Our Roku was automatically discovered with my initial installation of HA. I don’t see any reason for this to be useful to us, my wife struggles with the Roku remote which among the leanest and meanest out there, the HA web interface to it is just not going to be helpful, clever as it is.
How can I remove the Roku device without disabling discovery? I’d like to keep discovery on should I buy other hardware for use with HA somewhere down the road, but I really don’t want the Roku component to be active or displayed.
Unless you put it in a group or enable tracking, it won’t be seen. You can turn tracking off in the known_devices file by finding the entry for the Roku and setting Track to No.
There doesn’t seem to be an entry in known_devices for the Roku. The only devices I’ve left track: yes are our two android phones, but still the Roku services remain.
Known devices is just for device trackers, I think Rob was getting a little confused (sorry Rob!)
His other suggestion was spot on though - if you want to hide devices you can mark them as hidden in the customization clause or you can take more complete control by using groups.
All I’ve done is used the automatically created yaml files and added the ASUSWRT stanza as shown in the Component documentation. Then I turned everything know_devices to track: no except for the two cell phones I want to track.
The Roku just appeared and I see no entries for it in either yaml file.
As I said - known_devices is just for tracking devices and presence and has nothing to do with the Roku - that piece is a red herring.
I linked the 2 pages up above that would help - using customizations you can hide the Roku if that is what you want to do. Otherwise, using groups you can pick and choose exactly what devices you want to show and where.
Not confused, actually a fundamental misunderstanding of the discovery component on my part; sorry for giving you bad advice. But in reading it over, I’m wondering if turning off UPNP on the Roku would work?
customize:
# hide Roku
media_player.roku_2la51x172707
hidden: true
breaks it. In the log:
16-06-24 08:37:54 homeassistant.util.yaml: mapping values are not allowed here
in “/root/.homeassistant/configuration.yaml”, line 15, column 13
Can’t tell you how many times that has happened. I go searching for some complicated issue and it’s just my damn formatting. Glad to make up for my misinformation before!
Google online yaml parser.
I used to tear my freaking hair out wondering where the hell my errors were. Copy paste the text of the configuration file you are working on into it and any simple formatting errors should show up.
Somebody posted a link to a validator here in another thread and I tried running my already valid piece through it just to see what would happen and it ended up a reformatted mess. If you have a favorite you can suggest, I’m sure we’d all appreciate the pointer, @Shazster!
I use that one. As for your results, I put in all the text from beginning to end, not just the piece I’m working on. I think it really needs to see the whole file, since your syntax nests components within groupings dependant on number of space indents. Also, you are not copying what it outputs and sticking that into your config, you are just looking to see if it chokes on it. It should tell you what number line of text it has a problem with, so you know where you missed one or added a space to much.
Another suggestion before doing any configuring - keep a separate copy of your last good config somewhere. If anything goes sideways in a way you just can’t figure out, you have a fallback. Also keep one of the barebones initial config your net discovery service spits out the first time - it may come in handy if you get sick of your config and need to blow it up and start from scratch (you won’t actually use it for anything but a starting reference), .Keep copies of other required files too (there’s a phue token info file, among others) on a data key (I bounced around between three different machines trying to find the optimal old piece of hardware to use for my server before I settled on what I have now).
The only other suggestion I can make is this: one component at a time.
I know you want to add all the bells and whistles, but I found myself getting the best results making one change at a time: add, restart, see if it works, troubleshoot if necessary, restart, works? - COPY CONFIG AND ANY OTHER FILE GENERATED BY OR RELATED TO THAT CHANGE…move onto next component.
Duh! Of course! Why didn’t this occur to me… Thanks for pointing that out, Shazter.
Great advice that I make part of every project I work on. I even have a bash script to tar up my configs that I run on a regular basis. I always tell my clients that you can always tell a person who lost crucial data that couldn’t be recovered; they have the best backup strategies!
In my case, back when I used to do photography, I lost a portfolio’s worth of work. I still have the drive as a reminder. My backups run as a nightly image and then I also have a real time cloud back up with Crash Plan that runs up to the minute deltas.
And as an aside about choosing hardware…don’t go for just the barest of bones. If you are going to have an always on machine running running HASS, it might as well run other stuff as well (some of which will play well with your HASS instance/server, some won’t but doesn’t necessarily need to)
-Google play destop instance/music server/movieserver/general file server
-apcupsd (if you have your stuff on a UPS)
-audio sink (cast or airplay receiver)
-a bunch of other stuff I have no doubt the forum members here can reccomend.
Also: your control panels can do double-duty. An old tablet mounted in my kitchen that is my HASS control client is also an airplay receiver connected to speakers that my wife casts audio from her iphone.
Got Alexa Voice Services running on the same netbook as my HASS. They are not currently aware of each other’s existence yet - have not installed the Alexa/Echo component in HASS yet. May not since the DIY Alexa doesn’t do smart device discovery. It’s kind of a bastard/mutant/techno abomination/curiosity I enjoy keeping caged and poking with a virtual stick now and again).
