Extend/customize devices

[petro]

I really think you should spend time learning about core.device_registry or MQTT discovery before trying to reply to my responses. What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense.

[boheme61]

Eventually i believe i will have to learn about MQTT, however im not there yet, and this Topic aint about MQTT. And as i haven’t read much about MQTT, i also don’t know what people mean, or put in their words, nor how they interpret the functions of i.e a MQTT feature

[petro]

Right, this topic ain’t about MQTT, it’s about devices. Which are controlled by the device registry. MQTT is the only integration that allows a user to create a device. So you as a user can create entities and attach them to devices. I.e. Extending devices or creating custom devices, as mentioned before:

@petro

Try using MQTT discovery, you can attach entities to any device rather easily as long as you have a matching identifier connection.

[uSlackr (Greg Martin)]

There was movement on this in 2024.7. Shout out to @dougiteixeira, who added the ability to add template entities created through the UI to existing devices. Here’s hoping this gets extended to other helpers going forward.

[dougiteixeira]

@uSlackr

There was movement on this in 2024.7. Shout out to @dougiteixeira, who added the ability to add template entities created through the UI to existing devices. Here’s hoping this gets extended to other helpers going forward

There has been no movement to add what was requested in this feature request, personally I find it difficult for the HA core team to implement this in the short term.

UI configuration for more types of template helpers is being done, even though with fewer features than YAML, this would already address many use cases. In a second moment we can try to “equalize” the YAML and UI resources, but doing so and maintaining the organization of the config flow is an obstacle.

[uSlackr (Greg Martin)]

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply this FR was being addressed, more that the change you provided in the latest release moves HA in that general direction. I do not expect my FR to stop the train .

[Forage]

I’d love to see this RFE implemented a well.

In my case it’s a select entity that I want to be part of a double switch device and have the select act on and change the switch states.

I’ve been maintaining a separate template for it for some time. But as I’m adding more and more devices, the code duplication is becoming cumbersome to handle. All this just because I need to change the device reference in two locations for each device.