There’s no issue here - it’s just telling you that you have to customise it in YAML instead of through the UI.
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Is there any way to get it in to the UI? It’s cumbersome to go to configuration to use the device
??
You don’t need an unique id to use a device ?
Sorry, I’m new to home assistant. I did not notice I could add my own cards to the dashboard. I guess i need to figure out how to add a card that will allow an arrows for blinds up and down commands. Adding a simple button only allowed for blinds to go down.
Use the entities card. That should show buttons for covers.
I see this confusion come up over and over for new users. I’m willing to do a PR if we can figure out more/better wording. To start with, what do you think of just adding a second sentence?
“This entity does not have a unique ID, therefore its settings cannot be managed from the UI. This is usually because the entity is defined in configuration.yaml, and settings for such entities must also be done in yaml.”
It’d be nice to have something shorter, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
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Although aren’t entity IDs unique enough?
No, because they can change. Either because you’ve changed them through the UI (where it supports a unique_id) or manually (where the definition of it is in the YAML).
True, although “unique” does mean one of its kind, and even if an entity ID changes it’s not like two entities can have the same ID.
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Doesn’t really matter, the Entity Registry uses the unique_id deliberately 
I’m getting this on zwave entities that I did not manually add and cannot find in yaml anywhere.
Makes it challenging since one of the entities is failed, but not recognized as failed, so I can’t remove it…but I need to reuse its name because I have a bunch of automations using that entity name and I don’t want to have to update all of them.
I’d like to encourage us not to write this off as “just how it is” or “it’s entered manually in configuration” because I don’t think that’s true - or at the very least we need a better place to look so we can remove it from configuration. I never manually created this particular zwave device. All I did is add via zwave, then hit config and rename it. Now that it’s dead I can’t get rid of it.
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It would be good if it told the user how to resolve this problem.
-Mike
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I’m there now too! I understand the concept, and might take a stab at guessing what I need to put into configration.yaml, but as a bit of newbie perspective, just saying “You need to configure the entity id in configuration.yaml” isn’t quite enough to be clear (but it’s a good signpost).
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By the way for more attention, @agoralive could edit this post in to What The Heck month category…
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What’s annoying is that for, e.g, a template sensor, the unique_id parameter is documented, but of course it doesn’t work when configuring the template sensor.
Invalid config for [binary_sensor.template]: [unique_id] is an invalid option for [binary_sensor.template]. Check: binary_sensor.template->sensors->no_one_home->unique_id. (See ?, line ?).
Also, it’d be great if the parser could do a better job of figuring out what file/line number it’s working on. It’s easy to find this one, but other random errors can turn into a snipe hunt…
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Just tried it out on a template sensor, it does indeed throw an error on checking the configuration.
Just randomly checking, seemed to work on MQTT sensors, but not input_select or or input_boolean entities.
For MQTT sensor it has always been working. Did not even know it was documented for template sensors 
Maybe because of MQTT auto-discovery?
Probably.