Simplification of individual access of entities/devices

Feature Requests
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using home assistant for some time now and I think like everyone loves the project.
It is usable by everyone from beginners who just use the integrations to advanced users who use HACS and program their own components etc.

However, home assistant always presents you with “unnecessary challenges”. I call it “unnecessary” because almost everything is already there to change.

I am talking about the inflexible devices/entity.
Let’s take Light as an example.
A standard dimmable light has in its “More Detail” card the components:

  • On/Off
  • Dim
  • Colour/Temperature

To transfer the individual components to their own cards, I need a “Light Entity Card” or have to use “slider-entity-row” to isolate the components from each other and control them.

For my air conditioner, I had to use “Paper Buttons Row” and “Button Card” to achieve the result I wanted.

They are all frontend elements that Home Assistant actually already brings but doesn’t let us access without using scripts.
Actually, it should be in the sense of Home Assistant to let every user access his devices/entities flexibly.

To achieve this, I have two possible solutions. The first would be to add all the entity to each device, which would of course lead to it quickly becoming confusing.
So, the second possibility:

We have a light in an entity card:

type: entity
entity: light.desk_light

This can therefore only be switched on and off. In order to be able to change the temperature of the light, for example, it would be easiest for the user to add a “temperature” after the “light.desk_light”.

type: entity
entity: light.desk_light.temperature

This way each entity can be controlled by each device without the need for larger frontend elements from HACS and even with this we would be much more flexible.

I am curious what you think of the proposal and wish you a nice day.

Greetings
Dobby

2

You can add attributes to entity cards.

3

They aren’t actually asking for that they’re just borrowing that syntax and using it for something else. What theyre really asking for it would seem is more options for what to show when including an entity in the UI.

Like by default when you put a light in a dashboard it only lets you turn it on or off or change the brightness. If you want to change the color/temperature you can but you have to open more info.

They want to be able to include the options that are only in more info right in their dashboard. Which aren’t attributes or entities, generally they are either different inputs on the service (like the light example) or different services altogether (like the A/C one, probably).

I don’t like the syntax because it’s confusing to use the attributes syntax for non attributes. But I agree with the idea, it is kind of weird that there’s stuff the UI can clearly do but is basically locked away in more info unless you deep dive and figure out how to recreate what the UI is doing as service calls.

Aside, @dobby5 vote for your idea!

4

I think the frontend dev philosophy is KISS. Supply a simple interface, if users want more then third party cards are the go.

Having said that I think someone was looking at the light and thermostat cards. Not sure it went anywhere.

Enable-able options for more detailed info/controls in the core cards would be nice. Voted.

5

@CentralCommand has described it well. I hope we can achieve exactly this goal (no matter what the solution looks like afterwards), I think it would help normal and advanced users a lot.

Thank you both for the votes.
@CentralCommand @tom_l

6

Don’t forget to vote for your own request.

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