Home Assistant Attributes Card

So you have that new Integration in Home Assistant, but once it’s installed, you see that it just gives you one entity, with a bunch of attributes. First things first: don’t blame Lovelace – it’s not Ada‘s fault.

This can be fixed by turning the attributes that we want into sensors themselves and should take about 10 minutes. So sit back, relax, take a deep breath, and off we go.

Oh, by the way – you do have HACS installed, right? If not then simply head over to the HACS site for installation instructions (erm… but make sure you come back yeah?)

Install the Attributes Integration

Once you are in HACS, Click on “Integrations” and click in the search box, and either search for “attributes” or just look for it – it’s called… well… “Attributes”

Then go into the integration and click “Install”

Restart Home Assistant

You should now restart Home Assistant so that the new integration can be registered. But wait, if you have advanced mode enabled I recommend always checking your configuration (advanced mode can be enabled from within your profile page).

Checking your config isn’t as much of an issue now that Home Assistant has added a “Safe Mode”. It’s still a sensible precaution, though, as prevention is always better than the cure.

Assuming your config is healthy, restart Home Assistant. Once it’s restarted, you can create a new entry in your configuration.

Create new sensor

For my new sensor entry I’ll need the:

• name of the attribute (attribute)
• entity_id (entity_id)
• unit of measurement (unit_of_measurement)
• name you to want to give to your attribute (friendly_name)

I’ll explain why that last one is crossed out shortly.

Using the placeholders above, I can configure the configuration like so:

sensor:
  - platform: attributes
    friendly_name: {friendly_name}
    attribute: {attribute}
    unit_of_measurement: {unit_of_measurement}
    entities:
      - {entity_id}

This could give me something like the following if I were to use my climate.living_room example from the image from above

sensor:
  - platform: attributes
    friendly_name: living_room_humidity
    attribute: current_humidity
    unit_of_measurement: %
    entities:
      - climate.living_room

Whatever version you have from whatever entity you are using, save the file, check your config and assuming all is well – restart.

Go find your sensor

When Ada [Lovelace] loads up again, head over to the “Developer Tools” panel and make sure you are in the “States” tab.

Then, while you are in the filter box, type “sensor” and find your new entity, it will be in the form of.

1. the new sensor domain ie
   sensor
2. the dot separator ie
   .
3. old entity_id without the domain eg climate.living_room =
   living_room
4. an underscore ie
   _
5. the name of the attribute eg
   current_humidity

So, in this case, it would be

sensor.living_room_current_humidity

A single issue to workaround

Now one thing I can’t get to work is the friendly_name. I even tried giving it a very unique friendly name so that I’d find it easier, but alas, that didn’t work. I can keep you up to speed on this though, as there is a bug filed for this and I’ll keep up to date with the situation and update this post when it’s fixed.

So if we stick with my climate example and the “current_humidity” attribute I put into the config, the new entity_id will be sensor.living_room_current_humidity

The only thing that’s left to do it to keep an eye out for the update when it comes. If you’re not used to HACS, the updatable integrations/plugins etc are listed separately at the top of the page (like this)

When the update happens, you can either click on the “changelog” option and read the docs or if you leave the update and check back here, I’ll update the post to reflect the updates.

There you have it, Folks, now you can make it into a graph using the standard Lovelace Graph card, or some other widget.

You’re welcome,

John

Credits

Mathew Schwartz

Featured image by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash