Whisker, a Litter-Robot card for Home Assistant
The Litter-Robot has a clear physical state and a couple of actions people use every day. Home Assistant showed it as a list of raw sensors. This card shows it the way the robot looks.
- For
- Open source, for Home Assistant users
- When
- 2026
- Status
- Maintained under homeassistant-extras on GitHub.
The situation
Home Assistant’s official Litter-Robot integration exposes everything: status codes, waste level, litter level, pet weight, a dozen switches. On a dashboard that comes out as a long list of raw entities, which is a lot of reading to answer "does the box need emptying?"
What I built
A custom dashboard card, written in TypeScript with Lit, that shows the robot’s status in plain words with a matching icon, gauges for litter and waste, the last pet weight, and when the robot was last seen. The two things people do every day, start a clean cycle and reset, are buttons right on the card. Everything else opens in a controls dialog.
The visual editor lets you pick the robot from a list filtered to Litter-Robot devices, so setting it up doesn’t involve writing YAML.
Why I did it this way
Finding entities by translation key
People rename entities. The integration’s translation keys don’t change, so that’s what the card uses to find the waste gauge, the status sensor and the rest.
Reuse Home Assistant’s own controls
The advanced settings open in a dialog built from Home Assistant’s standard entity rows instead of custom controls. It keeps the card small, and every control behaves exactly the way it does everywhere else in the app.
Be upfront about models
I built and tested it with a Litter-Robot 5. Older models work to the extent the integration exposes the same entities, and the README says so up front.
What changed
Owners can see at a glance whether the box needs emptying, and start a clean cycle or a reset in one tap.
Whisker is one of nine card repositories under homeassistant-extras.
Built with
- TypeScript
- Lit
- Home Assistant
- Lovelace
- HACS
- GitHub Actions
- Mocha
