Right now if one has common entities that they want to sync, it must be done through automations (I think). It would be a really great quality of life feature to allow users to link entity states. For example, when light.living_room is On, make light.fireplace On, and vice versa, and off = off. Maybe even something slightly more complicated, like binary_sensor.pantry_door linked to light.pantry so open = on, closed = off (though that admittedly could only work 1 way)
This stuff is all possible today and I’ve tried to simplify things with groups, scenes, and automations, but I feel like it’s common enough that it could or should be simplified in the interface. At the very least it would certainly help cut down on my number of automations, which is increasingly growing with simple things like keeping light states synced.
and if something like this is already possible outside of automations please let me know and forgive my ignorance. It seems like something that should exist as an option within the ‘group’ configuration yaml but I’m not aware of such an option
I personally think this would be best served by an automation enhancement, i.e. “basic” and “advanced” automations. I think taking it out of automations altogether would be incongruous.
I’m tempted to agree as I think more about where I would put this functionality. I guess it makes sense as automations, but I do wish it were easier. Maybe it’s possible through blueprints or something and it could be suggested as a common one when adding an automation to ‘mirror’ two entity states. I’m probably just not good enough with automations, but I end up having multiple automations for every sync I want to do… LivingRoom_SyncOn, LivingRoom_SyncOff, and LivingRoom_SyncBrightness to try to perform the correct actions based on potential triggers. As a result my automations are littered with just lighting sycs: living room, kitchen, basement, and en suite in my setup. Those few thing are all essentially ‘when device 1 or 2 change state, change device 2 or 1 to same’ but those 4 ‘groups’ end up requiring 8-12 automations (again, probably because I’m a dummy and not doing the automation trigger/actions efficiently, but that kinda leads back to the point of this feature request - hopefully simplifying this automation via built-in blueprints or some other gui wizard)