Management of devices that are recognized by several integrations

Dear Community

I have been looking in the forum and over the net at some ways to better manage my devices that are seen by several integrations

I have

  • a fritz Box (and am using the official integration)
  • devolo 1200+ PLC/WIFI devices

WIFI Devices have also their own integration (Vacuum, Sonos)

In some cases HA recognises that it is the same device and adds entities, sometimes not

And when entities are merged i could not find a way to configure this merge, to reflect for instance which icon to be used. I did many different tests and realised that even sometimes the icon showed by HA is coming from an integation where the device is Disabled… not very logical

In a nutshell:

  • is there a way to indicate that 2 devices are the same when they are seen as two different devices so that entities could be attached to the same device
  • is there a way to declare Master integrations for a given devices so that i can show the right icon, also use the new 2024.04.01 function to group devices by integration (using the master one)
  • is there a way to declare integrations as minor/secondary, this is indeed what i would seen as improvement all PLC/Router/device tracker integrations should be seen as minor compared to a device specific integration. Take the sonos example…

If you take the example of cameras, how to define which integration should be used to take a snapshot ?

Any other comment or advice on how to manage this is welcome

I could not find a way to easily identify a ‘Master’ integration

There’s a HACS integration which may help:

Thanks stiltjack

i just tried it

managed to merge two integrations of the same device. Seems to work.
Apparently we can also set attributes of the merged device (i did not see if there was an option to choose the logo of the merged device from one of the integration)

No real documentation on how we should do it in the right way.
Is it better to have a new device name of the merge ? To choose the same name ? What should we do with the old devices coming from the integrations ?
and so on…

any experience to share ?

Can’t help much, I’m afraid. I have only used Device Tools to create “virtual” devices to hold template sensors - the only thing I have to share about that is that you have to give the sensors unique_ids so that they can appear in the UI.

I have been a bit wary about using it with “real” devices - as the developer says, it’s still an “at your own risk” project. I would have thought, though, that it would be safer to use a new name.

You’re right about the documentation - non-existent. :roll_eyes:

Many Thanks for your help.

Are there other ways to manage multi integrated devices ?

Anyone in the community having solutions ?

I do not get why this is not proposed in CORE.
Now that we can filter devices by integration i can see in my own system how bad the result is when you cannot configure multi integration devices

To be honest, devices have only come onto my radar fairly recently, when they were added to the UI as a “great way to start” automations (not true) :roll_eyes:. It has always seemed to me that entities are the things that are central to HA, grouped in integrations. Devices are a bit of a red herring. :grin:

May be i am a too old ex-SW programmer that is used to code in objects…

But i believe there is still a layer that you could call objects or devices that should be under our control where we could attach entities allowing an easier automation…

This is more or less what devices can do, except that we have no control on them, no parametrization… as everything is inherited from their integration and that HA itself sometimes merges (and sometimes not). This could be improved.

Of course we have workaround (templates, grouping…) but a clear device management where we could choose the master integration, inherit the right logo, choose the right entities (that we have already)…

I do not believe this would be so difficult to implement, and this is may be what the HACS integration you provide is aiming to do.

I am still surprised nobody did something similar before

when you look at the grouping based on integrations new function it is simply useless

as the grouping depends on the alphabetic order of the 1st integration of a device (this 1st integration changes all the time)

To me, as devices are going to play a more and more important role, we need a way to get hands on their management/configuration

May be someone has already THE solution