Having been an avid user of Home Assistant for a few years now, I thought it was about time I joined the Home Assistant Community Forum, so here I am and I would like to say hello to all the members reading my post.
I am also looking for some help with an issue that I am currently having with creating a Vertical Stack Card.
This card used to work (v16.0) but since the most recent HA updates (v18.2), it no longer works when I recreate what I used to have before.
The card and automations are for popping up on my HA Dashboard, a video feed from my Reolink video doorbell when a visitor presses the doorbell button but since the latest HA updates it does not disappear from the Dashboard but now stays on all the time.
I have noticed when creating the Vertical Stack card there’s an error message and I am wondering if anyone can advise on why this error appears - please see screenshot with the error.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing from someone that might be able to provide a solution to the issue.
That x does not mean something is broken, it just means currently the condition is not met. Is something actually not working as expected? If so, the icon is not the cause.
The vertical stack is just a way to group cards, so if your problem is anywhere, it is with the popup. Is this a custom card?
I’m using a Bubble Card (HACS add-on) in the Vertical Stack.
The issue seems to be that after creating it (like I used to have) the video doorbell video screen now remains visible all the time. It used to disappear off the HA Dashboard after the event cleared but now remains their all the time.
Any ideas ?
I just duplicated the previous automations and card configuration and boolean helper, like I used to have and that did work previously.
I will keep researching and trying other things in the integration/automation to see if I can narrow it down. At least now thanks to you, I know that Red X is not an error.
Cards behave differently when they’re in a vertical stack - you can’t use visibility conditions, for example, because the whole stack disappears rather than a single card.
Maybe something similar here? The solution with the visibility problem is to use a conditional card rather than the visibility options on a standard card.
Hey RedKing, thanks so much for your reply and for the information about the cards behaviour. I will play around some more and test using other cards (conditional cards).
Well a little update. I managed to get it working using, as you suggested a Conditional Card which works perfectly and is so simple to setup (see attached 2 screenshots highlighting the entries I added).
This now, when a person rings the bell, activates a pop up on my Home Assistant dashboard which shows a live video feed from the doorbell.
However I am now trying to figure out how to keep the video feed on screen for a much longer period, or say until I manually close the video feed window, as it only stays on screen for about 12 seconds.
Anyone have any thoughts on how to make it stay on screen for longer ?
RedKing - Yes that’s correct they come from the doorbell integration, using the Reolink integration with HA. However there’s no option in the camera settings to change the time. So I was hoping there might be something that could tell HA to display it for a longer time period ?
Create an automation which turns on the helper if the Visitor entity is on (or the Person entity is Detected), then turns off the helper when the entity has been off for 12s.
Use the helper in your conditional card instead of the original entity.
Well, what can I say but a big thank you to all 3 members here - Edwin_D, RedKing and ShadowFist for helping me resolve the issues with this automation.
Having now tested it using the above advice, I can now confirm that the Doorbell pops up it’s video feed and remains on screen until the Boolean Timer expires from the length of time I have set.
I will be doing a new YouTube video showing step by step on how to create the automation.
Thanks again and I will also be giving a shout out to the above users here on the community forum.
Sometimes with Home Assistant it’s easy to get stuck down the same route, this is because it’s so complex and so many things you can do with it, that I was thinking down the same route when I had the automation previously. Home Assistant is a fantastic piece of kit. Sometimes you need to think outside of the box, which I didn’t in this case and when the above mentioned users helped it made me think ahh yes, I see now
Please don’t do that. If anything ever changes in HA or Reolink (and you know that will happen sooner or later), your video will provide incorrect info with no way of updating it.
It’s simpler to create a new thread in the Share Your Projects category. That way it can be edited as & when needed and kept up to date.
