“We’re planning a lot of cool stuff around the entity registry. Stay tuned!”
What “cool stuff” does this open up? Is it more something to make developers’ lives easier? Or will I, a simple end-user, experience relief for a problem I didn’t even realize I had?
Again, I’m 100% confident that this is a cool thing to have… I’m just wondering if the issue it fixes is something that will sort of invisibly make my life easier (e.g. fewer bugs, faster fixes, easier for devs to make new integrations faster, etc), or if it’s something that I will be interacting with directly somehow.
I’m not a dev, I’m speaking here only from the bits they’ve talked about in Discord.
Amongst other things, it will eventually bring the ability to change the entity ID for any entity, through the UI, while Home Assistant is running. No more need to wonder what media_player.living_room, media_player.living_room_2, media_player.living_room_3, and media_player.living_room_4 are. You’ll easily be able to rename them, and have the name stick. No more need to dive into editing files, just use the GUI.
This will be useful. I hope they will also add a “Last seen date” field for each device, or something like that . I’m trying to keep the registry clean, but it’s not easy…
I dont get it either. I assume the known_devices.yaml is no longer required? Mine isnt updating anymore and it seems that despite my device tracker being set to no track devices new devices pop up in my HASS entities and disapper when they go offline.
That’s for the device tracker, and it is still required. The entity registry and the device tracker aren’t connected in any way (at least at this time - the future isn’t yet written).
Another interesting situation, that messed with me a bit. Hue lights get added to the entity registry IMMEDIATELY, as in the instant the Hue app finds the bulb and before you can enter the name in the app. I was replacing a bulb and named the bulb the same as the old one so I didn’t need to make any other changes in automations etc. The bulb didn’t show up in groups or respond in automations. It did show up as I had named it when I scrolled through the customize interface. A little baffling until a grep search found the name in the entity registry. I am sure there will be similar situations we will need to be aware of.