How do you replace devices?
I recently had to replace an old Zigbee bulb that had stopped working properly. How do you handle this? Do you manually replace all instances of this device in all automations, scenes, etc.? Or is there a magic button I am not aware of that makes this easier? At least I could use Spook to let me know which places I need to look at, but especially for scenes it is a pain because you need to reconfigure the settings for the device manually.
17 replies
Copy the entity ID from the old device. Delete it. Add new device and change the entity ID of the new one to the old.
It would be great if they built a device replacement function that would intelligently swap all the entities from an old device to a new one.
Missing basics like this are one of the things that drive me crazy about HA (as an 8-year user). Yes, the new Maintenance dashboard is nice, but they really need to focus more on creaky foundational problems.
Still waiting for a way to organize my automations...
I'm curious what you'd like for organization, I have all of mine sorted into categories.
Whatever you do don't tell them that. The "community project" with 5-6 full time paid developers will berate you for being ungrateful for your free software that thousands of users pay monthly to have developed.
I haven’t seen that attitude with HA, but for some other projects yes. It also may depend on what your attitude is when asking questions.
I 1000% get the fully volunteer projects being defensive. They catch a lot of shit for no pay.
But once I asked why they reworked and removed functionality that was easier to use and understand than what they replaced it with and they took me to task about how the person who did it was a volunteer contributor. OKAY, I get that there's still lots of volunteer code submissions but shouldn't the full time employees being overseeing it to make sure changes are improvements in all aspects?
I love the software and I have used it almost since the beginning, but if the community is paying for development and it's the actual livelyhood of the employees, I don't want to hear that I should be happy with what I get because it's "free."
I'm very curious how you positioned it. I've seen LOTS of examples of people describing things this way, but when you look at the actual interaction it was way less reasonable.
I actually, I looked back and it wasn't even me they were snarky with. I had complained earlier in the thread, but it was another user complaining that the documentation on the change was super unclear and incomplete. At one point they suggested we dig into the developer comments on the change process in github. For regular users and not devs?
They got snarky about the documentation complaint and more or less said the person complaining that it was unclear should fix the documentation themselves. Because we need people who don't understand the changes writing those? I replied that snark was inappropriate for a company with several paid full time devs that said they want to be a real smarthome brand in a recent announcement. And that's when they gave me the volunteer spiel and that the change was made by a volunteer. Who's running the company and cashing the paychecks? It's just such an unprofessional fallback. If the people cashing the paychecks aren't overseeing changes that break widely used functions I'm not sure it will ever break into the regular market.
It's still hard for me to reccomend it to anyone who's not a real dig in and get dirty kind of techy.
I will say it's now been a couple years since that incident and I still find documentation after changes lacking from time to time, despite the paid team having grown in that time.
@EarMaster Someone else here on Fedi taught me a trick for that!
You create device groups and add the devices you want to them. Doesn't matter if it's only for one lightbulb, you create a group for it.
Then you build your automations targeting the group, and not the device(s) inside of it.
To help with clutter, you can even hide the individual devices from the UI.
Now, when you need to replace that device, you add the replacement to the group, remove the failed/old one, and it's done! No need to scour automations and scripts, or to redo your cards or dashboards!
I'll update the post in a few hours with the link to the person who taught me this, can't do it right now.
Edit: As promised, linking to @unixorn, who was the one that taught me this: https://hachyderm.io/@unixorn/115294312403405669
That seems like overkill for me tbh. That means in addition to my numerous devices I have an additional group for every one of them and it also clutters the device selector.
That's what I did when I changed my phone recently. Works really well, and the next phone upgrade (hopefully not before 2032) will be super easy.
This feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that can be solved by simply making sure the new device has the same entity id as the old…
Not trying to be rude, because your solution does work. It just adds so much overhead to setup.
For me the magic is to use entities for everything, not raw devices. If I replace a device I just assign all of its entities the same IDs they had before and everything keeps working. I don't think this is highlighted as prominently as it should be, but I found this advice on Reddit back in the day and got rid of a lot of the issues with my setup
My perception is that the devices are more forward when configuring automations than the entities. Maybe I’m mistaken.
But that is how I do it all. Devices are too much trouble. I learned when I reassigned some outlets.
If you use zigbee2mqtt it's easy. Just set the old HA ID on the bulb in zigbee2mqtt.
I changed my automations since the Labs Experiment and this months update to "turn any lamp in area living room on" with Purpose-specific triggers and conditions. Made it easier to switch out my window sensors lately.