Hi everyone,
I have successfully integrated the Xiaomi Gateway and am looking for a way to rename the Zigbee accessories to smth more meaningful.
I am not talking about just a friendly name but a real name that can be used in automations.
Is that possible? Can someone please help?
Thank you very much in advance.
It’s not possible at the moment. The device names (device_type_macaddress) are hardcoded:
Problem is I have way too many accessories and cannot find out what is what without friendly names.
Wow.
This is not good. Any hope for a future release that tackles this problem?
Thanks a lot
What’s wrong with friendly names? 
Please attach a proper friendly name per device. The device name is just an internal and unique representation.
I am not sure I let you understand what I mean. Please see the attached image.
Instead of the circled name I would like to have smth like: “office temp sensor”
Can this be done?
Yes, use friendly names.
So I have to edit the customize.yaml file?
Total noob here.
Can the friendly names be used in automations?
It might be easier for you to add it in configuration.yaml as described here: Customizing entities - Home Assistant
No
Is there any hope for a future release that will support friendly names in automations?
Thanks a lot
I think not. Entity ids (devices names) are unique. Friendly names aren’t.
I know this is an old thread. But is there any chance to normalize names somehow into human readable format and maybe group the devices better? Having 12 xiaomi temperature sensors makes it very tiresome to begin with, but once I add my ~100 zwave devices, all showing up as 5-10 different device, it’ll be anything but user friendly whenever I try to automate something. Or am I mistaken? I’d love to have custom unique IDs in the form of bedroom.multisensor.temperature and so on.
You can now.
It is a big job to start with, especially since you have to use the GUI now, but it can be done.
you can change the entity_id and make it meaningful. ie: binary_sensor.motion_livingroom
then you can use this new entity_id in all your configs.
This is also useful if one of your devices fails, you can replace it and rename it to the previous name and all the config will just pick it up.
I think this is one of the best changes recently!
Not all components support it yet, but Xiaomi does and I hope most of the others are coming soon.
Enjoy!
Can you tell me exactly where I can find the sensor to open the details? I can’t seem to find that.
Thanks a lot! It is exactly what I needed!
It could only be improved if HA supported device grouping with names like room.device.service or something like that. But I won’t complain, this already helps a lot.
Dear Forbin,
If you go to http://hassio.local:8123/states and click on any of the devices listed there, a popup appears with the details of the device. If you CAN rename it, it’ll appear in the top right corner. Clicking it will open a new popup where you can change both the friendly name and the device ID.
Cheers,
Peter
Ah, I gotcha! You have to click the popup image on the left. Thanks!
I have five water leak sensors which I’ve given names in the Mi Home app. But I can’t find which one is which because in HA they show up with a code i.e: “Water Leak Sensor_158d0002568f96”
Is there a way to get this information from the app so I can give proper friendly names or do I have trigger one by one and find which one’s which?
The mi app doesnt pass the friendly name to HA, so you have to rename each one if you need to.
Thanks. I was looking for ways to find these “code names” from within the MI app. Seems like I have to trigger all the water sensors 
