Is there a reason for HA to not show brands of the devices, neither the names, not even the category of the newly added zigbee devices? At least on a fresh installation without any plugins. I cannot know if the device is a button, an infrared receiver, etc, except if I look into the device propertie
Is it because of legal reasons or is my HA installation broken?
Are you using ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt?
Can you show an example of what you are talking about? As far as I can remember, most of my zigbee devices have included a brand or manufacturer when added to ZHA. But it is up to the manufacturer to put the correct information into the firmware.
“Devices” in HA are simply a logical grouping for one or more entities, usually contained in a single physical object (but not always). While the entities in a device will be classified into their respective domains, devices themselves are not categorized in HA.
I mean, it could at least say “button” so I know what the device is. Heres how it shows:
and it’s like this for any device. All of them get these generic names
I believe I’m using ZHA since I didn’t add ZMQTT, I’m just using the docker image Package home-assistant · GitHub without any plugins
That’s a “Tuya” white-labelled device.
Unfortunately, many of the brands that use Tuya’s firmware platform don’t bother correcting names… If the manufacturer doesn’t include the data in the firmware, there’s nothing HA can do about it. If you do a quick Google search for TS004F you’ll probably find at least a handful of significantly different physical devices that all use that ID.
FWIW, Tuya-based Zigbee devices can be really hit-or-miss since the manufacturers often deviate from the current Zigbee standards. With newer devices it’s quite common for one or more functions not to work until someone develops a custom quirk (ZHA) or data point map (Z2MQTT).
but how can tuya itself detect the device model? I tried 6 devices that appear normally in tuya with the correct photos, naming and etc, but on HA they appear as these generic things.
I don’t know for sure, but I would suspect that the rest of the device name points them to the specific device in a database they keep of manufacturers who have licensed their firmware.
Tuya devices don’t follow the ZHA standard and instead have their own protocol. Every Tuya device has to have a quirk written for it and added to GitHub - zigpy/zha-device-handlers: ZHA device handlers bridge the functionality gap created when manufacturers deviate from the ZCL specification, handling deviations and exceptions by parsing custom messages to and from Zigbee devices.. Some of these quirks will support 10 plus devices and while each device has a unique manufacturer and model, they use the same datapoints and the same quirk.
As of a few ZHA versions ago, we do now have the ability to display a friendly name to the UI, but nobody actually does that. For that to work, we’d need to know the friendly model and manufacturer for each device and tie it to the underlying model and manufacturer. And we would also need to split each quirk out so that there is one per device. So, you can see why that hasn’t happened.
doesn t Zigbee2Mqtt maintain this database? Ive seen their UI and it shows even the photo of the device, together with the name/brand.
I could help providing photos/icons/names for all my devices if there’s a future effort for this
I’m not certain what z2m does. As far as ZHA, we don’t support images or icons. As far as updating all of the quirks to use friendly_name, see zigpy/zigpy/quirks/v2/__init__.py at 4a3c058f8c15eb991c2c3cf0b03d137bcbd90456 · zigpy/zigpy · GitHub, you would need to propose that. Mostly this would apply to Tuya devices and truthfully, I don’t think the increase in code complexity would be worth it. I’d bring it up on the zha-device-handlers repo if it’s something you want to contribute to, then it would be a matter of splitting all the combined quirks out so they could have the friendly_name added.
