Autoconfiguration panel¶

After installation, Fado appears in your Home Assistant sidebar. Click it to access the configuration panel where you can autoconfigure each light for the smoothest fades with the minimum of overhead.

Run Autoconfigure to automatically measure optimal step timing, support for native transitions, and minimum real brightness for each light.

Settings¶

Setting	Description	Default	Range
Min delay	Minimum delay (ms) between fade-steps without overloading slower devices	Global min delay	global - `2000`
Min brightness	Minimum real brightness value that the light supports	`1`	`1` - `255`
Native transitions	Whether to use the device's native transitions to smooth fading	`No`	`No`, `Yes`, `Disable`
Exclude	Exclude this light from management by Fado	`No`	`No`, `Yes`
Global min delay	Absolute minimum delay (ms) for all lights. Per-light min delay cannot be lower	`100`	`50` - `2000`
Download diagnostics	Download diagnostic data for debugging	—	—

Minimum delay¶

Autoconfiguration measures how long it takes for a light to apply changes to brightness and to report back its new state to Home Assistant. This minimum delay is the amount of time (in milliseconds) that Fado will wait between each fade step.

The lower this number, the smoother the fade can be but the more events Home Assistant needs to process. However, there is no point in sending more frequent updates than the light can handle. While you can configure this setting manually, it is not recommended to set it to a lower value than that determined by autoconfiguration.

Accepts 50ms - 2000ms and defaults to the global minimum delay. The minimum delay for an individual light cannot be set lower than the global minimum delay.

Minimum brightness¶

Home Assistant allows setting a brightness value anywhere from 1 to 255, but internally lights often use a different scale, for instance 1 to 100. For these lights, setting a brightness value of 1 might result in the light being turned off instead.

Autoconfigure determines the minimum brightness value where light is still emitted. With Fado, setting a brightness percentage or brightness value lower than this setting will instead apply the minimum real brightness.

Native transitions¶

Some lights support native transitions, that is the light hardware knows how to fade between two brightness levels. This is triggered by passing a time value to the transition parameter of light.turn_on. However, even if the light claims to support transitions, in reality this may not be the case. Also, the amount of time the transition takes may be very different from the time passed to the transition parameter.

Autoconfiguration tests this out to determine (a) whether native transitions are actually supported, and (b) how this affects the minimum step delay.

By setting native transitions manually to Disable, Fado will disable native transitions when autoconfiguring the minimum step delay, and when applying fades to a light.

Exclude¶

Checking the Exclude checkbox next to a light will prevent Fado from fading a light and also from autorestoring the original brightness level.

Global minimum delay¶

This is the absolute minimum delay for all lights. No light may have a custom minimum delay setting below this value. It defaults to 100ms and has a minimum value of 50ms.

Download diagnostics¶

The Download diagnostics link will download a JSON file containing all of the data used by Fado for debugging purposes. Important when submitting bug reports.

By default, Fado adds a Fado Light Fader entry to the Home Assistant sidebar, visible to all users. If you prefer to control who can access the Fado UI, you can disable the sidebar panel and use a custom dashboard instead.

To disable the sidebar panel:

Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Fado → Configure
Uncheck Show sidebar panel
Click Submit

The sidebar entry will be removed immediately. The Fado card and dashboard strategy remain available for use in any Lovelace dashboard.

Custom autoconfiguration dashboard¶

Fado provides a custom Lovelace card (custom:fado-card) and a dashboard strategy (custom:fado) that give you the same autoconfiguration UI as the sidebar panel, but with full control over dashboard visibility and placement.

Adding the Fado card to an existing dashboard¶

You can add the Fado card to any Lovelace dashboard:

Edit your dashboard and click Add Card
Select the By card tab, then search for Fado Light Fader (in Home Assistant 2026.6+ the card picker opens on the By entity tab; the Fado card configures the whole integration rather than a single entity, so it only appears under By card)
Add the card

Or add it manually in YAML mode:

type: custom:fado-card

For best results, use the card in a Panel view (single card filling the full page).

Creating a dedicated Fado dashboard¶

To create a standalone Fado dashboard using the built-in strategy:

Go to Settings → Dashboards → Add Dashboard
Set the URL to something like lovelace-fado
Configure visibility (e.g. admin only, or specific users)
Open the dashboard and switch to raw configuration editor (Edit Dashboard → Raw configuration editor)
Replace the contents with:

strategy:
  type: custom:fado

This creates a full-page dashboard with the Fado card. You can then control which users see it via the dashboard visibility settings.

Repairs¶

When Fado detects lights that haven't been autoconfigured yet, it raises an issue under Settings → System → Repairs to prompt you to configure them. The issue clears automatically once every light is configured.

You can control this behaviour in Settings → Devices & Services → Fado → Configure:

Notify about unconfigured lights — Uncheck to stop raising the repair entirely.
Dashboard URL — When the sidebar panel is disabled, the repair's learn-more link points to this URL (e.g. /lovelace-fado/0). Leave blank to omit the link.