The component, beside allowing binding the entities platforms to VEDirect registers, defines some ‘custom entities’ which provide some helping or utility features.

Link connected

This binary_sensor, as the name implies, shows the actual link state. It goes on whenever it receives a valid frame and goes off if no valid frames are received over an internally defined timeout (currently about 5 sec). Note: having some data on the UART channel doesn’t mean the link is active: those data must resolve to a valid HEX or TEXT frame.

binary_sensor:
  - platform: m3_vedirect
    vedirect_id: vedirect_0
    link_connected:
      name: "Link connected"

Raw HEX frame

This is a text_sensor used to publish the last received valid HEX frame. It might work as a simple debug tool since it will log, in the corresponding HA sensor, the full history of received HEX frames. As a drawback, this could soon become unmanageable since HA is not very happy when managing a rapid changing history (it might be updated several times per second though). Still could prove to be usuful though.

text_sensor:
  - platform: m3_vedirect
    vedirect_id: vedirect_0
    rawhexframe:
      name: "Raw HEX frame"

Raw TEXT frame

This is a text_sensor used to publish the last received valid TEXT frame. It might work as a simple debug tool since it will log, in the corresponding HA sensor, the full history of received TEXT frames. As for the rawhexframe tool, this could soon become unmanageable since HA is not very happy when managing a rapid changing history (this entity should update every 1 sec or so).

text_sensor:
  - platform: m3_vedirect
    vedirect_id: vedirect_0
    rawtextframe:
      name: "Raw TEXT frame"