User-entered memo section under Device-Info

Feature Requests
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1

Since i have customized or altered some of my devices, and others that have a specific history that i want to discriminate from other similar ones (eg, this one only connects through 2.4G wifi, that one i painted over the bright LED to make it night friendly, the other i cut off the sensor and use it to sense from my own electronics, etc), it would be great if HomeAssistant could have some user-editable memo field within the Device Info section of each device. I’m sure most of them would never have any user add anything, but some important ones would.

It would be super-useful, for example, to have some way to keep track of which user codes are programmed into each of the door locks. An editable memo entry could serve all purposes, including this one, with only minimal programming effort, until properly working integrations eventually get developed. (yes, i’m aware of keymaster, but it just slowed my system to a crawl, and caused lots of problems, and now i can’t even uninstall it, so it doesn’t work for me).

2

You can add comments if editing with YAML not the UI. You can add alias’s to many things which gives you a line of text. Some constructs have descriptions, like the automations, scripts, so you can add a lot of stuff there.

3

And one more: you can add a custom attribute to any entity, for example one called memo.

1 Like
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Thanks. Those are good programmer-friendly options, just not very mainstream friendly. I’m hardly a programmer, but i muddle through enough for this. Would it be any simpler to have a button for a user-entered log book entry record that always stays visible?

5

Maybe an input select (for fixed options) or an input text helper that you set from the UI you want a button (or via an automation). You can then display the events with something like the GitHub - gadgetchnnel/lovelace-home-feed-card: A custom Lovelace card for displaying a combination of persistent notifications, calendar events, and entities in the style of a feed..

6

A memo button added to the devices screen/dashboard would be very useful for storing some custom reminders about the device. Some devices I setup with one intent and then later move them around for another purpose. Over time you can forget what you did. This would be a good place to leave a quick reminder. Also I have a number of devices I am testing setups with. They may all be the same type of device, but having the ability to store some details about the target application and current testing state would be useful.

7

Yup, i found it quite limiting to make customize devices and have no way to keep the relevant mode info in the same location where i need it, it’s a pain to maintain separate docs. I’ve recently started restricting any custom work to EspHome stuff because that forces me to use a YAML without a UI, and i can keep my mods info in there as memos without the fear that i might accidently change something in the UI that messes with all my hard-collected historical traceability info because it wasn’t visible in the ui and i didn’t realize it was there.