New to home assistant and trying to setup my first automation with the home assistant web panel.
The automation is to control a limitless led. I have integrated the led light, can see is as an entity and control it manually with home assistant
I set all the parameters in the automations panel and click save.
This is the error message received
Message malformed: expected dict for dictionary value @ data[‘event_data’]
The automations yaml file is empty…
Any suggestions
Please share your attempted automation yaml text, and format it for the forum (see point 11). Do not post a screenshot.
since suffering the same I felt to not duplicate that topic …
In the middle of using the automation wizzard at the stage ‘trigger’ in yaml mode (for an enocean switch)
platform: event
event_type: 'button_pressed'
event_data: [254, 229, 15, 156]
pushed: 1
which: 0
Error was thrown after I felt to press the ‘SAVE’ button which I did hoping it would end up with a sensefull explanation telling me about what I need to define inside the conditions section.
Instead I was served by that error which is of no help.
Granted if you ask about my experience with automation within HA. 0,00% since there’s a 1000 topics about that but I still wasn’t able to located the one named "automation for dummies, an easy step-by-step explanation where everything’s explained line by line. 
And yes automation.yaml is 0 bytes in size at my end since I never managed to get a single automating up and running, let it be old-style non-UI-created or using the wizzard. (not enough braincells perhaps)
Anyway I do rate it likely that the error thrown isn’t ideal. Hope this explanation helps to turn it into something more sensefull.
Disappointed that nobody had a solution to this problem as I am experiencing exactly the same thing more than a year later!
I am creating an automation using the web UI - it triggers when a timer finishes and it switches off a device. The device I am switching off is a pump but it doesnt appear in the list of devices in the Action so one solution I found was to Call a Service.
Saving the automation fails with the error message: Message malformed: expected dict for dictionary value @ data[‘event_data’
The YAML created is:
description: Turn off pump after pump.timer has expired
mode: single
trigger:
- platform: event
event_type: timer.finished
event_data: timer.pump
condition: []
action:
- service: switch.turn_off
data: {}
target:
entity_id: switch.1001837378
alias: Pump off
I think I have solved this…
When creating the trigger based on an event, in the Event data field I was not leaving a space between Entity_id: and the actual ID. I guess I was expecting the : to be a field separator
Your solution worked. You saved me countless of hours, thanks a lot!