More fields for attributes?

[jm-cook]

Having just started to look at mushroom cards I was immediately excited to try to replace my button-card based dashboards. My dashboards are designed for wall hanging tablet, or google nest display, so they should be clean and with a text large enough to be read from some distance. It would be great to get away from that complicated template setup that button-card requires, and needs to be pasted as a large block into the raw text editor.

So far I have managed to get about half-way with a clean dashboard. In its simplest form I want a dashboard like this:

The date and time cards are already migrated to use mushroom entity card, but the sensor cards at the bottom use button-card with some 300 lines of template code to achieve. The date and time rely on card_mod, but the formatting was relatively straightforward. A complete mushroom solution would mean a substantial tidy up would be possible.

So far my mushroom version of the same dashboard looks like this:

As you can see, the 3 sensor cards along the bottom, using mushroom, have a similar layout to the current button-card solution (defined mainly with custom theme that I have made for the panel). However, what I am struggling with now is:

• The state displayed by the climate card is not actually the state, but a string containing the mode, the state, and the unit of measurement. The card looks a bit ugly, and could be improved by putting these attributes elsewhere? Some improvement can be made using a template card, but it is not really the same.
• The state displayed by the 2 temperature sensors (Outdoor and Bobby) also includes the unit of measurement. IMO this could be placed elsewhere for better readability.

So my point is, what if we had the possibility to add additional fields - tertiary, and quaternary for example - that could be populated with user defined attributes, and some control over positioning of those? In addition I would like to be able to choose raw state without units for display. I would hope that such an additional functionality would not break the simple aspect of mushroom? It would certainly take some of the headache away from fiddling about with button-card.

[jm-cook]

Replying to my own discussion :-)

After playing around some I have been able to achieve close to a desired result of clear large sensor display so some of my earlier comments are no-longer valid. This dashboard is shown in "kiosk mode" on a small (old) 7inch android tablet that is stuck to the wall with velcro. I am pleased with the result, but still have a couple of suggestions for enhancements.

Some comments:

• The card font sizes are tweaked in a theme for the dashboard in my solution for clear viewing some distance from the panel. I kept the mushroom horizontal layout after some trials as I decided it looked better than I could achieve with a button-card in a more vertical layout.
• I used the mushroom template card for my livingroom thermostat to get more control about what is displayed. In this format (ie large font) the standard climate card was a bit messy.
• I had to change masonry-view-card-margin and mush-spacing to get an even layout
• changing the line height ( mush-card-primary-line-height: 25px mush-card-secondary-line-height: 46px ) does not seem to be compatible with the new sections layout unless you put each card inside a container (like eg horizontal stack).
• I have not found a way to use any of the mushroom cards to display a simple bar gauge so used the rather outdated custom bar-card for the 2 indicators top-right
• 2 of the cards (date and time) further override the theme fonts.

Things I would like to see in future:

• A way to more finely define what is displayed as "state". In the current version the state displayed in the card is not the sensor state but a combo of metadata and state, which varies slightly depending on the card.
• A way to position elements of the card, still keeping the minimalist approach. It would be handy if some of the components/metadata could be placed somewhere on the card without resorting to CSS trickery. For example in my dashboard I would prefer to separate the unit_of_measurement from the state display and place it away somewhere, eg on the top-right. In the climate card the mode is included as part of the state display and I didn't like that :-).

Perhaps such elements could be tertiary/quaternary information, and the state display could be definable?

The upshot of all this is that I can remove over 300 lines of custom button-card configuration, and get something that on the whole looks a lot better. I will be working on similar updates to my nest hub dashboards next.