Best practice for device naming to differentiate them in various integrations

Configuration
1

Generally speaking when im configuring various devices outside of HA, I name them by location. For example for my living room Sonos it’s just “Living Room” since within the sonos app it’s redundant to also include “sonos” in the name. Similarly, for my security cameras (by Eufy) I name them “backyard” or “front porch” since again, when I’m in the eufy app I don’t need to know it’s a camera in this case since it’s clear it’s a camera.

for HA, and other systems that aggregate devices like Alexa, I’m seeing problems where I cannot distinguish devices easily. Imagine I have a sonos speaker in master bedroom, a eufy camera and a hue light.

In each of their respective proprietary apps, they are each called “Master Bedroom”.

When HA gets them all, they are known as:

media_player.master_bedroom
camera.master_bedroom
light.master_bedroom

That works great!

However now look at Alexa integration. All those devices come in all named “Master Bedroom” so things get weird. They try to differentiate device domain with icons and such but even stuff like routines are broken because there are dupe names.

Is the only way to solve this by appending a more specific suffix to solve the Alexa (and other aggregate device systems) scenario?

So:

Master Bedroom Sonos
Master Bedroom Camera
Master Bedroom Light

This then has downside of creating these device names (which I guess I could just rename):

media_player.master_bedroom_sonos
camera.master_bedroom_camera
light.master_bedroom_light

But at least this solves the Alexa case where I can now easily see the text based names and know what they are as well as avoid device name conflicts when giving verbal commands through my echos.

What am I missing?

2

You totally right and not missing anything afaik. So if I were you I would create a feature request to change the way this is handled in HA. Because this issue is not only with Alexa but with all integrations I would guess it’s better to change it in HA instead of wacht individual integration. But that might cost way more work.

3

Naming things is one of the two hard problems of Computer Science.

4

For only dealing with alexa you can use the “cloud:” config entry to customize how the entity is exposed to the alexa app.

5

Thanks! I had no idea this was possible to configure more advanced stuff and it will help me stop certain devices coming through. For anyone else reading, this is what this is reference to:
https://www.nabucasa.com/config/amazon_alexa/

However, this still doesn’t address the larger question of device naming within HA.

6

Device naming in HA itself is kind of subjective. What makes sense for one person won’t make sense to another person. You kind of just have to do what you think is good for you.

the only examples you gave in your first post dealt pretty much exclusively with Alexa naming. What other issues are you having with names?

7

Exact same issue with Alexa as in Eufy or even in Hue. Adding the suffix to each device for HA that is totally unnecessary in their native apps.

8

I’m a device - room kinda guy. So I have stuff like Thermostat - Kitchen or Camera - Back Porch. It’s just the way my brain works. My entities are a hot mess right now though. Not looking forward to the great renaming.

9

Totally realize this is a stale thread, but as I am about to migrate from my old Synology NAS HA instance to my new HA Blue appliance, I am weary about onboarding from a prior backup as there is a certain amount of non-expunged data in some of the core files. Remember the version where Z-wave entities kept showing up with ‘_2’ appended to them and iOS mobile apps were listed twice? But I also don’t want to start as a fresh installation and have to make sure the multiple changes I made, and recorded, are correct.
Here’s where I have the same issue you do, and with my Nabu Casa subscription passing this information through to the cloud and Alexa: I have master bedroom:

  1. Sonos media player (beam, sub & 2 SLs)
  2. Apple 4K TV
  3. Alexa device
  4. Lutron light switch
  5. A group of all the lights in light_group.yaml

etc. and they are all in the Area: Master Bedroom
So almost every entity has master bedroom in it for those listed above.
How can I get Alexa to correctly know through Nabu Casa “Play song XXX on Master Bedroom” it will play on the Sonos and not say back to me “You have multiple devices named master bedroom”?
I have gotten around it by naming Sonos as “Master Bedroom Sonos” in the app, just like the OP said was redundant - agreed. Same in Apple Remote: labeled Apple TV Master Bedroom. Not to mention how Alexa will group the Echo shows in the bedroom as master bedroom.
This is not intended as a ramble, but what are the best practices and have there been any changes since July 2020?
Would love to hear what some experts do to get around this so I don’t have to remember to ask Alexa to play song XX on Sonos Master Bedroom when I am standing in the master bedroom.
Hope to hear from you guys.
Thanks.

10

OK, I am trying to do the same thing. If I go to a device, there are two names I can edit. One in the upper left of the device page in the configuration settings, and one in a lovelace card. They work independently. If I go to cloud settings and change the name for the device, it also changes on the lovelace card but not the name in the upper left corner. This is a bit confusing because somehow before I was able to edit names under cloud settings and it wouldn’t impact the name in lovelace. I did to an update today so maybe that changed something? I would like to have the Room - Device Type go to Alexa so I can tell the devices apart rather than 15 lights getting imported with the same name “Light.” In HA, since there are areas, I would like to just have the device type as the name. Worst comes to worst, I can deal with this. However, not sure how I accomplished this before for some devices and can’t seem to get to work now.