New HVAC entity

Configuration
1

Hi
I am slowly integrating a proprietary automation system with HomeAssistant. So far, with much help here, I have lights (with platform template with webhook for maintaining state and rest_commands to control) and room occupancy, door & window state (input_boolean) working well (~10s of entities, 10s of calls an hour). I use this to present the house through the companion app.
Next I’d like to sync the HVAC controls for each room/area/zone (10 zones). Each object in the other controller has various attributes I’d like to track (including room temp, set point temp, call-for-heat) and various things I’d like to control (services in HA parlance?) including triggering change of set point profile and forcing heat on for a period (like a boost).
The general thermostat entity looks interesting, but is quite different to the HVAC object I want to reflect in HA. The HVAC object has 5 states (Heat, Cool, Off, Disable, Fallback)
I’ve had a look at the source for the thermostat and it is beyond me to create a new entity that way.

Is it possible to define a new object/ entity for each heat zone with attributes in YAML which I can then update using webhooks and rest command to send instructions? Something like a blueprint but for an entity rather than an automation??
Is defining a new independent entity for each thing I want to track and control going to be simpler? How would I associate this collection of entities in a heat zone to an Area to make the display in a card easier?

Are there other/better ways to approach this?
TIA

2

Let’s start with how do you do it now.

Yes you’ll want to get a climate entity to be able to do stuff but how you set that entity up matters.

So do you control the all separately now? What’s the system it’s coming from? How do you connect?

All of that’s kind of vague and it is relevant.

3

The other system is Idratek Cortex (not HTTPS for some reason), old but awesome and running reliably for 15 years with their modules too. It is very smart and I don’t need to replace the existing automation, just add a little in addition, eg geofencing using the companion app on my phone, visibility from the companion app (& make adjustments occasionally). The secure remote access (thank you Cloudflared team!), external integrations (eg Octopus Energy) and responsive UI are all HA features I like.

Cortex runs locally (same PC, different VM) and offers a Web API so comms via webhooks into HA and web service and REST post/get from HA to Cortex works reliably.
Does that clarify some of the vagueness?

4

Haven’t forgotten about this reading about your system…

5

Bumping this in hope of some good ideas on how to integrate a different HVAC object into HA, mainly for display purposes??
TIA