This idea may need further development but this is the gist:
Each room has a main light, fan, blinds, temperature, motion, humidity, etc. plus a number of additional devices that are less relevant. If I have more than one main sensor or light, the logic could be to do what “Groups” do (group on if even on is on, off if all off, temps could be averaged, etc.).
Areas in HA hold anything and everything inside a room and honestly I have yet to find a use for them other than organizing the tons of devices I have. Configurable rooms would be their own living thing that can report whether lights are on, whether the room is occupied, what the environment in it is, and all without needing to interact with the specific devices providing those states.
Viewing a room would not show you all the devices in it, but just the main controls and sensors that affect the room. The user would just have to tell HA what sensor(s) and what control(s) apply to the various measures/controls a room has. Then, when automating stuff, I don’t need to repeat the same code over and over to verify room occupation, light status, temp etc. as I can refer to the room’s attributes. It is somewhat of an abstraction layer. Automate based on room characteristics/attributes rather than having to deal with each and every sensor or control.
A lot of what I describe I can patch together with the awesome tools in HA (including Node Red) but I am hoping there will be something simpler, yet powerful, in the future.
Good idea, I miss it too. Currently, in the area configuration, we can only add its photo. When creating an area card, we can optionally add an image from the camera. The area tab lacks the ability to display additional information and actions that can be performed. As a result, the area card or their list should illustrate the condition of a given room (area) and devices located in it. It is very modest nowadays.
I almost registered a similar idea, but with somewhat a narrower use case: I want that areas (rooms) automatically get sensors based on what the user assigns to it.
My foremost use case would be to have an official room temperature based on all temperature sensors currently available. The default would be mean of all temperature measurements in the room, but it could be configured to be min/max/median. This way it will also be dynamically updated if sensors are added or removed in the future. When adding e.g. a thermostat to a room it could automatically pick the official room temperature so that less configurations are necessary.
@2jan You developed the idea more but in essence we are seeking the same. I’d like it to go beyond just environmental, to include doors, windows, lights, etc. The main thing is that I do not want ALL devices of the same type to be automatically forced as part of the group. Google used to do that and trying to turn off my “Kitchen Light” would result in Google turning off 13 lights that were in the kitchen… and I am not even sure what it was including as I can’t quite get up to 13 in my count of lights in that area… I ended up creating “everything in [room name]” booleans that I only use to turn stuff off. The boolean is always kept on by node-red and when I turn it off, node red turns off what I want as part of my “everything” (so yeah, it is not really an everything, as some stuff just needs to stay on). With this type of Room (=device) I am hoping you can then just tell your favorite assistant to turn on/off everything in room x, or ask about the conditions of a room (temp, humidity, motion, light, etc.) with less work-arounds.
Yes, think the suggestions are very alike. In the temperature use case I would like all sensors of same type to contribute by default, but the ability to remove some (e.g a boiler temperature). HA could suggest smart fixes like this based on typical temperatures, variance, usage, name pattern etc.