Hi,
I am already using and maintaining multiple home assistant instances… and this over years now! This is great stuff! However, I can’t get rid of the feeling that I have redundant and unnecessarily manually maintained input-entities to automate my home. Let me give an example.
Guess what, my home has multiple rooms. All rooms have (more or less) similar entities and “feature sets”:
- A media player (media_player)
- A speaker set (media_player)
- Several lights
- Cover blinds
- Climate/Heating
- Scenes for lightning and cover positions
- Scenes + scripts for media control (select radio channel XY on media_player, turn on speakers, set audio_level, …)
- Automations for presence state detection
- All off
So, with all this implemented again… again and… again for each room, I finally end up with a bunch of automations, scripts, input_numbers, input_booleans, … which are exactly the same for each room and only differ in their naming prefix. Same in Lovelace: For all rooms/areas I have to select and maintain every single entity.
Of course you could “simplify” the number of required automations by using template variables, but I think this ends up in ugly and unreadable code and dependencies. Also the nice UI&UX with which you can navigate and analyze your configuration would suffer from this.
I would like to suggest the following two solutions:
Probably its possible that home assistant already provides basic input-entities and automations (presence state, light scenes, media control, climate control, all off, …) on a per-room basis. This would also improve onboarding for new users, as a basic featureset is available out-of-the-box - just the entities need to be assigned!
Second, automation templates and required helper entities should be assignable to rooms/areas in order to create an “area template”. When this template is instantiated, the associated automations and entities are automatically duplicated/created/referenced. When the template is changed, all existing copies/references are also updated. So I could add the light scene that should be activated when I enter to room only once and could simply reuse in all other rooms.
What do you think?
Cheers!
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