unit_of_measurement for linkquality missing in HA

[HA-TB303]

Improvement:

On all my sensors (hue, Ikea and Xiaomi) the unit_of_measurement value for linkquality (dB or % whatever is appropriate) is missing.

Debug Info

zigbee2mqtt version: 1.9.0

It would be nice of you could add this.

[nanobra1n]

Link Quality Indicator (LQI) is the quality of the real data received in a signal.It ranges from 0 to 255, with 255 being the best quality. Therefore, there is no unit_of_measurement, as shown by the "-"

[HA-TB303]

Would it not still be perfectly possible to translate those values to a more consumer friendly 0-100 and make the unit of measurement ”%”?

[nanobra1n]

Including this functionality into zigbee2mqtt is a philosophical question and beyond my pay grade. But if you really want this now, it's as easy as creating your own template sensor

sensor
  - platform: template
    sensors:
      linkqual:
        entity_id: sensor.yoursensor_linkquality
        unit_of_measurement: '%'
        friendly_name: 'My sensor link'
        value_template: '{{states.sensor.yoursensor_linkquality.state| float / 255 * 100}}'
        icon_template: mdi:wifi

Voila

[HA-TB303]

I know i could do that for my 18 sensors, but that's not what I’m asking 😏

[groenmarsmannetje]

Maybe just use “lqi” as unit. Besides that I would recommend to use device_class “signal_strength” as default class for all these Linkquality sensors. Currently I have to manually customize that each time.

[Koenkk]

@groenmarsmannetje done, unit will be lqi now and icon will be set to a signal icon now. Device class signal_strength cannot be used as according to the docs the unit has to be dB for this (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/sensor/#device-class)

[pedrolamas]

@Koenkk the dev build got broken after these changes, I assume the tests have failed?

[pedrolamas]

On a side note, I've asked on Home Assistant discord if there would be an interest in having a "lqi" device class of sorts!

[Koenkk]

@pedrolamas thanks, fixed the tests.

[pedrolamas]

This feels a bit unnecessary and kind of "hacky" to me...

All these sensors end on "_linkquality", so it was quite easy to configure them globally anyway with the customize_glob.yaml file:

"*_linkquality":
  unit_of_measurement: 'lqi'
  icon: mdi:signal

You can check here an example in my own configuration.

[Koenkk]

@pedrolamas why do you think it's hacky?

[pedrolamas]

Probably a bit of a strong word there (sorry!), but I think this should just be provided on a new device class on Home Assistant rather than having the HA extension supply this metadata.

[Koenkk]

@pedrolamas yes I agree it should be in a device class, let's see if they'll add it.

[groenmarsmannetje]

This feels a bit unnecessary and kind of "hacky" to me...

All these sensors end on "_linkquality", so it was quite easy to configure them globally anyway with the customize_glob.yaml file:

"*_linkquality":
  unit_of_measurement: 'lqi'
  icon: mdi:signal

You can check here an example in my own configuration.

Thank you for that tip. I did not know that something like that existed. But of course this probably only works for people using yaml files. Because the architectural view from HA is that integrations and customizations should also be configurable in the front end. Can I do this without editing yaml files?

[carldebilly]

Maybe it should be configureable in Z2M.

Also we show follow this issue on HA: home-assistant/architecture#342

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Koenkk]

I assume this can be closed, unit is not set to lqi.