Build your Home Assistant dashboard

Turn ESPectre's discovered entities into a focused dashboard for motion, movement history, runtime controls, and on-demand diagnostics.

Before you start

• Your ESPectre device is online in Home Assistant through ESPHome or Native MQTT Discovery. Micro-ESPectre works too when its optional MQTT Discovery adapter is enabled.
• You can see the device under Settings → Devices & services, and its Motion Detected and Movement Score entities have current values.
• You have administrator access, which Home Assistant requires to create and manage dashboards.

Step 1 — Find your entity IDs

The maintained dashboard template uses the default ESPHome entity IDs, which start with espectre_. For MQTT Discovery, Home Assistant generates each entity ID when it first registers the entity and preserves later manual changes. Current Home Assistant versions do not derive that ID from the discovery topic's object_id; see Naming of MQTT entities.

1. Open the entity list

   Go to Settings → Devices & services → Entities, then filter for your ESPectre device.

2. Identify the active entities

   Open Movement Score, confirm that it belongs to the intended ESPectre device and has a current value, then copy its complete entity ID.

3. Check whether one prefix is enough

   If the ID ends in movement_score, the part before that suffix is the prefix you can reuse throughout the template. If it ends in a collision suffix such as movement_score_2, you must verify and replace the complete ID of each dashboard entity individually.

These are examples, not values to guess. The chip label, short device ID, custom device name, manual renames, and existing registry entries can all change the final ID. If Home Assistant shows both an unsuffixed entity and an _2 variant, it registered two entities that requested the same ID. The suffix is not part of the device prefix and may differ from one entity to another; use the entities attached to the active device rather than mixing both sets.

Optional — Recreate clean MQTT entity IDs

Use this reset only for Native or Micro MQTT Discovery when stale registrations keep producing duplicate IDs. Dashboard cards and recorder history refer to entity IDs, so note the current IDs and back up the dashboard before changing them.

1. Keep only one publisher

   Turn off or disconnect every old ESPectre instance that uses the same device identity. Leave the intended device disconnected while cleaning the retained discovery configuration.

2. Find this device's discovery topics

   With an MQTT client such as MQTT Explorer or your broker tooling, inspect retained topics matching homeassistant/<component>/<object-id>/config. Match the payload's device identifier, device name, and unique_id to the ESPectre device you are resetting.

3. Remove only the matching configurations

   Publish an empty retained payload to every matching config topic for that device. Home Assistant treats the empty discovery payload as removal of that component; wait for the old entities to disappear. Do not clear homeassistant/# or another device's discovery topics.

4. Publish one clean entity set

   Reconnect or reboot the intended ESPectre device. It republishes its MQTT Discovery configuration, and Home Assistant creates the entities again. When the unsuffixed IDs are free, the new entities should no longer need _2.

5. Verify before editing the dashboard

   Confirm that every recreated entity belongs to the intended device, has a current value, and shares the expected prefix. Then update the dashboard template with those exact IDs.

Step 2 — Create an empty dashboard

1. Add the dashboard

   Go to Settings → Dashboards, select Add dashboard, and choose New dashboard from scratch.

2. Name it

   Use a clear name such as ESPectre, choose whether it appears in the sidebar, then select Create.

3. Take control

   Open the new dashboard, select the edit button, then use the three-dot menu to take control if Home Assistant asks. The template uses the responsive Sections view.

Home Assistant documents the same flow in its dashboard guide and explains the responsive grid in the Sections view reference.

Step 3 — Paste the maintained template

1. Copy the YAML

   Open the maintained ESPectre dashboard template, select Raw, and copy all of it. This file is the source of truth for the example dashboard.

2. Open the raw editor

   In the dashboard editor, open the three-dot menu, select Raw configuration editor, replace the existing content with the copied YAML, and save.

3. Replace the stable prefix

   If Step 1 found a consistent prefix other than espectre_, replace every occurrence of espectre_ with that exact prefix, then save again.

4. Resolve collision suffixes

   If any active entity ends in _2 or another numeric suffix, replace that complete entity ID on its dashboard row. Do not append the suffix to the shared prefix.

Step 4 — Verify the result

The first column shows motion state, a full-width Movement Score bar, and 30 minutes of movement-versus-threshold history. The second column groups the detection controls and the diagnostics that matter most during installation.

• Move in the room and confirm that Motion changes state and Movement Score updates.
• Confirm that the Threshold line appears in the history graph after the device has published its current value.
• Select Refresh Diagnostics to populate Traffic TX Rate, CSI Admitted Rate, WiFi RSSI, and WiFi Channel. These diagnostic states update on demand.
• Use Trigger Calibration only when the room can remain still during Lightweight calibration.

Troubleshooting