Hey Everyone!
I was going to export a list of devices attached to my Home Assistant setup when I noticed that some devices listed are not actually hardware devices, such as “File editor” and “Forecast”.
Why are these “virtual” hardware devices listed? How can I generate a list of just hardware devices?
Thanks for your help!
“Devices” in Home Assistant mean a collection of related entities and/or services. They are not necessarily tied to physical devices.
@tom_l Ahh, so all “devices” are a virtual collection of entities, but some entities are not part of a device (ex. a zone). Is that right?
How can I generate a list of just physical hardware devices?
I’m sorry I can’t provide a ready made solution. However,you might use the integration providing the to identify “physical hardware”. Jinja selectattr might do the trick for you, if you can access a device list within templating (I’m not aware that this is possible).
But what do you mean by “physical hardware” is the Bluetooth controller of an RPi a physical device?
I would expect is as part of the physical hardware RPi.
@aLMa Yes, I’m ultimately looking for any physical hardware or individually identifiable parts. With your example of a Raspberry Pi computer, the Bluetooth controller, CPU, RAM, and so forth are “physical hardware,” but each of them has the “parent” of the Raspberry Pi. I could have a USB Z-wave controller plugged into the Pi; the controller would be a physical device with the Pi as its parent. I’d like to start with a list of all devices that don’t have a parent and then map it down from there.
Are there any HACS integrations that will help me list and map the relationships of physical hardware?
By accident a came across this post.
There is a DIY solution on how to get entities by integration, and how to get all integrations for templating.
Not exactly what you are looking for but it might help to find your ultimate solution 
@aLMa Oooohhh! That does look interesting!! I’ll take a look there and see what I can glean from their examples. Nice find!!