User can make own device_tracker

Configuration
1

Call a service:

      service: device_tracker.see
      data:
        dev_id: fake_tracker
        gps:
          - 55
          - 55
        gps_accuracy: 10

And see a new entity created:

image
image882Ă—216 15.2 KB

which can be shown on a Map:

image
image999Ă—504 16.2 KB

Means - there is no need to use integrations creating virtual device_trackers.
I wonder - is it by a design?

2

I was going to say it probably doesn’t survive a restart but, surprise, it does.

Now that I have created it, I’m trying to find a way to delete it …

  • The entity doesn’t have a unique_id so it can’t be deleted via the UI.

image

  • It wasn’t created via YAML so there’s no configuration to delete.

  • It has no associated Device Tracker integration so it can’t be deleted via Settings → Devices & Services → Integrations → ???

I ended up manually deleting references to it in the following files and then restarting.

  • known_devices.yaml
  • homeassistant.exposed_entities

Given the challenge of deleting it, my guess is that the service call wasn’t meant for creating a device_tracker entity (because if it was, they overlooked to make it easy to delete the entity).

3

Thanks for a feedback.

Deleting here seems to be enough.

So far I see no harm from this manually created entity.
It can be used in some ways.

Noticed this behaviour recently:

  1. Installed a Virtual integration which created some “device_tracker.virtual_tracker” entity.
  2. Created an automation which moves this tracker to some random coords periodically.
  3. Uninstalled the Virtual integration.
  4. Got surprised that my tracker still exists.
4

Interesting. It wasn’t enough in my case, even after performing a Ctrl+F5 in my browser to ensure I wasn’t looking at cached data. It only disappeared after editing the JSON in the second file. Maybe my testing procedure was flawed and I saw a false positive some how. :man_shrugging: Anyways, I won’t be experimenting with that service call again.

5

There never was… you could just add manual entries to known_devices.yaml.

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