Changing type of entity generated through the Lutron integration

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Hi,

Very interesting journey with Home Assistant and great to see how fast it is moving forward!

I’m now trying to build more generic/type based automations. It is generally working great, especially with the broader use of areas/floors.

Now my quesiton, I LOVE lutron for light switches. I started my automation journey with them and they have been rock solid. Local control, easy to add remote control and they work even if everything goes down (except power, obviously).

I’ve been expanding their use of the dimmers for … towel heaters. It works great. Similar to incandescent bulbs really ! :wink: Well within the max wattage.

Now, maybe you see my question coming. Since they are lutron dimmers… they are automatically included in home assistant as lights! And it throws all my light based automations off.

I have a suboptimal fix which was to great a light group excluding them… but that is not idea and if I add a switch or a dimmer, I need to remember to add it to the group and I must reference the helper explicitly instead of just using all lights (e.g. when no one has been home for a while).

Anyone knows a way to change the of a device going through a core integration? I looked at customize the yaml file. Is it the right idea? Should I look at something else?

Thanks for your help in advance.

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You’re on the right path - you should be able to customize it via YAML as described here: Home Assistant Core Integration - Home Assistant.

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Thank you fellow Canadian :slight_smile: That is indeed what I was looking at. As a replacement class, what would you suggest. I requires a dimmer like feature (so being to control current allow to flow through the device), which I could not easily find in another class (other than cover, but that does not seem to be the right fit). Also, when I was looking at the list, I could not see light in the list that supports device class customization.

I’ll give it a shot and report back if it can help others. Thanks again !! :slight_smile:

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I think you can hook onto any device… I think it would be something like

homeassistant:
  customize:
    light.my_light_device:
      device_class: ...

However, looking at this a bit more and I think the issue you may have is finding a device that has a method of supporting the “dimming” effect and translating that correctly to the switch.

What may work better is not having HA integrate the switch directly, but instead have something like MQTT or maybe NodeRED (not sure, never used that one before) act as the proxy to the switch, and have it exposed to HA as something else so it doesn’t get grouped with your other lights.

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ahhhhh, interesting the proxy bit. I might ended just not bringing it into home assistant and limit myself to a regular schedule. That can be done directly on the Lutron bridge.

Thanks a lot for the quick reply! Have a great day :slight_smile:

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Hey dont give up lol i proxied lights before. Actually ive done way more that i combined two devices into one via a proxy (Tuya Light + Zigbee Relay) for true local on/off control but still have color/temp/brightness control within the proxy as well.

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