I’ve been using Home Assistant (Supervised) for roughly a year now and am currently starting over with a clean install (moving to HA Container), using Z-Wave JS UI (in a seperate docker container) to integrate my Z-Wave devices into HA.
Since Z-Wave JS UI seems very stable so far and provides a nice and fast GUI, I’m thinking of setting device names and locations in Z-Wave JS UI and automatically generating HA entity-IDs accordingly. However, if I change a device name in Z-Wave JS UI, only the device name is changed in HA and entity IDs stay the same. The only way of automatically changing entity IDs seems to be to remove the Z-Wave integration and reinstall it in HA, which does not seem to be a good idea once changes in HA (e.g. activating and deactivating entities) have been made.
a) Is there a way to automatically change entity IDs based on Z-Wave JS UI device names using Z-Wave JS UI and WS Server (Z-Wave integration)? Is there a way to remove and re-add only specific Z-Wave devices in Z-Wave Integration?
b) In Z-Wave JS UI Documentation there is information on “entity name templates” (Z-Wave JS UI). However, I cannot find such an option in the Z-Wave JS UI. Can this be used with WS Server or is this for MQTT?
b) What is the best way to connect Z-Wave JS UI and HA? Is there an advantage using MQTT in this scenario? I would like to avoid adding devices manually and rather use some kind of autodiscovery, if possible. Furthermore, Z-Wave JS UI Documentation suggests that MQTT connection to HA is going to be dropped at some point in the future.
No, name changes in ZUI do not propagate as entity ID changes. Once the device is added to HA, the IDs are fixed unless you change them from HA. Personally, I’d be pretty annoyed if something was changing entity IDs without my explicit permission. You can achieve this behavior for future devices by adding them in ZUI, which let’s you preset the name and location. The entity ID naming should follow the ZUI naming.
Entity name templates are for MQTT.
The “best way” depends on who you ask. Obviously, from the HA POV, it’s the integration, otherwise what would be the point of its existence? It provides much easier setup and better “integration” of devices than MQTT. There are a few users that prefer MQTT here, but they are in the minority. I think you’ll find MQTT to take more work on your end, but I suppose you get some kind of portability (arguably not with MQTT HASS Discovery).
When device is first added to ZJSUI you can name it and HA will use that to create EID
Light switch named “master bedroom” in ZJSUI will become light.master_bedroom in HA
This only happens when device is first added to ZJSUI. Once its in HA it is too late
When first add ZJSUI to HA as integration it will add all devices using the names in ZJSUI. I believe in past i have deleted the integration then readded it to get EIDs matching ZJSUI names. Doing that will NOT rename existing EIDs but will create NEW EIDs.
Following inclusion, can I modify the display name in HA and have that appear on the dashboard and device list in HA? I use ZJS to connect to the devices.