Device triggers are not as useful as state triggers as there is no control over unknown state

[BlinkyLights]

I would really prefer if device triggers either had from/to control like state triggers or by default ignored unknown state.

This is particularly a problem with on/off sensors for the most part I find I can’t use the simpler device trigger because when I restart HA or lets say restart Zigbee2mqtt or Zwave2mqtt the state will flip between unknown and on or unknown and off, thus triggering the automation. You can over come this with conditions but then you are not getting any benefit over using a state tigger to begin with.

Device Actions on the other hand are typically great.

[tom_l]

@BlinkyLights

Device Actions on the other hand are typically great.

Until you have to replace the device.

[BlinkyLights]

Entities arnt much better since you need to fully release them restart rename etc to try and keep them in place.

HA really needs a “replace” function for devices / entities but that is another topic.

This is simply an request to address behaviour of the Device triggers and I’m my opinion it isn’t useful to have them fire on reboot due to unknown state.

[tom_l]

@BlinkyLights

Entities arnt much better since you need to fully release them restart rename etc to try and keep them in place.

You can change a new entity id to match an old one in one place, Configuration / Entities. You cant do this with device ids.

@BlinkyLights

HA really needs a “replace” function for devices / entities but that is another topic.

It is also an existing feature request.

Add a method of replacing devices

Automations associated with a device are marked as unavailable if you replace that device if it is faulty/stolen etc… For state automations you just name the new entity_id the same as the old and… you’re done. For device automations you have to search out all the occurrences of the old device_id and replace them with the new one. You cant just edit the new device id to be the same as the old one. For people only using the UI this is daunting task and they would probably end up re-writing all …

@BlinkyLights

This is simply an request to address behaviour of the Device triggers and I’m my opinion it isn’t useful to have them fire on reboot due to unknown state.

Device triggers are simple triggers. They don’t (and probably never will) support advanced options like specifying the from and to states, or support templating. If you want that use one of the other trigger types.

[BlinkyLights]

Ya the whole point is that there current simple implementation is bad since they can easily trigger on restart. We are off topic here.

At the very least they should not trigger from unknown states.