official Lovelace card with compact view + rich more-info dialog

[environ314]

Hi @jrhubott ,

Thanks for the recent work on the custom_position display issue and
the v2.22.1-beta.2 release — the new active_slot and minimum_mode attributes
are exactly what's needed to build smarter UIs on top of ACP.

This leads me to open a broader discussion: would it make sense for ACP to
ship an official Lovelace card?

Why I think it would strengthen the project

1. A proper showcase for ACP

ACP is, in my opinion, one of the most sophisticated cover automation
integrations available for Home Assistant — multi-handler arbitration, custom
positions with floors/ceilings, sun protection, manual override detection,
rich decision trace… But none of this shows in the README or in a fresh
install. Users discover the depth of the integration only after weeks of use.

An official card would:

• Make the integration's power immediately visible (screenshots, demos)
• Give ACP a recognizable visual identity in the HA ecosystem
• Lower the entry barrier for new users who currently see "just another
  cover entity" until they dig into YAML and templates

2. A first-class diagnostic surface

The decision_trace sensor is incredibly valuable but underexploited because
it's hard to consume visually. Recurring questions in issues and community
threads — "why is my cover at 60%?", "is it in manual mode?", "which
custom position is constraining the result?" — all have answers already
present in ACP's internal state, but invisible without custom Jinja work.

A card built by you would:

• Expose the handler arbitration logic faithfully (only you fully master its
  semantics — any third-party card will drift or misrepresent edge cases)
• Turn the decision trace into a self-service diagnostic tool, drastically
  reducing "why is ACP doing X?" support load
• Make floor/ceiling constraints, manual locks, and protection states
  legible at a glance

Proposed UX: HA-standard "compact tile + more-info dialog" pattern

To keep multi-cover dashboards clean while preserving access to ACP's full
introspection power:

Compact view (default card)

• Cover icon + name + current position
• One contextual badge (the most relevant at the moment):
  • Auto (green, discreet) — normal state
  • Manual (orange) — override active
  • Min #1 · 60% (purple) — custom position constraint active
  • Sun protection (red) — protection active
• Quick controls: ↑ ■ ↓

More-info dialog (on tap) — the diagnostic core

• Current state: physical vs calculated position with divergence indicator,
  active handler, timestamp, all simultaneous badges
• "Why this position?": human-readable decision trace
  (e.g. "Solar calculated 100% → Floor custom more accuracy of shadow limit #1 applied 60% → Manual locked at 60%")
• Advanced controls: position slider with visible floor/ceiling markers,
  "Resume auto" button, custom positions toggles, quick edit of floor/ceiling
  values
• (v2) Forecast: chart of expected positions over the next hours, with
  annotated events (sunrise, protection trigger, custom position windows)

Possible technical approaches

1. Custom Lovelace card (TypeScript/Lit) distributed via HACS — most
   powerful, allows a truly custom more-info dialog with ACP-specific badges
   and decision trace visualization
2. YAML blueprint / dashboard template — lighter, but the standard cover.
   more-info dialog cannot display ACP-specific information, which defeats
   most of the diagnostic value
3. Documentation + reference dashboard example — minimal, but leaves the
   showcase and diagnostic gap unaddressed

Option 1 is the only one that fully delivers on both the showcase and the
diagnostic dimensions.

Question

Does this direction resonate with your vision for ACP? I'd be curious to hear
how you see the UI side of the project evolving, and whether a card has
already crossed your mind.

[jrhubott]

Actually, there's already a card: jrhubott/adaptive-cover-pro-card, HACS-installable, separate repo with its own release cycle. It might be most of the way to what you're describing.

The shipped card covers a lot of this ground. There's an SVG sky compass with the FOV wedge, blind-spot wedge, and live sun dot; a decision strip showing all 10 pipeline handlers in priority order with the winner highlighted; per-cover live-vs-target bars with a mismatch indicator and click-to-set; an overrides panel with manual countdown, force-override sensor count, motion-timeout status, and a one-click reset; and inline integration-enabled / automatic-control toggles in the header. Pure frontend consumer, no integration-side changes, works against any ACP >= v2.14.0.

Where your proposal genuinely differs is the form factor. You're describing a compact tile with a single contextual badge and a richer more-info dialog -- Auto / Manual / Min #1 · 60% / Sun protection appearing depending on what's active. The card has a compact toggle, but it's still the "full panel" shape. The dense-dashboard, many-covers use case would benefit from the tile pattern you're describing, and I'd be open to that direction.

The "Why this position?" one-liner is also worth pulling out separately. The decision strip shows which handlers matched or were skipped and highlights the winner, but it doesn't produce a plain-English summary like "Solar calculated 100%, Floor custom #1 applied 60%, Manual locked at 60%." That's not in the shipped card and it would be a genuine diagnostic improvement over the current visual.

I've captured both as jrhubott/adaptive-cover-pro-card#60 on the card repo — that's the better venue for tracking the specific UX work.

For details, see the Lovelace Card wiki page.