So everything works fine and as expected. But one of the outcomes of using the Aqara app on iOS is that I need to add it to HomeKit in order to get it into HAOS. And the way to do that is to then remove it from HomeKit, at which point is is discovered by the HK integration in HAOS. That’s fine. Very very stupid that you have to add it to HK then delete it, but fine.
I’m aware that a firmware update allows the device to be discovered directly, but this doesn’t work on iOS because their app still forces you to add it to HK.
The problem is that once this is done, the device disappears from the Aqara iOS app. So I can’t go and modify the zones, change zone names, update firmware, etc.
If I want to add it back into the app, I have to reset the device; but when I do that, it’s no longer accessible in HAOS until I go through the steps again (add it to HK, remove it from HK, and have it discovered by HAOS again).
The problem with that is that the unique internal entity IDs for the zones change and the ones currently in my automations are no longer valid. They are replaced by blank fields. So I then have to go back into all my automations and re-add the zones again.
It doesn’t matter if the rediscovered device’s zones have the same name; the internal ID values have changed so the automations and anything that referenced the old entities is no longer valid.
The biggest problem with this is that I have some fairly complex automations, and I don’t remember exactly how they are configured. So re-adding the zones back into them is problematic - does “this part” of “this automation” check zone1 or zone 6? What about the next part of the automation? Which zone was it using here?
No idea.
I’ve had to re-add my zones and re-configure my automations about 4 times in the past year. I now have my automations documents so I can re-add the zones fairly quickly, but it’s a real annoyance that so many automations stop working and I’ve got to delve deep into my automation code it fix things.