With the focus on moving everything to the UI and trying to make this consumer-friendly HA really needs SAFE defaults, built in cleanup / maintenance functions, etc all exposed in the UI… Also UI ways to do filters etc for Logbook (mostly useless noise unless you filter things in YAML), History Needs more filters views etc right now it is an ugly list of graphs (needs grouping options by type, area etc), Recorder (also needs UI for filter controls and maintenance currently are all YAML)
That is not the focus, where in the first post did it say that?
It is the overall focus of the devs not specific to this month.
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There is one, super-missing thing in HA, that would make many user’s lifes easier - easy setup of schedules. I really believe this is the most common automation use cases. The more detailed use cases for this include heating (time range per day, temperature-driven), lights control (time and lux sensor-driven), water sprinklers / valves control (humidity driven). There’s a custom component for this with a quite good UI and UX (Scheduler card/custom component), but would be great to see it integral part of HA.
Of course all of this may be done using HA automation, but in most cases this is awkward from the UI point of view (not easy and intiutive config change, no clear schedule overview UI) and I understand the goal is to make it easy, quick and user friendly.
Sample UIs for this, posted in the Feature Requests section of HA Community, which propose even better UI:
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This is really disappointing, as is the explanation that it’s “broken by design” and new template sensors can’t be supported using packages. I can understand that a particular design would lead to that problem, but since when was the packages feature not deemed something that has first-class support? Shouldn’t new features like this be designed with the thought that the packages feature exists, has been around for years, and is frequently used by users that have large or complex Home Assistant configurations?
Packages is a feature to allows Home Assistant use to scale out to more complex, larger use-cases. It’s a differentiator that makes the cost-of-ownership lower, even in the face of moving more and more data into opaque persistent state storage. It would seem that packages is something that would naturally go along with blueprints as a means to distribute units of functionality to Home Assistant users, and that it would become more important as time went on, not less.
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Am I missing something? I thought this was fixed in 2021.8.2.
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I just see it as an automation with a timed trigger. Both equally valid as a requirements. I’ve long since stopped looking at HA as simply an automation tool but now see it as a comprehensive home management tool.
Wrong topic?
It is.
I use a few new style template sensors in packages and they work fine.
That’s great news then! I followed the earlier link to the issue which looked as if it was closed without a fix.
Well then use a timed trigger 
I must say though that I have just tried this, you might want to take a look. Scheduler card/custom component
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You’ve slightly lost the thread. This reply thread was more about you jumping all over someone else’s suggestion simply because it didn’t fit with your definition of HA purpose.
It is going to be an exciting year. Thank you to all involved.
Are there any plans afoot to fix the database?
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I would love to see an option to group automations. I could see groups for Christmas lighting, Pool automations, Lighting automations, etc. The list grows very quickly and with no ability to group them it gets ugly.
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You just made my day. I didn’t realize this happened, fantastic. I have quite a few terrible templates to turn into much cleaner auto-off triggers now lol
I know it’s limited but I organise my automations by name so:
LIGHTS - Trigger - Action
or
ACTION - Trigger - Action
First word is just a grouper.
I do the same but once you get dozens and dozens of them it gets a bit ugly. It would be nice to have tabs or something to better segregate them. Also, ideally, it would allow you to enable/disable an entire group with a single switch.
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Very interesting video. The UI/UX team should definitely take a look at that. This kind of experience feedback is very valuable. At my job, that’s exactly the kind of feedback we, the dev team, love. You have a guy who is a neophyte with HA but at the same time a very technical user. So when he hits a stumbling block, it doesn’t just stop there, he actually explains the reasoning behind why he had problems and what could have prevented him from experiencing the usability issues.
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I name mine as well but would love to be able to group them. As sometimes it takes several individual automations to make a more complex one…
Also just in general having them categorized would be nice.
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