Using Area in alarm system not possible?

Configuration
1

trying to select the triggering devices for my alarm system per Area seems not possible? Use case: select different active areas in the house depending on family presence.

right now we have to create all kinds of complex templates and mappings, to finally end up selecting each and every device individually.

It would be so nice if we could select the area (to which the devices are added of course) an activate that.

maybe easiest solution would be to add the area as attribute to those devices in the states? Or? what am I missing here…

please have a look, thanks!

2

My understanding is that areas are stateless (as opposed to groups which are ‘on’ if one or more of their children is on).

If areas don’t have a state for the alarm to monitor, how do you propose the alarm knows when to trigger?

3

well, the alarm would still be triggered by the binary devices (motion sensor, camera etc) but would then only taking account those in the activated Area’s?

or, if an area would be added to the devices/entities we could select these in a template:

battery_level: 60
sensitivity: 2
sensitivity_max: 2
friendly_name: Attic sensor motion
device_class: motion
icon: 'mdi:home-floor-a'
area: attic

so I don’t want to deactivate the binary_sensors, I want to take them into account or not.

4

But that’s what I’m saying, the area doesn’t report the state of anything, so whether one of the children changes state is irrelevant.

IMHO when the idea of areas was introduced it wasn’t thought out very well, and groups (which we already had) remain far superior for anything more complicated than turning a few lights on and off in a certain section of your house.

5

Check out this custom component it may help you with that …

6

wait, I can of course use the groups only to check whether the devices belong to that group (and not use the group to switch them on/off)… tsss, needed that push to rethink the logic in my head. thanks :wink:

still, the attribute Area would be a nice addition and open new possibilities
created this FR: Add Area to entities attributes

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