Now that I’m making more use of HA and adding more devices, including ESPHome, I need a way to map between the HA name and the actual device. This is especially important for ESPHome which has a rich native API and interface.
In the state information, I see “light.kauf_bulb_3” (and, worse, all have the same friendly name). Yet, if I use the screen interface I see Kauf-bulb-b63559 and can find the IP address. Is there a way to expose that information? Do I need to make a feature request?
I don’t think you need a map. You can rename devices, and with that your entities will be renamed, if you choose to do so (it will prompt you). You can also rename entities separately and you can specify your own friendly names. The initial naming is a function of the integration, hence the reason it’s generic.
I don’t care about the names – what I want to do is to get out the properties, such as the IP address.
Going further, I want semantic-free names that I use only for binding since a device or its components may have different semantics in different contexts. A bulb my be considered part of two different lighting scenes, to use one example.