Device Names

Placed this one outside the beta group as it often gets a conversation going…

I noticed Home Assistant was smart enough to construct rooms / areas automatically for my Hue lights and shades brought in via my Bond Bridge. Initially I thought this was based on name prefixes but now suspect the rooms / zones in both platforms were used. Nonetheless, HA was still smart enough to remove prefixes like “Living Room” when displaying them on the dashboard. A nice touch.

So it would seem we can still include prefixes in device names for more accurate indications of where they reside, without needing to adjust their display manually.

Does anyone else have any tips for device naming and how it interacts with things like Home Assistant?

Some quirks with the HA naming functions for example.

The room name must match exactly the start of the device naming, and if it is using a _ it will not register as a match.

Examples:
Living Room Lights will match to a room named living room and display under its tab as Lights.
Living Room Lights will match to a room named living and display under its tab as room lights.
Kitchen_Lights will NOT match to a room named kitchen, but Kitchen Lights will.

Here is a visual example so you can see what i mean

In the business room for example, i have a wled controlled that is named business windows, because it lacks the word room there was no match and the name didn’t get shortened to just windows.

Under Kitchen you can see devices named Kitchen_ do not match for Kitchen and retain the kitchen part of the name, but things like kitchen freezer outlet do match and become freezer outlet.

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So it’s purely based on name? And not the groupings from the integrated platform, e.g. hue or bond?

If the platform provides information such as room location I do believe HA uses that to auto populate the area. I don’t recall having to set the location of my lutron devices for example.

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