashboards.
Not saying that this won't change in the future, just explaining why visibility even exists.
Right, well lights will always appear as lights in home assistant because lights are derived by the light platform. So the title isn’t really correct in regards to what HA can do. Not to mention, the paragraph under the title explains what they actually want, which can be achieved by:
Sorry for the delay in responding, I've been offline for a couple of weeks. Thanks for all of the comments. Changing the visibility of the entity doesn't really do the trick here because I still want the indicator to appear in the dashboards, the fact that I can click on it to control it just as if it were a light is fine, and the fact that it looks like a light on the dashboard isn't really a problem either. It's the fact that they get grouped with lights and that they are controlled by "all".
The "weather orbs" being the example in this case (ignore the fact they are unavailable my zigbee interface is unplugged). As I design more custom dashboards I can put the indicators where I actually need them, so the fact that they appear on this automated lights dashboard is more an annoyance.. The biggest issue is that they should not be controlled by "all"... "all off" could result in a situation where a weather warning would not be seen, "all on" could result in confusion as it will illuminate in whatever color was last in use (so you might falsely believe their is a warning)... falsely think your garage door is open (or closed), etc.
I'm definitely +1 on the "indicators" vs. "illuminators" party bus. A lightbulb should always by default show up as a light but there should be an option to categorize it as an indicator instead. Both use cases emit light, but are to a completely different purpose. I'm sure a poll of those with home automation systems would return a relatively high percentage of users having some sort of light emitting device to warn them that their garage door is open if nothing else. .
That is the way to remove them from any categories in the UI, including the Lights dashboard.
Outside that, you'll need to wait until HA provides a way to configure the Lights Dashboard, or manually create your own Lights dashboard. Manually configuring your own dashboard exists now and you can add it to your overview page. Configuring the automated dashboards is an end goal for HA, but it's not something you can do at the moment.
