Confused on how to configure Areas

Configuration
21

looking for clues to the use of areas, i stumbled on you post here.
Must have missed this completely, but none of what you use here is familiar to me…

where do you write
entity_config:
expose: false and
room: ??

thing is I wanted to start experimenting with these areas, but having only made 1 Office area, I cant seem to find it in the state machine. Probably isn’t there, but wanted to be sure it wouldn’t interfere, or double, all my already existing groups, with the same name…
also, is a room as you use above, the same as an area?

any pointers are appreciated!

22

It’s in my google assistant configuration - it’s all part of the configuration for that.

23

a yes, thanks, forgot about that… use the room: setup in my nabucasa setup also, but they are not the same as the areas in HA are they? Those rooms are for Google Home organization only afaik?

have you setup Areas in HA, and, can we manipulate/config these in yaml, or is this a configuration thing only.

24

They are only available for use with integrations - so not yaml.
I believe GA will use areas as room hints if you don’t add devices via rooms in GA config (obviously only if the device is allocated to an area in integrations)

25

ok thanks, will start some testing…
thing is HUE automatically creates lights groups, which are lights in HA, and has recently added Zones to their setup, also imported as lights in HA, Tradfri does something alike, and I already have handmade groups that contain entities in a room, and Google Home uses room: … so many things to consider when giving correct and unique names :wink:

26

Totally… and then throw in as well that Google likes to have reserved words that they change without notice so it’s not easy at times to keep everything working…

27

Any update on this? Is this feature being tracked on Github?

28

There really isn’t much you can do with areas at the moment. And I don’t believe anyone in the thread created a feature request.

What are you trying to do, i’m sure there’s a better way to handle it over areas.

29

hi I’m new to HASS
comming from Vera

the idea for me is t section/group items into “rooms”
this will make it a lot cleaner
right now its a mess as things are all over the place

to me areas is the same thing as vera’s (rooms)
most of my items are imported by Vera
the items don’t show under integrations so i cant apply areas to it
it seems strange to implement a function but not allow it to be selected

are there alternatives?

30

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.

31

can light also go in a normal group?

32

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.

33

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

34

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:

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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

35

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:

36

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.

1 Like
37

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.

38

what is the new cast feature?

39

Honestly, I don’t know much about it. But it’s listed in the blogs.

40

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.