Automations have their own diagram, but these only show the operations inside a single automation.
I wanted to illustrate how “this” automation fits in with the “other” automations for a given feature set.
In my example, I have four individual automations:
- Turn the lights on in the garage when any door opens.
- Set a timer to turn off the lights, when all doors are closed.
- Add more time to the timer, if motion is detected
- Turn off the lights when the timer finishes
Because these are all individual automations it gets a little confusing when thinking about how all these work together.
Mermaid to the rescue. Mermaid is a text-to-visual diagram markdown language. There is a free online editor site at workflow.jace.pro. No affiliation.
When all of the individual automations are working as expected. I goto that website and update the diagram for a particular feature set. Then I copy the raw mermaid markup from the website. In Home Assistant I open the automation → three dot menu button → Rename. In the description block the raw text is inserted between triple backticks, like this:
```mermaid
<replace this line with mermaid text>
```
The site also offers a preformated link already in markdown mode. This link gets pasted into the description block too. And voila notes to help future-me understand a feature set.
Here is what the final version of my “Garage lights on” automation looks like in Home Assistant.
