Rooms, Google Assistant & Device vs Entity

Configuration
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1

Hi, I’m a little confused when it comes to devices and entities.

I’ll start out by explaining what my goal is. I’m trying to configure all my rooms in Home Assistant so I don’t have any custom configuration in the Google Home app. At the moment I have to assign my lights to specific rooms in the Google Home app. Whenever I sync my entities to Google, all my configuration is gone and I have to start over.

This is what I want to do:

  • Bathroom (when I say ‘turn on the lights’ to the speaker in the bathroom, I want the bathroom lights to turn on)

    • Bathroom lights
    • Google Home speaker

  • Kitchen

    • Kitchen lights
    • Google Home speaker

However, ‘areas’ only seem to support devices, and not entities. All my lights are entities.

Currently, my setup exists of a few Shelly 1 switches to control my lights.
This is an example setup:

light:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Eetplaats"
    state_topic: "shellies/shelly1-idhere/relay/0"
    command_topic: "shellies/shelly1-idhere/relay/0/command"
    optimistic: false
    qos: 0
    retain: false
    payload_on: "on"
    payload_off: "off"
    payload_available: "on"
    payload_not_available: "off"

This works pretty flawlessly to control my lights, except that they all show up as entities, and not as devices. I also have a Raspbee to read a few Xiaomi contact/temperature sensors. These show up as devices.

Does what I’m trying to do make any sense?
What’s the difference between devices and entities?
How can I turn my lights into devices?

Thanks for the help!

2

ShellyForHass is better integrated with HA and create devices etc.

Have a look here:

3

Currently, the only opening my unsecure IoT network has to my secure network, is through MQTT. All other communication is blocked.

I’d prefer to keep that as is, but if I can’t find an alternative to configure my MQTT lights, I’ll switch to ShellyForHass.

Thanks for the reply!