Only entities assigned to an area will appear in the dashboard. It's not necessary to assign every entity: if a device is assigned to an area all its entities are also assigned to that area (this can be overridden per entity).

Area and label assignment can be done piece-meal or in bulk but only needs to be done once. Home Assistant supports easy bulk assigning except for assigning entities to areas.

Areas

Areas can really simplify automations, etc. and are a good idea in general, but Homekit Dashboard won't work at all without them. For my personal home system I make every room an area, plus garage, front porch, garden and a generic "outside".

Create areas by going to Settings->Areas, labels & zones, selecting the Areas tab and clicking CREATE AREA. Give the area a name and fill in any other desired fields, Homekit Dashboard currently only uses the name and the (optional) background picture. Once created clicking on the pen icon allows specifying related temperature and humidity sensors but these are currently also not used.

If relevant it can also be useful to add floors (CREATE FLOOR on the same page). This allows for e.g. "Turn off all downstairs lights".

Labels

Homekit Dashboard needs 3 labels:

• On Home View
• Favorite
• In Summaries

Go to Settings->Areas, labels & zones, select the Labels tab and create them. Only the name is used, make sure it is exactly as given here.

Labels work the same way as in Apple Home: setting the On Home View label on an entity will place it on the app home page; setting Favorite will place it in the Favorites section on the home page (independent of On Home View); the In Summaries label will include the entity in the home and view pages badge count for that kind of entity if it is "on" in some sense.

The On Home View and Favorite labels only influence whether and how an entity appears on the home page. The In Summaries label only influences how/if badges are shown on the home and view pages. Badges on area pages show summaries for the sensors in that area.

Assigning areas and labels

It can be a lot of work to assign areas and labels if starting from scratch. The following procedure tries to minimize that:

Devices

Assign devices (and all their entities) to areas:

1. Go to Settings->Devices & services and select the Devices tab
2. Click on Filters then Integrations
3. Select only the Integrations that have devices of interest (in my case that narrows the list down by around 75%)
4. Click on the Enter selection mode button to the left of the search bar
5. Select all the devices that are in 1 particular area
6. Click on Move to area and select that area
7. Click once or twice on the "select all" button to the left of the device list headers until all selections are cleared
8. Rinse, repeat for the other areas

Devices can have labels assigned to them but these are not used by Homekit Dashboard.

Entities

Areas

Entities that don't inherit an area from a device, or where the area is different from the device, need to be set separately. At the moment Home Assistant does not have an option to do this in bulk so this is the process I use:

1. Go to Settings->Devices & services and select the Entities tab
2. In the Group by dropdown to the right of the search bar select Area
3. In the same dropdown select Collapse all
4. In the Entity column scroll down to Ungrouped and click on it to show only entities without an area
5. Click on Filters then Integrations and make the same selection as for Devices above
6. Click on the Enter selection mode button to the left of the search bar
7. In the entities list select one-by-one each entity you want to show in the dashboard and click the Settings cog at the top of the pop-up
   • if there is an Area dropdown select an area there
   • if there isn't, turn off the Use device area toggle and select an area in the Area dropdown that appears
8. Click UPDATE at bottom right
9. Rinse, repeat

Selecting one or a few domains at a time from the Domain list in the Filters section can make it easier to deal with a long entities list.

Labels

Assign labels to entities:

1. Go to Settings->Devices & services and select the Entities tab
2. Click on Filters then Area
3. Select all areas, this will limit the entities list to entities that can appear on the dashboard
4. Under Filters click on Integrations and make the same selection as for Devices above
5. Click on the Enter selection mode button to the left of the search bar
6. Select all entities that you want to show on the home page
7. From the Add label dropdown (top right) select On Home View
8. Click once or twice on the "select all" button to the left of the entity list headers until all selections are cleared
9. Select all entities that you want to be included in the summary badges
10. From the Add label dropdown select In Summaries
11. Favorites can be added in the same way but it's likely to be easier via the dashboard itself: in the browser or on your mobile device long-click the entity, select the settings cog and select Favorite in the Add label field and then click UPDATE

Entities will appear in the dashboard as they are assigned to areas and given labels.

Hiding entities

Sometimes an entity will be put on the dashboard that's not wanted. For instance a templated fan might show up twice: once for the actual fan and once for the template. Turning off Visible in the entity settings for the actual fan will prevent it from appearing on the dashboard.