I’ve been using HA for a while and am very happy with it. The one area that seems a bit off is how zwave entityIDs are managed. I understand the need to assign a deterministic entityID to each device and the need to do this on discovery. The one piece of this that has some friction is using the entityIDs in the rest of my scripts. The names that come out of the process aren’t too intuitive and it makes other groups/scenes/automations less clear to read.
For instance: light.ge_unknown_type5044_id3031_level_6_0 is generated as one of my lights, but really this is just a dimmer switch.
What are your thoughts on preserving some mapping between zwave identifiers and custom entityIDs for each of these devices? I don’t know the complexities of supporting both, but what I would envision:
If no mapping present, treat the zwaveID as the entityID
If a mapping is present, map the zwaveID to a custom entityID and refer to this entityID throughout HA
This would allow the device to still have a unique identifier, but I would be able to map light.ge_unknown_type5044_id3031_level_6_0 to light.family_room or something similar.
I would love to see something like a simple 2 column lookup table. Z-wave name on one side. Assigned name on the other. You wouldn’t necessarily need a customize.yaml or hunt for where you needed to change scripts, automation etc. if you replace a device.
On the other hand, you can get pretty close to readable names directly, by using the rename_node service or editing the xml cfg file while HA is stopped.
The problem with renaming a device directly is you loose potentially helpful raw z-wave information. I don’t mind that ugly information as reference as long as I could use a friendlier location translated one in scripts, automations etc.
I agree, it would be nice to be able to rename entity_id’s for use in scripts/automations/etc. Could perhaps fit in the customize: section of the configuration yaml. Soemtimes the auto generated names aren’t the most descriptive or intuitive.
Simple access to device model numbers. I have changed device names in OZCP before. It isn’t hard. The services tab is just as easy to use. I move and reset devices quite regularly. I just would rather have a simple lookup table.