Ok, Here goes some much needed TLC on the GUI as this is what it current looks like:
Way too much going on in a single page along with some things that aren’t super useful. My main goal here is to end up with a few useful pages for specific purposes along with a useful main page.
Home Tab
Kill the intro
In the configuration.yaml file, comment out or delete all together the following line:
# Show links to resources in log and frontend
introduction:
This is what tells HA to display the card in the top left corner above.
Custom Home Page
In the groups.yaml file, we can override the current home page by define a new default view by adding the following above (or really anywhere) the current “mainfloor” group:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
- sun.sun
- sensor.yr_symbol
- switch.front_porch_switch
- switch.master_bedroom_switch
- switch.dining_room_switch
This is telling HA that we’re making a custom default view which, if we say “view: yes”, will be our new home page. If instead we say “view: no”, we’ll end up with a new card on our existing home page:
This feature is incredibly useful, but not what we’re looking for right now. Other than that, the rest of this addition is just telling HA the entities that you want to include in this page:
Note that HA automatic put the switches in their own card and placed the sensors at the top in their badges. Let’s add some more components:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
- sun.sun
- sensor.yr_symbol
- switch.front_porch_switch
- switch.master_bedroom_switch
- switch.dining_room_switch
- light.bedroom_lamp
- input_number.lamp_brightness
- input_number.lamp_warmth
It’s nice to have some cards back to interact with HA, but the grouping isn’t really working for us. For instance, do we care that the two sliders were made from input_number components? No, but even if we renamed that card, we still don’t need them on their own. What would be more useful would be to have groups of the house linked together, at least to some extent. For example, it doesn’t matter that the three listed switches are switches at all. I’d be happier having the bedroom switch and the two lamps on a single card. For that we can create another group, but this time set view to no:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
- sun.sun
- sensor.yr_symbol
- switch.front_porch_switch
- switch.dining_room_switch
- group.master_bedroom_card
master_bedroom_card:
view: no
entities:
- switch.master_bedroom_switch
- light.bedroom_lamp
- input_number.lamp_brightness
- input_number.lamp_warmth
That’s better. I’m not sure I like the switch that gets added to the card. It can be turned off by adding a line (control: hidden), but maybe it’ll be useful to have it there to turn every light on and off with a single click. The card title has to go though. We can make it a little prettier with a name rather than the group title, so we’ll add a name attribute. While we’re at it, I’ll also add the closet light and the Home Mini that lives in there.
master_bedroom_card:
view: no
name: Master Bedroom
entities:
- switch.master_bedroom_switch
- light.bedroom_lamp
- input_number.lamp_brightness
- input_number.lamp_warmth
- light.closet_light
- media_player.bedroom_speaker
I’m not sure at this point if I like the speaker grouped there or not, but I’ll leave it for now. At the end of the day, I need to consider when these screens will be used. If I’m sitting in my bedroom, I’ll probably go to the tab for that room which should give me full access to everything thing in that room. However, if I’m sitting in the living room, I’d be more likely to be on the home tab. So if I’m sitting in the living room, why do I need to control the closet light in the master bedroom? I likely don’t, so maybe I shouldn’t have every option available from the home tab. I’ll leave it for now, but it’ll likely be evolving further.
Let’s create a card for the main level and add it to our home tab:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
- sun.sun
- sensor.yr_symbol
- group.main_level_card
- group.master_bedroom_card
main_level_card:
view: no
name: Main Level
entities:
- switch.dining_room_switch
- switch.front_porch_switch
- media_player.kitchen_speaker
- media_player.living_room_tv
I’m pretty happy with that for now. Let’s move onto the Main tab.
*ADD home_group mediaplayer??!?!?!
Main Tab
mainfloor:
view: yes
name: Main Floor
entities:
- switch.front_porch_switch
- switch.dining_room_switch
- media_player.kitchen_speaker
- media_player.living_room_tv
I guess that’s it for now.
Master Bedroom
So we’ll take a few hints from what we did on the home tab and group the lights into a single card. Other than that, we’re adding all of the auxiliary components that aren’t super important unless you’re actually in the room.
master_bedroom:
view: yes
name: Master Bedroom
entities:
- group.master_bedroom_lights_card
- media_player.bedroom_speaker
- sensor.tradfri_remote_control
- sensor.tradfri_motion_sensor
- scene.reading
- scene.nap_time
- scene.goodnight
master_bedroom_lights_card:
view: no
name: Lights
entities:
- switch.master_bedroom_switch
- light.kyles_lamp
- light.mels_lamp
- input_number.lamp_brightness
- input_number.lamp_warmth
- light.closet_light
New Components
Going through the list of available components and sensors is a bit overwhelming as there are currently 919 available. It’s probably better to scroll through the list of categories and dive into those where there’s some interest. Some tie into software, some hardware, some both. I usually just browse through the list of new ones every two weeks when the updates come out, but this is the first time I’ll have had to try a lot out since my old HA instance was stuck at 0.39.1.
A quick scan through I’ve come up with the following:
These are just the easy sensors that I find interesting but don’t require additional setup other than adding them to the configuration.yaml file. There are lots of other components that I’ll be adding, just outside the scope of this post.
sensor:
- platform: yr
- platform: uptime
- platform: moon
Now add them to the home group:
default_view:
view: yes
entities:
- sun.sun
- sensor.yr_symbol
- group.main_level_card
- group.master_bedroom_card
- media_player.home_group
- sensor.uptime
- sensor.moon
Alright, so the GUI now looks better and is a little bit more intuitive. Still not a lot to control and this post was drier than intended… but I basically accomplished what I set out to do:
“…end up with a few useful pages for specific purposes along with a useful main page…”
I’m sure these posts will get more interesting! 😉