Entity_id - how do you find it?

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Hello for all!

First of all let me introduce my self. I am senior Python developer. 6 months ago I have moved in to the new house which is totally smart. I choose Fibaro system back then as it looked much more complete then any open source project. I have over 50 zwave devices connected to my home zwave network. Unfortunately Fibaro home center hub just died a month ago. Never the less I already hated it because of the things you can’t do with it and because of many bugs, phone battery draining etc… Peace of shit. Just like Microsoft software… So I started looking more seriously in to open source projects and found this. I thing it’s just totally amazing! Already love it. This is what I really need!

So, having said that… I have plenty of experiences in home automation, python, open source project, etc… I find Home Assistant amazing, but after reading all the documentations, examples and even some part of core code I am still puzzled… Where do you get entity_id of a device? Entity_id of a device is a core peace of information yet there is zero information on how to obtain it once you connect a device to HA. Is there a way to change it? If yes, then how? These questions frustrated my initial experience since the very first moments I started reading through the docs…

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In the left sidebar, under the Developer Tools, click on the States icon which looks like “< >”. Then, on the right of the page, you will find a list of all known entities (entity_ids).

Whether or not you can change these entity_ids depends on the device. For example:

  • the entity_ids of Philips Hue light bulbs are based on the name you gave the bulbs in the Hue app.
  • the entity_ids of sensors, switches, input_booleans, etc…you create in the configuration file you can obviously choose the name of yourself.
  • the entity_ids of ZWave devices are based on the name of the manufacturer and the product name, but you can change them through the Open ZWave Control Panel.

You can customize each device with a friendly_name but that is only how they will show up in the UI. The friendly_name does not affect the entity_id of a device or how they are referenced in the configuration file.

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Although 2 years old, your answer helped me too, thank you !

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