I just installed 3 blue switches and have 7 more to go, and my home assistant overview is already basically all blue switch related things. Each switch publishes dozens of numbers, toggles, etc (I’m using zigbee2mqtt in case that matters). How are people dealing with this? Custom dashboards help a little, but it’s a little bit annoying to lose the overview.
You can either hide or disable entities that you don’t want to respectively see or use.
That will declutter dashboards.
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That would require hundreds of clicks - is there a better way?
It’s going to be a few clicks for sure.
A simple way to disable lots of entities is to use the entity view. You can filter base on name, etc and then just select a bunch of entities then press disable button once.
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I would not mind seeing an image of a device view of one of the switches if you don’t mind sharing. I’m curious what entities are showing up.
You can customize your dashboard from scratch. I’d highly recommend that and learning Lovelace (or UI or whatever they are calling it now).
You can declutter down SO SO SO much.
Here’s my example:
Using filters you can limit to lights that are on only, scenes that you choose, etc.
Happy to help if you have questions!
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That looks great and also like a LOT of work.
The best I’ve found in terms of least clicks for hiding everything I don’t want to see is:
- Go to Settings > Devices & Services > Entities
- Type the name of the switch in the search box
- Click the select box in the header to select all, then deselect the (very few) entities I want to keep visible.
- Click “Hide Selected” in the top bar
That way the number of clicks depends more on the number of things you want to see than on the total number of exposed entities. If all you want is the light entity to show it’s like 6 clicks from logging into HA to do that for a single switch.
It doesn’t do that for me… while all the parameters are on the device’s page, the overview dashboard only shows the switch on/off toggle, power usage, and total energy. I don’t think I’ve done any customization; I’m a newbie and just set up HA for the first time a few weeks ago.
I just received my switches! I have one “installed” (its on a test bench). The number of sensors and config parameters is totally overwhelming as you reported @eduard.antonyan.
Curious - what are you using to integrate: zha or Zigbee2Mqtt? I’m using Zigbee2Mqtt and wondering if the user experience is better with zha. @dahanc are you using zha?
BTW, if you are comfortable installing and running Python, I have written a Python script that will disable lots of the entities created. It’s configurable as to which devices and entities get disabled. Shoot me a DM if you are interested.
Lol if I try to print my Overview tab it’s 27 pages. I have a lot more entities that just the Blues. You should build a custom UI like @kreene1987. The overview page isn’t that helpeful and I keep meaning to disable mine.
I’m using ZHA.
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Also as mentioned in post 4 you can use the entities tab to select multiple and hide/disable.
Also, you may want to consider filtering entities in the recorder. I ran into an issue where the database grew over 25 GB causing my RPi SD Card to Fill up.
I have written a Python script to disable all of the “extra” entities. Other than have Python installed it’s pretty simple to use. After running the script here is what I see for one of my devices:
Happy to share the script if anyone is interested.
Edit: the “entities not shown” are all disabled entities.
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Wow. You could also submit an enhancement request to HA. There’s got to be a better way for them to handle many pages of entities in the Overview, and that could benefit all of us
I’m not sure what an enhancement request would look like for this. The behaviour of HA is what it should be doing – that is creating entities for things it can control, show status on, or configure. The “problem” is there has never been a switch that has lots of attributes. I mentioned on another thread on the this forum that I had created an enhancement request for z2m to reduce the number of attributes that are broadcast. That would help in that HA would not even see these attributes and would not create the entities in the first place. If this is something that interests you, commenting on the issue would help: [Feature request]: Add support for filtered_attributes on device creation · Issue #15075 · Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt · GitHub
It would be great if you shared the script on github.
TIA