Do you suffer from the terrible rash and itch of unnamed device entities?

Hardware
1

Or…how can I get my device to work with Home Assistant?

I currently have several smart devices of different types (wall switches, dimmers, plugs, etc.), all of the same brand, and almost all of them work quite well with Home Assistant.

However, my two in-wall outlets (TP-Link Kasa KP200) do not play as nicely. Every time Home Assistant is restarted the four entities from those two devices have their names re-jumbled, two of them randomly becoming “unnamed device”. Which means yet another round of reconfiguring both Lovelace and the Automations set up for those devices. It’s frustrating.

Any suggestions on what I might do to get consistent entity names?

Thanks.

(Apologies for the clickbait subject line.)

2

I’ve not had those problems, but I’ve had other problems with TP-Link, leaving me pretty unimpressed with them.

However, rather than updating Lovelace with the new entity_id, you might find it easier to rename the new entity back to the old name. Under “Developer Tools > States”, find the entity, click the “i”, click the cog and change the entity_id.

You may get an error saying it already exists, in which case it probably has “restored: true”, in which case you can first remove the old entity.

Not much of a solution, but at least it should ease the pain.

1 Like
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Thanks Michael, I appreciate the reply.

In trying out your suggested procedure on these unnamed devices, the Settings dialog informs that:

This entity does not have a unique ID, therefore its settings cannot be managed from the UI.

I’ve tried tweaking the core.entity_registry file directly too, but no joy.

These two are (so far) the only trouble I’ve had with TP-Link Kasa devices, all others I’ve installed have been fine. That I only have two of these smart outlets and they both have the same issue in Home Assistant – they work perfectly in the Kasa app – leaves me wondering whether the problem is with the devices…or maybe the integration code for them in Home Assistant (not intending to cast aspersions).

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How could I determine which? And if the problem does lie with the integration code, what might I do about it?

5

About a month or so ago the “unnamed devices” problem went away. Yay!

It appears to have been rectified when I made a network change on the HA server. Initially my Kasa devices were all on an separate subnet, with appropriate routing in place. For unrelated reasons, I added a second NIC to the HA server to directly connect it to the Kasa network. Now all is good.