Confused on how to configure Areas

Burningstone · February 26, 2020, 12:18pm

This is not true, groups are not being deprecated. Groups are only deprecated as a frontend construct.

See this post from the founder of Home Assistant:

mamoulian · February 26, 2020, 12:30pm

Frontend is my problem with areas. When Lovelace auto generates it currently uses areas and groups. As discussed above areas are only currently useful with Platforms that have been updated to be Integrations, so the now-deprecated groups are the only way (I think?) to tell it to put all the otherwise-unrelated kitchen stuff in a card called Kitchen.

AhmadK · February 26, 2020, 1:42pm

Maybe you could do it yourself rather than rely upon auto generation?

hagak · February 26, 2020, 9:10pm

This may be true but in the same post they have this:
Group Deprecated - Group configurations options, services and service options related to the old states UI are now deprecated and pending for removal in Home Assistant 0.107.0.

That is not specific to the frontend, and read at face value means they are going away.

Burningstone · February 26, 2020, 9:28pm

Read carefully

petro · February 26, 2020, 9:41pm

Yeah, they aren’t going away. You read that wrong. Not your fault though, it’s a shit sentence.

hagak · February 26, 2020, 9:57pm

Very poorly written. They also wrote about services and service options which are NOT tied to the states UI. So which is it?

petro · February 26, 2020, 10:03pm

Groups are staying.
view and control configuration options are not staying.
the service group.set_visibility is not staying.
the configuration options control, visible, and view for group.set service are not staying.

The options in the group section inside configuration.yaml only affect the States UI (view and control)
The service group.set_visibility only affects the states UI.
The configuration options for group.set only affects the states UI (control, visible, and view).

None of these things affected lovelace. So they are just saying that these are getting removed.

anon3881519 · February 27, 2020, 12:31am

So, we’re a year on from when Areas were introduced and I’m still not sure what they are used for or will be used for. Meanwhile groups is just slightly more useful as you can (maybe) affect a group together depending on how different the group items are from each other and groups don’t make a difference to lovelace layout that it once did in the states UI.

So… Do we know where either of these two constructs are headed?

petro · February 27, 2020, 1:04pm

It’s pretty clear that areas are going to drive the auto-generated interface.

Groups are staying the same… Nothing has changed with groups other than removing the deprecated states UI links, which should have come to no surprise to anyone when the announced that lovelace was taking over.

jaburges · March 5, 2020, 6:37pm

jut revisiting areas - as i’ve installed Dwains theme
The layout is pretty interesting as it puts things in ‘Rooms’ which is the same as Area in this context. So you can see a Room and all its entities in a single view
I’m assuming eventually other integrations, voice assistants etc will be able to leverage this.
If a command is issued to the bedroom alexa “turn off the TV” then turn off the bedroom TV, and speak the result through the bedroom sonos one? etc

It feels like area has got as far as it can in preparation, now other things probably need to begin using it a little more?

jjross · March 8, 2020, 6:16am

That’s how the default theme works now too. Everything is automatically grouped by area.

Fiendir · March 20, 2020, 1:15am

The documentation overall on what areas are intended to be used for is so incredibly vague that I can’t help but laugh. I’ve gotta come here to this years-old forums thread to discover nobody else really seems to have a solid understanding hahahah

You can’t even call an area like you can a group if you’re doing an automation or script, which kind of defeats the majority of (at least my own) use cases, when it comes to grouping together devices. Thought Areas was gonna be the new, YAML-less way of quickly configuring groups, but nope, I just wasted my own time hoping that was the case

petro · March 20, 2020, 3:46pm

Areas is a WIP and it’s only for the frontend.

ptdalen · March 24, 2020, 2:18am

After months of ignoring areas, I finally had some free time and decided to play around with it. I created two area’s even restarted HA, and after an hour or so, still cannot figure out how to add an entity or an integration to an area. Does this require yaml? Not sure I have a use for it, but wanted to see what it could do. I have zwave, zigbee, homekit, echos, ecobee, hue and have not seen anywhere for any of these as to where I would add the area. Any help is appreciated

sparkydave · March 24, 2020, 2:22am

No need for YAML. If you add a device via the Configuration --> Integrations menu you can assign the device to an area.

ptdalen · March 24, 2020, 8:02pm

I’m not seeing how to add a device to an area. Do I have to remove every device and add again to select an area during adding??

123 · March 24, 2020, 9:30pm

When you’re displaying an entity’s Device Info page, look in the upper right corner. You should see a gear icon. Click it and you’ll be able to change the entity’s Area.

Misiu · March 30, 2020, 9:57am

Anyone could like to materials on how to create automations/scripts for areas?
For example I want to turn off lights in specific area.

jjross · March 31, 2020, 2:22am

I’m not sure whether that’s possible yet. Though it does seem to work in the UI so maybe I’m wrong?