Now we have labels I am thinking about what I can use them for and how in order to build an effective and consistent system. After all there is nothing worse than just start without a concept and later having to redo everything.
I want to start an idea and discussion and brainstorming how we can use labels in the best way.
Some ideas I had so far:
Type of connection (Zigbee, Wifi, Ethernet etc.)
Type of device (Light, Cover, Mediaplayer etc.)
Power Source (Mains powered, battery powered)
Exposed to Alexa, Google Home etc.
Priority entities (e.g. when you have multiple temperature sensors in one room show which is the primary one to use)
Another thing is label colors. Would you give each label its own color, where you will eventually run out and have to multi use colors? Or would you rather use a color for all labels for a certain group (e.g. type of connection labels all in blue)?
So if you have already started organizing you label system or you also have good ideas please share.
I have been duplicating a system of tags in automation/script/helper names which I was using before. They are now labelled by function - heating, lighting, security, and so on - mainly because I prefer to write short interlocking automations and scripts rather than long complex ones. It’s very helpful to be able to list automations with a similar role.
I’ve looked at labelling other things, but the question is: “When am I going to use it?”
In your examples there are other ways of listing types of connection, exposed to Alexa and power source (well, batteries, anyway) so why label them again? Also, if I go to, say, Settings | Voice Assistants | Alexa I can change the setting on the spot.
A mass of unnecessary labels is going to be more confusing than not I suspect.
Haven’t tried colours yet, although buttons on my main dashboard are grouped and colour coded (by function again) so it might be a good idea to colour lables the same way.
Also… I recently have started to use labels to gather data and write YAML configuration files directly into my packages.
One of my use-cases is to throttle many of my sensors that cause too many writes to the database because of the precision with which they report.
I have temperature sensors that log to 4 decimal places !!!
I have Persons and Phones that log Geo Coordinates to 9 decimal places (when for my purposes, 3 suffices)
I use the following labels (sometimes combined)
Throttle-Half
Throttle-0
Throttle-1
Throttle-2
I have macros gather the data (usually a list of entity ids) and then pass that data to a script that prepares the YAML and writes it to the filesystem
I was previously using AppDaemon for this, but am switching to this pure HA solution because the API used by AppDaemon does not provide Label data
