Another approach is to add the house itself as a location. This occurred naturally for me because I actually have two separate houses represented in my model, my own house and my dad’s house. So my Locations model looks like
Dad's House (Building tag)
|_ Dad's Office
|_ Dad's Living Room
My House (Building tag)
|_ Outside
| |_ Entryway
|_First Floor
| |_Family Room
And so on. So stuff that’s global to the house, like the weather readings and forecast are located in My House (I used Outside for awhile and may go back to that at some point).
Two other tips I can give for customizing the UI is:
-
define custom list Item widgets and reuse those to customize how the Items look in the cards, see Example Custom List Widgets for some examples by using them to define the “default list widget” on the Items
-
use the visibility field to hide those Items that you don’t have to see all the time. For example, I have a bunch of Items representing the online/offline status of various services. I only ever need to see these in my UI if it happens to be offline. So I set the visibility field to only show the widget when it’s offline. I only care about the Chromecasts when it’s actually actively streaming something. So I hide all it’s widgets except when it’s actively streaming something. The gray bar for the Equipment still shows up in the Location and Equipment cards but that’s OK for me.