Once your ESPHome device is up and running, and you have added it to Home Assistant, you should make yourself familiar with how it surfaces in Home Assistant.
This way, you can verify whether all of your device features work as intended, and figure out the entity ids assigned to the features. These ids are needed later when you want to access your device features, either to place them on a dashboard, or to automate it.
This article deals entirely with how your device surfaces in Home Assistant. Should you be using ESPHome stand-alone, you can skip this article.
Visit ESPHome Integration
The bridge between ESPHome and Home Assistant is the ESPHome integration. Integrations exist for many different frameworks. It is their job to translate between specific devices and Home Assistant.
So the first stop is to visit the ESPHome integration:
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In the sidebar, go to Settings, then click Devices & services. This brings up a list of integrations. Look for ESPHome. The tile already tells you the number of ESPHome devices that you added to Home Assistant:
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Click in the upper part of the tile (do not click on the DEVICES text in the lower part). You now get a summary page with more details. Identify the device you want to investigate.
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You now see a list of available entities, each one representing a specific device functionality.
In the example above, looking at a CO2 sensor, there are four entities listed, each with a unique Entity ID.
Only three entities are related to the sensor itself, exposing the current sensor readings for CO2, temperature, and humidity.
The forth entity is added automatically by ESPHome for any device, enabling you to trigger a firmware update.
Click on any entity to see the current value, find out when it was last updated, and view the data history as a graph:
Managing ESPHome Settings
There is another control panel that you may visit. It is not related to your ESPHome devices but rather controls the options for your ESPHome integration.
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In the sidebar, click Settings, then click Add-ons. You now see all add-ons that you have installed.
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Click ESPHome. You now see the add-on settings and its resource use.
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To control additional options, in the upper part click Configuration. Most options presented here do not need to be changed in regular use cases.
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(content created Jul 06, 2024 - last updated Jul 12, 2024)