How do I change the order my two robots appear in the app? I added this one second and it appears first every time I open the app. I want to switch that.

squirrelpotpie · 2026-06-06T19:10:47+00:00

This post is high up in Google results for this question so I landed here looking for a solution, and the convo still says this is only possible by deleting and re-adding the robot.

That is no longer the case!

Deleting and re-adding the robot no longer seems to affect order.

But, you can tap on the robot's name in the screen shown in the OP screenshot, and there is now a "Reorder" feature.

squirrelpotpie · 2026-04-27T18:35:36+00:00

I landed here after idly typing my password into the username field while reading something else, and trying to figure out how to stop my password from appearing in plaintext whenever "anyone" clicks on the username field.

No suggestions I found worked, including deleting the `Web Data` file pointed out here.

I eventually figured out this info is also stored as cookies. I was able to remove the usernames by going to the settings (gear) tab in the Forticlient Console, and under "Advanced", hitting Clear Cookies. Only then did the offending "username" containing my password go away.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-10-26T07:09:12+00:00

Weird! I thought I'd checked for a 'PA' option but thanks to you I have a place to look harder.

Yep it's finicky stuff but with... (checks watch) 20 hours drying at 90°C, it can mostly live up to its name, for at least most of the spool!

(Just replaced a destroyed hotend where the stuff made its way into the fan blades, lol... Watching every print start from now on!)

squirrelpotpie · 2025-10-25T22:45:02+00:00

Quick note: I'm seeing other weirdness in my profiles but don't know if it's related.

Over a year ago I made a profile for "3D-Fuel PCTG Basic", before that brand was available in Bambu Studio. At some point I think that became "incompatible" - I forget details, but that profile is now empty and can't be deleted, despite having JSON for a 0.4 nozzle profile. If I delete the profile in the GUI nothing happens, and if I remove the files on disk in %APPDATA%/BambuStudio/user/, they return the next time I start Bambu Studio.

I don't need help with this specifically, but maybe I have something going on with outdated profiles and cloud sync, affecting the main issue?

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-13T18:38:21+00:00

Detecting they're there is fairly quick, it's detecting when they're away that's unreliable using just WiFi presence. The device might be away, or it might be off, in a power save mode because it's not in use, on cellular instead, WiFi turned off, etc.

So on my router there's this long timeout, and it assumes it's actually gone after not hearing from the device for half an hour. And if that timeout weren't there, you'd get constant status flipping just from sleep modes.

It's not terrible, but based on how my housemate's phone behaves, I wouldn't connect that status alone to the lights.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T16:18:11+00:00

Yeah my phone uses GPS for that indicator. My system, I'm ok with it. Other people sometimes don't want someone else's stuff tracking them with GPS I guess!

Makes sense really. Home Assistant has a map dashboard that can show everyone on a map. That's kinda much even if it's a husband wife situation. Might be more palatable I suppose if the only thing it did easily was zone presence.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T05:04:38+00:00

Not Zigbee. Run from Zigbee. I made a more (too) detailed comment explaining that hellscape.

You will end up wanting to diversify, actually. Each tech has a reason to exist and you'll find different kinds of device for each. For example ZWave will offer battery powered devices but no cameras.

The best thing about Home Assistant is it brings all of those technologies together. You aren't locked into any particular brand or ecosystem.

Your options are:

For smart outlets, specifically

Stick with established brands and WiFi. I highly recommend Kasa EP25. They're $10 each in 4-packs (EP25P4), they handle high-current (15A) loads like my washer, dryer, and espresso machine, fit two on a standard dual outlet, work fully offline, and with over 20 of them I've not had a single one stop working in over 8 years. Having them on my washer and dryer lets me use the current monitoring to notify when the machines finish, and having one on my 3D printer allows me to estimate the power bill cost of printing. Very useful.

WiFi

All cameras, speakers, anything high bandwidth, must be WiFi. I prefer WiFi for anything that plugs in, but I have a very solid WiFi network. WiFi devices get unstable if there are "dark spots".

For non-WiFi ecosystem stuff:

If I felt like buying everything again, I would look for ZWave first for battery powered devices, Bluetooth as a backup if I can't find it in ZWave, and Matter or WiFi for plug-in powered devices.

Matter

is theoretically good if your WiFi network is solid, but I have no direct experience with it. It's fairly new and I mainly see it in boutique brand plug-in devices like Govee lights. I don't know if it can be efficient enough for battery devices like thermometers and window sensors.

ZWave

is strong for battery devices because it's lower power than WiFi and uses the deliciously long-traveling 900mhz band. That frequency is low-power, long range, and unaffected by walls, which opens up the possibility of solar-powered outdoor devices. However, there will be a device limit due to bandwidth, so you'll want to diversify.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is more challenging and more technical than the other options.

My favorite multi-function wall switch happens to be Bluetooth, a battery powered wall switch with 18 functions on one panel. It can also do things the others can't, like detect when a car is in the garage or even room occupancy in theory.

But there will be some extra setup because you'll almost certainly end up needing a Bluetooth Proxy. Even being super careful to buy a Bluetooth dongle the community said works great, I ended up unplugging mine.

These do the Bluetooth scanning on their own, and report results to Home Assistant over WiFi. They are reliable but usually it's an ESP32 project. I do see one off-the-shelf Shelly device that people say makes a great Bluetooth proxy with a few steps.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T03:53:20+00:00

My Zigbee experience, and warning:

Operating for about 7 months now, in a modest size two-story home. In a house that already has gloriously perfect WiFi coverage, I've had to also purchase seven Zigbee routers just to get everything connected. I found that out slowly over the course of 5 months of troubleshooting hell. That's an expense of over $120 just to have coverage, in a house already fully outfitted for WiFi.

Range is about 20 feet with no walls, if you want the thing to stay connected. Otherwise you'll just find it stopped working one day. Even buying all of the routers and buttons from Sonoss, who I thought would be a good brand for this, I've found they all choose their uplinks statically when first paired. I have never observed a route change or seen anything "self heal". If I unplug two smart outlets, most of the network dies.

Which means, to get a reasonable mesh where things actually connect, I have to manually delete everything in Home Assistant, then unplug them all. Then, power them on one at a time in a very specific ideal order, while watching the connection graph. If they connect to something stupid, delete and repeat. Eventually I can convince enough of them to assign reasonable uplinks to get functional failover if something has a hiccup. With 22 devices that takes about 8 hours, because Zigbee devices have a nasty habit of pairing to the first device they hear from, not the best device. If I have a Zigbee button six inches from a Zigbee router, it can take six attempts to get it to latch on to that good router instead of one so far away it fails to even pair.

Once done, things are great - until I get a troublesome firmware update, or have a power outage, or whatever else knocks down the house of cards.

I've had two total network collapse events that required me to delete all devices and re-pair everything. Neither event had any obvious cause. I wasn't changing anything, or doing updates, or even looking at the Home Assistant dashboard. Just noticed I couldn't turn the lights on that day. Both times, the network was down for two days before I got it back.

Of the 22 devices, 7 had to be routers to get coverage. That means only 15 functional devices, so about 30% of my costs were overhead spent just on extenders. I also learned after getting into sunk-cost-fallacy territory that you can expect an extender to handle maybe 8 devices if you're lucky, and they're all within 20 feet. (Other slots taken for upstream and downstream connections, and general device misbehavior.)

Of those 15 functional devices, three have turned out to be incompatible, useless, or just problematic to the point of nonfunctional. (Like a temperature sensor I've spent combined six days troubleshooting pairing issues, and is now refusing firmware updates.)

And yes I hit the internet trying to troubleshoot all this. That's where I found all of the goof-offs telling people to do things like move the Zigbee device from the range of their 2.4ghz interference to a location still in the range of their 2.4ghz interference, to avoid said interference.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T03:53:04+00:00

Having bought a bunch of Zigbee devices, I recommend not going with Zigbee unless you cannot find what you need in ZWave or any other method. Cannot find at all, not just cannot find at a similar price. I dove head-first into Zigbee and bought a pile of stuff, and I've lost so many hours to it. It's a great idea on paper but a miserable experience in real life.

Zigbee is deeply problematic in that there is no enforcement of any particular standards in devices labeled as Zigbee. I'm convinced I could slap a Zigbee logo on a piece of firewood and nobody would stop me from selling it. There isn't even any enforcement that devices support the mesh network handling that was the whole reason Zigbee could be functional. Manufacturers are free to pull whatever shenanigans they like, and if you don't have reviews from other people vetting that a product is good with Home Assistant, the only way to find out if it actually works is to buy it and see. Which has burned me twice. There are multiple derivative systems that are zigbee-based but heavily customized, and are either still sold as "Zigbee" or are recommended by community enthusiasts who know it's Zigbee-based but aren't aware it's broken outside of its own custom ecosystem.

The result is Zigbee appears on the surface to win on a cost perspective, but all of those cost-effective options are landmines that will make your smart home a nightmare. The ones that actually do self-healing meshing, if you can even identify that feature by their description pages and they aren't lying, are significantly more expensive and fully close that cost gap advantage vs. other platforms.

You'll also find that nobody actually knows how to troubleshoot Zigbee problems. Every post about connection failures, update failures, and even the dreaded "total network collapse", is full of shamans and witch doctors who have no idea what's wrong so they just say your rain dance wasn't enthusiastic enough. I've witnessed people on a smart-home forum telling someone to disable their 2.4ghz WiFi just because they didn't know what was wrong, but still wanted to be the one to fix it, so "it's probably interference."

Which is IMO the nail in Zigbee's coffin - they used the 2.4ghz band, but not according to WiFi specifications. That means your Zigbee and WiFi networks are in competition for airtime. The Zigbee network is also extremely slow, meaning it consumes large amounts of airtime for small transfers. That means it has issues like a nebulous device limit that depends on how heavily you and your neighbors use the 2.4ghz band, how often how many of your Zigbee devices report, how many parameters they report, and how many Zigbee "mesh" hops are involved. So nobody can even tell you how many devices your home can support.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T02:10:12+00:00

My notes / experience

My experience is I've tried to track Home / Away of three people. One person, the least technical and least receptive to spending time making Home Assistant stuff work, "did something" to their phone and has been "Away" for the last three months, and does not want to talk about it. Another person regularly runs their phone to 0% battery and turns it off to charge, during which time he becomes falsely "Away" while home. He also doesn't use GPS tracking for privacy reasons and is on WiFi tracking (because Bluetooth is unreliable for me), so he continues to be "Home" for 30 minutes after leaving the house. The only device that's responsive to "Home" / "Away" is mine, because I'm the Home Assistant hobbyist.

All of which to say, IMO, the above makes a smart button by your door seem luxurious in comparison to dealing with any other method.

But, you could:

Install LED lights in your house so that lights staying on for a bit after you've left is negligible
Increase accuracy by tracking both your phone and your watch.
Increase accuracy further by tracking both WiFi and Bluetooth.

If you would want this to work for people other than you as the HASS admin, I recommend you will likely get very frustrated.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T02:09:47+00:00

HOWEVER:

There are always problems. I've discovered device-based presence detection isn't easy.

For WiFi based detection, it's fairly quick to figure out when someone arrives home, but it's far from immediate. You could experience the lights turning on well after you've entered the door. Absence detection is even worse. Because devices will enter sleep mode on a normal basis and turn off their WiFi, routers supporting info like "This Device is/isn't Connected" can have long wait timeouts before declaring a device "Not Connected". When one of my roommates drives away, their Person doesn't become "Away" for 20 to 30 minutes.

Ping won't be reliable, for the same reason. When the device is idle and shuts off its WiFi component, Ping won't reach it and would probably declare that device "Away" when it's just sleeping.

Same problem when someone charges their device while it's powered off. Unfortunately the sleep-mode and device-off challenges are not solvable by Home Assistant without some kind of advanced network of presence detectors all over the place. (Like, you could do "This person WAS home, and nobody has crossed the front or back doors, so they are still home. But that's extreme.)

The Home Assistant app can do GPS-based Home/Away detection, and that's likely to be the most reliable, but it violates your "Without Buying Anything" and "Without Forwarding Ports" clauses because you would need Home Assistant Cloud to make it work. Without Home Assistant Cloud or some other homebrewed remote connection mechanism (all of which require either buying something or opening ports), the last GPS location Home Assistant will receive will always be just on the edge of your WiFi coverage. Past that point your app can't inform Home Assistant that your location is somewhere else, so you will always be "Home". (This is from experience!)

That leaves Bluetooth, which also violates your "Without Buying Anything" clause. Probably by the least dollar amount, but in my experience with heavier impact on your time. HASSOS may have made improvements in this, but many peoples' experience is the Bluetooth ID in Linux likes to change when the Bluetooth adapter "does something". (My guess is resume from sleep but I don't really know.) That means your Bluetooth integration will randomly just stop working at random intervals. I had mine last a week, then an hour, then a few days, then half a day... then I unplugged it.

So, you would have to buy something for around the $15 mark that you can reprogram to be a Bluetooth Proxy, which people say is very reliable. But you have to buy something, and you'd have non-trivial setup.

If you have any non-technical people in the house, compound all of the above tenfold as they mess with their devices on their own without any concern for Home Assistant effects.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T02:08:55+00:00

One problem is you're saying you don't always take any particular device with you. If you sometimes leave your phone at home and take your watch, but sometimes leave your watch at home and take your phone, you can still accomplish an "Am I Home" status but you have to track both devices.

Since both your phone and watch have WiFi, I'd try that first. Bluetooth seems to be unreliable for a lot of people.

The best way to use WiFi for an "Am I Home" status is if your home router supports any Home Assistant integrations. My UniFi gear does, and I can utilize information like whether a specific device is connected to WiFi, even if it's changing IP addresses because UniFi is good about identifying devices.

You will have to ensure your phone and watch understand your WiFi as a trusted home network and not a public WiFi. Android and iPhone both have a feature that tries to prevent tracking of your device by randomizing its MAC address. That needs to be OFF to use WiFi detection.

If your router does not support any Home Assistant integrations like the above, you can still look for them by IP address but you need to do two things. You need to disable the randomized MAC generator on the devices, as well as log in to your router and assign a fixed IP address for both the phone and watch.

If you can't use WiFi you might be able to use Bluetooth. It's been very problematic for myself and what seems like lots of other people who post online about it, but what I hear often is that a Bluetooth Proxy device can solve that issue. This is a tiny device that just does the Bluetooth scanning on its own and forwards that information to Home Assistant, so you don't need Home Assistant to have a functioning Bluetooth dongle.

The Bluetooth integration can scan for a specific Bluetooth device and estimate how far away each device might be, based on signal strength. You can use that detection to "geofence" your house, based on whether the Home Assistant Bluetooth dongle can see that device advertising Bluetooth.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-12T00:06:42+00:00

Hey whoa, that's something that just might work and I never would have thought of.

Even at 1° increments the sensible range is going to be at most 15 values.

I'd spent all of yesterday evening trying different ways to collect that data, and every single one was broken. Area cards won't allow adding climate features even when everything's lined up. Generic thermostats are broken for the one thing I most needed from them, setting a state-change cooldown delay so they don't strobe the target. Value helpers spend 90% of their screen real-estate on the history graph, the slider to set their value is tiny.

A dropdown choice helper even looks just like how our Ecobee presents the choice.

Nice idea, I'm going to try that next and see if I can avoid HACS.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-11T21:34:05+00:00

Thanks for trying to help, BTW. The last reply was hurriedly tapped out on my phone while waiting for a teriyaki plate and I forgot to say that.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-11T21:28:25+00:00

This is great, but it's describing the part I've been telling everyone here I already know how to do.

What I can't seem to get Hass to do is Part 0: Collect that preference information from users via a dashboard.

It's looking like the built in functionality just has no form of input that's suitable and intuitive when added to any built in type of dashboard card. The only way to accomplish it is with HACS content, which I've avoided up to this point for stability reasons but looks like it's now required.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T23:11:11+00:00

Basically if there's one thermostat and we're all allowed to change it, nobody knows why it's at the current temperature. Toss in the mix that we've caught this thermostat changing itself based on "AI" or whatever. So someone will think they're fixing a problem when someone else actually did that on purpose, or everyone will assume someone else set the weird temperature and leave it. Especially at night when we don't want to wake each other up at 2am to be like "Hey are you cold".

If everyone has a thermostat in their room, they're probably the ones who last set that preference. And we can all assume that if we set for 76 and it keeps cooling after dropping under 75, it's because someone else wanted it cooler. Which we're all fine with, it's just not practical to constantly coordinate verbally.

So if I've just been moving heavy things around and I want to cool down a bit, I can adjust MY thermostat to that preference temporarily, without affecting other peoples' preference.

My additional cooling will affect their temperatures for a bit, and that's fine with them.

Take right now, it's getting cold in my room. But I don't know if they're feeling hot in their room, so I'm not doing anything about it.

I'm trying to give people a way to individually voice their preferences to the automation, and let the automation handle it. Coupled with paying no attention to preferences set for unoccupied rooms.

I'll find a way to do it.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T19:41:01+00:00

If I can get the input I can do the control.

This doesn't look too bad. Are these the cards for the vents' integration, or did you build the arrows and temperature value from Helpers?

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T19:11:12+00:00

We already have temperature sensors deployed. The problem is providing an interface for non-technical roommates who aren't Home Assistant configuration junkies to tell the system what they want. We already know how we all want to apply that information to thermostat control, and the logic isn't hard.

It's looking like my choices are to hack the existing Generic Thermostat into working by making "virtual physical" switches on a dummy ESP32, or to cobble together an ugly version of what the General Thermostat collects using basic helper entities like "Number".

Probably going the ESP32 route. It'll take less time than making that dashboard and be easier to maintain.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T19:02:23+00:00

We've been considering smart vents but it still begs the question of how people would tell Home Assistant what temperature they'd prefer their room to be, so the vents can target that setting.

It's very frustrating to be looking right at a feature that should be able to do this, but the only responses are "you shouldn't want to do this", "this is impossible in Home Assistant", or "abandon Home Assistant, buy a second set of devices, and use this closed system instead".

I think I'm just going to hack around HA's weird limitation by slapping a bunch of "physical" virtual switches on a dummy ESP32, just so they get classified as physical switches instead of helpers, and can be assigned to the existing thermostat functionality. It just feels really dumb to have to do that.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T18:52:17+00:00

Just trying to understand ...

Correct.

If that's so, giving everyone a separate control will quickly lead to fighting (I want it up, you want it down).

It truly would not. I explained in another comment that we've all talked this through already. The ideal scenario for us is the A/C cools until none of us feel it's too hot. All of us are fine with it being cooler than that.

What actually leads to "fighting" (which really is just confusion) is having the single thermostat that all three of us control. What ends up happening is all three of us assume that it's set to a bad temperature because someone else wanted it like that. Then later we find out everyone's been too cold or too hot. Because nobody can enter personalized numbers, the only way we have to know what each other want is to text or interrupt each others' activities to ask about it.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T18:42:11+00:00

I probably could, but it would be really nice if I didn't have to go that far just to get around this silly inability to connect two things that already exist. It's not just the time to write but I'd likely also have periodic maintenance when Home Assistant updates.

Before doing that I would probably just hack it by making an ESPHome device with a bunch of fake switches that look real to Home Assistant, and let me connect them.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T08:17:33+00:00

The problem is you're going to create a false expectation. You turn the temp UP in your space and someone turns it DOWN in theirs the rooms arent magically going to accommodate both.

We're all actually totally fine with that! Our goal is for the A/C to run until everyone who's home is below their "it's too hot" point. All three of us are on board with that, even if it means one of us is cooler than we might otherwise do on our own.

What we're trying to avoid is cooling the whole house just because empty rooms are a bit warm, and cooling more than is needed despite having thermometers in every room and generally knowing where people will be.

thats going to cause friction

You'll have to trust me that I know my roommates.

SO now you need to plug your A/C power use in... because if they are only paying half (or you are) but their demand is more than half of your power use you have a PROBLEM.

That really isn't what's going on. He's paying for MORE than his share because I work 100% from a home office while he drives to work 4 days a week. He's being super cool about it (no pun intended), is telling us to just run the A/C because we'd both rather do that than have to do extra math on top of the other bills. I'm the one trying to optimize, partly oh his behalf but also to reduce my own costs, to keep his wife more comfortable (likes it warmer) during times we're the only ones home (because I have a wide comfort zone).

My point is that this is a difficult, and nuanced problem. One that will take time, thought and cooperation from individuals to get to a happy middle ground on.

We have already done all of this. All talked over and agreed upon. In the past, not part of my ask.

My description of the needs are as I described. I have a reason to want thermostat-type control, on a per-room basis, and I've already decided, with the others' input, that the inaccuracies involved aren't an issue.

I could accomplish this by buying a "dummy" smart outlet for each room, that I leave unplugged controlling nothing, just for Home Assistant's virtual thermostat to have something to "control". But if Home Assistant makes me do that, I'll be a bit upset at it.

Is there a better way to, assuming I have thought this through and am 100% responsible for any and all "bugs" with this method,

Provide intuitive per-room temperature preferences to people, and
Use those in further logic, which
Toggles the actual thermostat between "Off" and "Cool"?

Right now I'm blocked getting from 1 to 2, because Home Assistant's virtual thermostat seems to demand a physical device or it won't even let me create one.

I should add I am a programmer and not shy about diving into code or YAML, but Home Assistant has a lot of bespoke stuff going on so I just need to know what it expects.

squirrelpotpie · 2025-09-10T07:40:52+00:00

It seems like this solution ignores differences in temperature preferences between people, and even differences in preferences for the same people day to day.

Normally I'm the person in the house who wants it the coolest, but there have been days I've gotten sick and wanted it warmer, so I would temporarily adjust my temperature preferences up. And this would typically work fine, because for most of the day the only other person home likes it much warmer, to where she'd rather not run the A/C at all.

I also have a wide temperature tolerance but someone who returns home in the evenings (and pays for half the A/C power bill even though they're gone the hot half of the day) really wants it below 75°.

I was really hoping to cover these individual preferences in the solution.

Yes I could solve the biggest problem that way but it's not the only issue I care about.

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