homeassistant only show lights with brightness capabiliites

Amstronge

2 min read

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16-01-2025

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Home Assistant's flexibility allows for highly customized dashboards. This article shows you how to elegantly display only your lights capable of brightness control, excluding those that are simple on/off switches. This improves your user interface, making it cleaner and more efficient.

Why Filter for Brightness Control?

Cluttering your Home Assistant dashboard with on/off lights can be visually overwhelming. Filtering for brightness-adjustable lights creates a streamlined interface focusing on devices offering granular control. This makes managing your lighting easier and improves the overall user experience.

Method 1: Using the brightness attribute in your Lovelace configuration

This method leverages Home Assistant's built-in entity attributes. It directly filters the lights shown based on the presence of the brightness attribute. This is the most straightforward approach.

Steps:

1. Open your Lovelace configuration: Access your Home Assistant configuration, typically found under Settings > Lovelace Dashboards.
2. Identify your light entities: Navigate to your Developer Tools and expand the "States" section. Find your light entities (they usually start with light.). Note the entities that have brightness control; they'll show a brightness attribute in their state details.
3. Create a filtered light group: Use a template sensor within your Lovelace configuration YAML to filter the lights. Here's an example:

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Brightness_Controlled_Lights"
        state: >
          {% set lights = states | list %}
          {% set brightness_lights = [] %}
          {% for light in lights %}
            {% if light.attributes.brightness is defined %}
              {% set brightness_lights = brightness_lights + [light.entity_id] %}
            {% endif %}
          {% endfor %}
          {{ brightness_lights | join(', ') }}

This creates a sensor called "Brightness_Controlled_Lights" which lists the entity IDs of lights with brightness capabilities.

4. Use the sensor in your Lovelace UI: Integrate this sensor into your Lovelace dashboard using a lights card, specifying the Brightness_Controlled_Lights sensor as the entity:

type: lights
entities:
  - entity: sensor.brightness_controlled_lights

This will display only those lights possessing brightness control. Remember to adjust the sensor.brightness_controlled_lights entity ID if you've named your sensor differently.

Method 2: Using a Home Assistant automation and a helper entity (More Advanced)

This method uses an automation to dynamically populate a helper entity. This is suitable for more complex scenarios, perhaps involving conditional logic beyond simple brightness checks.

Steps:

1. Create a helper entity: Add a light type helper to your configuration. This will represent the group of brightness-controlled lights.

2. Create an automation: Create an automation that triggers on Home Assistant startup and whenever the state of a light changes. Inside the automation, you'll iterate over all light entities, check for the brightness attribute and update the helper entity accordingly.

3. Utilize the helper entity in Lovelace: Add the helper entity to your Lovelace card.

This method is more involved but offers greater flexibility for future expansion and complex filtering rules.

Troubleshooting

• No lights appear: Double-check your entity IDs and the YAML syntax in your Lovelace configuration. Ensure the brightness attribute exists in the states of your desired lights.
• Incorrect lights are included: Verify the logic within your filtering mechanism. You might need to refine the conditions if unexpected lights are shown.
• YAML syntax errors: Carefully examine your YAML configuration for any typos or incorrect formatting. Home Assistant is sensitive to YAML syntax.

Conclusion

Optimizing your Home Assistant dashboard by showing only brightness-adjustable lights enhances usability and visual appeal. Choosing between the two presented methods depends on your comfort level with Home Assistant and your specific needs. Both methods effectively filter your lights, providing a more focused and efficient control panel for your smart home lighting. Remember to restart Home Assistant after making changes to your configuration files.