Migrating from a different system to Home Assistant, I was quite impressed by how efficiently HA discovered all the devices I had on my network. When I installed the Tasmota integration and all 120 devices showed up, I was stoked. Promptly started putting entities into automations and scripts and google assistant etc. All good so far.
Then I noticed that Tasmota integration seems use both topic and friendly name in the ID. So if my topic is ‘mylamp’ and the friendly name ‘my lamp’, I end up with 'light.mylamp_my_lamp… I thought that to be redundant, and started renaming all 120 of them, removing the topic_ portion…
Everything broke! I thought that these changes would propagate throughout HA, scripts, automations etc… I guess not.
I also noticed, that when I hit the the circular arrow next to the entity field inside the properties, it goes right back to light.topic_friendly_name…
And while most entity IDs let themselves be modified, some of them (which I probably touched before), say ‘this name already used’ or something to that effect. Except I cannot find that supposed ‘duplicate id’ anywhere.
So, is there an easy way out of this mess I created, or do I need to start from scratch?
And if I need to start from scratch, is there a way to do away with topic_friendly_name and just do friendly_name or just light.topic. Or do I just keep it?
Why is this in Voice Assistant? Because these doubly identified names show up in Google Home and it is a major PITA to rename every device… I really would rather just have a light called ‘Office Recessed’ than ‘ofcrec Off Recessed’
Thanks