I just now switched from the old Z-wave integration to the new OpenZWave integration and all my devices went back to their default names. Since I’ve got 40-odd devices, what are the best practices around naming Z-wave devices now?
There’s really two parts to this question - first, what’s the best mechanics for doing the renaming with the OpenZWave integration? The GUI for editing devices/entities, editing some .yaml file, or something inside OpenZWave? How well does the integration do long-term remembering these new names?
Second, what naming scheme do people like? The default names are obnoxiously long (like “sensor.zd2105us_5_recessed_door_window_sensor_battery_level_2” and very unhelpful to look at. I’d been using this sort of scheme: sensor.room_function_attribute so the one above might be “sensor.kitchen_door_batterylevel”. But it’s a lot of work to rename them like this and I’m wondering if some other scheme might be better.
I use the Device renaming functionality which is permanent. Some people like to use ozw-admin to do renames, but currently HA won’t remember those name changes and if you ever lose your cache file or it’s corrupted you’ll also lose your HA names. Renaming by device will also rename all of child entity ids and friendly names (with the exception of some cases where there is punctuation in the name and it fails).
I just noticed the renaming via Device does not rename the entity IDs any longer. I’m pretty sure it used to work, and it does work for other integrations. That’s not good. It looks like the Device name doesn’t match any longer.
edit: somehow I ended up with Device names that didn’t match the entity names. Re-installing the integration resulted in a different set of entity names, which allowed the renames to work properly.