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Devices

Settings, Devices is the single hub for everything LocalSky talks to: every controller, source, and sensor, whether LocalSky owns it natively or sees it mirrored from Home Assistant. If you only remember one screen for hardware, remember this one. The companion Sensors page is just a lens that filters this same set down to the probes and meters.

The three tiers

LocalSky groups hardware into three tiers, and keeping them straight makes the rest of the UI obvious:

  • Controllers open and close valves. Your OpenSprinkler, or the Home Assistant service that fronts your valves, is a controller. This is what actually waters. See Irrigation controllers for the supported list and per-kind configuration.
  • Sources (also called gateways) bring data in. A weather station, an Ecowitt gateway on your LAN, a forecast provider, an MQTT broker, or a Home Assistant bridge: each is a source. A source is a pipe, not a probe.
  • Sensors are the individual probes and meters those sources carry. A soil-moisture probe paired to an Ecowitt gateway is a sensor on that gateway; a flow meter wired to your OpenSprinkler is a sensor on that controller.

So a sensor never connects to LocalSky directly. It rides in through a source or sits on a controller. Add the source or controller here, and its sensors show up underneath it, ready to use. The Add your first soil sensor walkthrough follows this model end to end.

Native vs Home Assistant

Every device card is tagged with its origin:

  • Native devices are ones LocalSky owns directly: a source or controller you added here. Native devices are editable in place. Click Edit on the card to open the same source or controller editor used elsewhere, change it, and save; the device registry hot-reloads shortly after. You can also enable or disable a source with the toggle on its card, which controls whether it contributes to weather readings without removing its configuration.
  • Home Assistant devices are mirrored in from a configured HA bridge. They are read-only here, because HA owns them. The card says “Managed in Home Assistant” instead of an Edit button. To change one, change it in HA; the mirror follows.

A native device that also exists in Home Assistant carries a small + HA badge, so you can tell at a glance that the same physical thing is visible on both sides without it being a duplicate. Cards also show an Online or Offline pill when LocalSky has a reachability signal, and a small badge with a count of how many items the device carries. Expand the card to see what those items are: the sensors and zones the device brings in, broken out as child rows.

Adding a device

The Add a device bar gives you two direct paths and one discovery path:

  • Weather source: opens the source editor. Pick a kind (Ecowitt gateway, MQTT, a forecast provider, a Home Assistant passthrough, and so on), fill in its connection details, and save.
  • Controller: opens the controller editor. Pick a kind and configure it. Exactly one controller is the default; new zones inherit it.
  • Scan network: sweeps the LAN for supported gateways (Ecowitt today) that broadcast on your network.

Sources you add join one unified list of every source LocalSky knows about, each with live status and an enable/disable toggle. Cloud services available in your region that you have not enabled yet appear separately as “coverage you can add”: toggle one on to start using it immediately.

Scan and adopt

The fastest way to add an Ecowitt gateway is to let LocalSky find it:

  1. Click Scan network. LocalSky listens for supported gateways broadcasting on the LAN.
  2. Each gateway it finds shows up as a Discovered card with its model, IP, and MAC address.
  3. Click Adopt as source. That opens the source editor prefilled with the gateway’s host and a sensible poll interval, so you usually just confirm and save.
  4. Once saved, LocalSky starts polling the gateway, and its soil channels appear as sensors under it (visible here and on the Sensors page), ready to bind to a zone.

If a scan finds nothing, the gateway may not be on the same subnet, or it may not broadcast; in that case add it by hand with Weather source, choosing the Ecowitt gateway kind and typing the IP into the host field.

Per-reading source priority and backup chains

Each headline reading (temperature, humidity, wind, rain, pressure, solar/UV) has its own ordered chain of sources. The first source in the chain that is reporting fresh data owns the reading; if it goes quiet the next takes over, so a reading is never lost while any source in its chain is fresh. “Automatic” is the smart default order for your region and enabled sources. To customize it, open Settings > Devices > Data sources and drag a reading’s source rows into the order you want (or use the up and down arrow keys); that becomes “Custom”. The order you set is exactly the priority the engine uses for that reading. A one-source chain behaves like a single hard pin.

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