Not Sure where to put this

[ivory moon]

TLDR: I cant figure out how to make a card to control my brewery tanks chilling system.

This is my first post in here, just found the discord server. I have an up to date version of HAOS running on a proxmox server that I have setup at my brewery and I am working on moving all of my tank automation over to it. I have created several esp32 devices to monitor temp and level in several places to kind of test this system out to use as in a light industrial application and while it has been super easy getting all of the backend setup, especially with ESPhome, I have run into a wall while trying to configure the UI. I was never very good at ui dev and the way I usually got around it when I was working in controls engineering, I could make the Scada display look mostly like the schematics and then just attach tags to activex controls or similar. These dashboard cards and they way they interact with the system is very foreign to me. I can see the appeal and I would love to make some templates to fit my requirements, but I honestly am pretty lost. I am figuring it out, but I thought I would offer a some collaboration at this point since I think I may be trying something a bit novel with using this to run a nano brewery, since I haven't been able to find any ready made projects in hacs or anywhere else I have tried searching. If anyone has done this, I would love to be pointed in that direction, I am not big on duplicating effort. Anyway, that is my long paragraph of a problem. Thank you for any assistance you may give.

I should add that I have figured out that I can make climate entities that can give me rudimentary control, but I feel it could be better, more intuitive. Plus I would really like to have a better tank status indication of the system state. just using a generic thermostat ui feels unfinished.

[worldly tree]

I don't know anything about brewery and don't really use any ESP devices. But, I do tinker quite a bit with HA dashboard stuff and I use SCADA at work. HA dashboard's don't really offer the same "complexity" as SCADA, but you can make a lot of things happen with HA especially when you start looking into some custom cards, card_mod, working with Jinja templates, or maybe even some browser_mod popups.

I'd suggest starting with some basic stuff and expand as you go. (Dashboard design can take forever to get just the way you want it.) You could use an Entities card to show all of your temperature entities and another for your level entities. While that shows all the information, that's probably not a very good representation of the brewing process.
So, perhaps, an Entities card for each batch with the respective entities. Each Batch card could get more stuff added to it such as triggering scripts for the next step in the process. Now, your information has a bit more relevance since it is grouped together.
Again, this is super-basic but would act more as a starting point to see what you need the dashboard to do for you and how you want to interact with it.

To kind of give some perspective of an option to work towards, this is one of my oversized buttons used on a tablet dashboard. It is made with a custom:button-card, but you'll notice it has some extra stuff on it.

• In the top left corner is the Automatic indicator showing if the "Automatic Kitchen Lights" automation is enabled; I can double tap the card to enable/disable the automation.
• To the right of that is a real-time countdown timer that shows how long until the lights automatically get turned off; this disappears when the timer is not active. On the right side are custom_fields for how long the lights have been on and their current color_temperature (or RGB).
• At the bottom is a timer-bar-card that is embeded into the custom:button-card. It shows the same info as the countdown timer; I just like them both...
• Also, the card changes its background and icon colors based on the RGB of the lights.

A nice feature of the custom:button-card is the configuration templates which allows you to define a template to be used across multiple cards without having to repeat the code. This comes in super-handy when making changes because it would only need to be changed in one place as opposed to each of your Batch-type cards, for example. (The entire YAML needed to generate this card is just over 200 lines long.)

The Picture Elements Card may be useful to you. I don't use it myself, but I suggest checking it out.

[ivory moon]

Thank you, after reading the long, and informative readme on the git repo, that doesn't solve my self made problem. But gives me some good places to start. I was afraid of this when I posted, but I think the problem is that I just need to understand how this system works a bit better. I am still trying to understand how and where the various aspects of these things go. EG it seems I need to build composite entities in the configuration yaml, and then I need to tell them how to act in the automations yaml, and there is templating I can do, but I cant cause I still don't quite understand how all that works. and also some automation is already built into some entities. and I cant really seem to find a definitive source for how all that works yet. but I am sure its out there. Perhaps some of yall who built this from the beginning could point me in the right direction. I really feel that there is a huge opportunity here to use this system to help with small factory automation if I could figure out how to build the ui better.

[worldly tree]

Yeah. You have such a niche use for Home Assistant, I think getting everything working 100% from the start will be a bit of an issue. Asking how to automate your garage door when you get home or sending notifications when the laundry is done, well, those are the common uses of HA; beer brewing, not so much. That isn't to say that it can't be done or won't be a good system. But, I think if you tackle the process in small bits and pieces, then you'll get the system to work how you want.

I remember watching a video a couple of years ago that showed an older brewery being upgraded with ESP devices and using HA for its automation. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find that video. Googling leads me to some information but not the video that I wanted to share because, to me, it sounded like exactly what you're looking at doing.
I did come across this blog post that I think has some useful information for you. It is old (from 2019) and does not appear to have been updated. https://habrewery.home.blog/

[ivory moon]

that is a pretty cool article, lots of good info, but probably a bit out of date on some things. but before I finish reading it, I want to push back on calling this a nich use case for HA. As it stands I haven't seen a better option for implementing all of the hardware in a building in one place like HA can that isn't a fortune. and even if I wanted to buy one of the industrial options out there, it runs on old (reliable) and expensive hardware, will require some version of support contract, and likely a ruinously expensive software subscription. I realize I have been out of the controls industry for a while, but I don't think that has changed much. At brewer specific conventions that I have attended such as the CBC I have seen many options to automate various aspects of both the tap room and the production floor, but all of them come with the aforementioned problems + they cannot take in information from outside their own ecosystem usually. that leaves me with several separate solutions to manage things all over the place. Disregard the open source aspect of this software, for those who can understand it, it is more powerful than many scada systems out there with its ability to integrate almost any device. I feel that it is only Nich because it hasn't been showcased to the correct market place yet. Now that it has enough polish and stability to pass the 2million stable users mark I see and industrial spin off of this as a must have for many small manufacturing facilities out there.