Using Person Type Cards for non-Persons (e.g pets)

Configuration Frontend
1

I have a bunch of cats that I would like to display like people do in the UI

e.g.
image

Harley is already a person, and I jankily created a device tracker which is manually updated to create her status…
I don’t actually think is a good way of doing things (due to the impact it has on home zones etc) and now I’ve got some new cats to add am revisiting this setup

But I would like to make the cats appear like this on the dashboard… with a person type card

Is there an easy way to do this?

2

There is no such a thing as a “person card”.
There are cards created by users to show info about persons - like a picture, name and location.
If your pets have some kind of GPS-tracker - it is normal to have corresponding device_trackers and then see these pets on a map card.
If you do not have a GPS-tracker on a pet - then may be you have some other way to know if a pet home or not. Assume it is some binary_sensor: on - pet at home, off - pet is not home; then you may create a device_tracker manually by calling a service device_tracker.see based on that binary_sensor.

3

I may be misexplaining - the only way I have found to get a bubble picture with a status is by adding a person entity.
Everything else uses an icon or a full image

I got around this with Harley by doing what you suggest - making a person and adding a manual device tracker, but this to my mind is non ideal and overkill for the cats who I’m only able to track binary with the cat flap (in/out)

So what I’m looking for is a “person type” card, with an image bubble and the binary status, but without having a person

4

Are you talking about a particular card like a new Badge?
In general, most of stock cards show an image if an entity has entity_picture defined.
If some other cards have a different logic - this is a wrong behavior.

I mean - using a person entity only to bypass this wrong behavior is not a good way.

5

Ah okay, so in that case can you add an entity_picture if it’s not part of the standard entity definition?
I.e. can I give that to a binary sensor helper or drop-down?
And bonus points if I can define that based on the binary sensor state!!

6

By using “customize” in yaml you can add entity_picture to any entity (static, not state-dependent).
If you need to add an image to a template binary_srnsor - you can add it directly as a part of definition as a state-dependent.

7

Okay, I’m clearly doing something wrong

Added the below to my configuration.yaml per thread here but it fails to reload

image

#EDITING CATS TO HAVE PICTURES
binary_sensor.cocoa:
  entity_picture: /local/images/Cocoa.png
  
binary_sensor.blossom:
  entity_picture: /local/images/Blossom.png
  
binary_sensor.harley:
  entity_picture: /local/images/harley.jpg

image
image702×975 36.1 KB

what am i missing?

8

You are missing a “customize” section. Check docs.

9

Docs are a bit crap on this - doesn’t actually mention that in the relevant secton…
But thanks :slight_smile:

Editing entity settings in YAML

The Home Assistant Core integration is also responsible for entity settings. By default, all of your devices will be visible and have a default icon determined by their domain. You can customize the look and feel of your front page by altering some of these parameters. This can be done by overriding attributes of specific entities.

Most of these settings can be changed from the UI. For the detailed steps, refer to Customizing entities.

If you prefer editing in YAML, you can define your general settings in the configuration.yaml file.

I’ve done a reload and still not seeing pictures on these entities tho :frowning:

image

Files are there and working, path is correct

10

To customize an entity:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    sensor.xxx:
      entity_picture: …
    sensor.yyy:
      entity_picture: …

But as I already told you - for template entities you can define an image as a part of definition.
Is your binary_sensor - template?

11

This is what I have

The entity is not a template, it’s defined by an integration