It’s not 100% complete. Gotta keep in mind that Home assistant is an open source project and new implementations often are not complete.
You can group lights, via a light group. And you can group items via a normal group.
can light also go in a normal group?
Yep, it’s just that a light group will allow you to change the brightness or color of an entire group of lights. A normal group does not have that ability.
pardon my ignorance
but, it looks to me that a group is the same as an area
how do they differ?
why have both?
to me
only difference seems to be if itys an integration, it can be set on screen instead of in the config
not sure that is completely correct, as you can see here, we can adjust brightness and color_temp of a regular group of lights and the counting lights change their brightness/color_temp accordingly:
office_lights:
name: Office
icon: mdi:floor-lamp
entities:
- light.office_inside
- light.office_outside
now this is in regular/legacy HA, but it shows you can manipulate the group so the containing entities follow
According to the dev team “in the future, we’re planning to add area based user permissions and a Lovelace area card.” That was in February, and cast may have replaced it. At this point, I think you should just ignore area’s all together as work hasn’t been done since it’s initial release in February.
Here’s a link to the original ‘areas’ post:
I have come to the conclusion that Areas is just an abandoned idea they had. Petro keeps saying it is still a work in progress, but considering nothing has change with it since this thread was started almost 10 months ago I think maybe the person who championed the idea moved on to other things and now there is no one pushing it. The other issue I see with Areas is the direction they decided to take with it and that is to only allow it to be used from entities established through Integrations which is a very small subset of the entities I have and probably most people have. Putting the requirement on other developers to support this will either make adoption of it painfully slow to the point that most people like me give up on it.
To answer your question regarding how it differs from groups was when it was first introduced they stated that eventually they will add permissions tied to Areas such that you can have a Guest user that can interact with some Areas but not all. Not sure of the other features it would give.
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To add, this new cast feature does what area’s would have done. And I agree, I think it may be abandoned, but you never know with home assistant. Just look at the entity_registry. Took like 2 years to get to where we are and it sat idle for 6 months.
what is the new cast feature?
Honestly, I don’t know much about it. But it’s listed in the blogs.
So I’m confused… areas and cast don’t seem to be in any way related.
HA will use a configured area for a device to provide a room hint for Google assistant.
The original intent for rooms was to allow the ‘interface’ to change based on the selected room. That’s what I gathered. Now you can just cast to specific devices. I tried to correlate that behavior. Sorry if i’m out in left field.
I would imagine that maybe in the future we could use ‘areas’ as a way to limit a users access to certain entities. ie: user 1 can access entities associated with any room, user 2 can only access entities associated with lounge room and kitchen…etc. Just a thought
Is it still not available? I have a lot of rfxtrx sensors and switches and I would like to assign them to areas.
And what are you going to do with these areas? They literally do nothing at the moment. No organizational benefit in the backend or UI. No automation benefit. Nothing.
That’s not true at all. Devices in the same area are automatically grouped together if you are using the automatically generated front end.
Oh man, color me a liar. That’s so useful.
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It sounds like you’re being sarcastic but it’s certainly a move in the right direction if we are taking about the push to 1.0.
If you try to have a non-technical user set up HA they are going to have a really tough time if everything isn’t laid out in an effective manner.
The on boarding process makes you select the area for devices so it’s really nice to have everything logically grouped the first time you open the UI.
It might not mean much to you, but it’s probably not “for” you.
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I never said it wasn’t. Was just simply saying that they are currently useless and serve no purpose. They were added a year ago and there hasn’t been any changes since. Until they make it so you can use these in automations/scripts, they’re still pretty useless.
It will also use the area as a room hint for Google Assistant - otherwise useless as you say.