I’m very new to both Inovelli and Home Assistant
. I have installed about 40 blue series switches and they are connected to home assistant yellow, ZHA, controlling Phillips hue bulbs throughout my home.
I’ve successfully installed, paired and integrated my switches into home assistant, however I’m very frustrated with the “random” numbers that seem to be added to the customized entity names of every switch in my home.
For example, inside home assistant, when configuring the kitchen switch as an entity, I named it “Kitchen Overhead Inovelli” as the DEVICE name as it was added to ZHA in home assistant.
Subsequently ZHA adds tons of entities for each switch, but while:
The names of entities show under the settings with the following examples:
Kitchen Overhead Inovelli Light
Kitchen Overhead Inovelli Local dimming down speed
Kitchen Overhead Inovelli Invert switch
And so forth…
However ,thiis where the weird random numbers begin:
When I look into the actual entity Id shows:
light.kitchen_overhead_inovelli_light_15
number.kitchen_overhead_inovelli_local_dimming_down_speed_13
switch.kitchen_overhead_inovelli_invert_switch_11
And so forth…
The other devices I’ve added into home assistant don’t assign random numbers to the end of the entity id…for example:
Bedroom Shield TV
remote.bedroom_shield_tv
Basement Ecobee
Climate.basement
And so forth…
Why do inovelli switches do this?
Something caused by ZHA?
How to fix?
My problem will be:
Won’t I want to be able to search for my entities or create automations by typing out the entity id without looking at the random number or have to look up the random numbers in entity settings?
This is usually something that happens when you’ve added a buncha things of the same type and/or added/removed things without cleaning up.
The home assistant dialogue to rename all the entities when you rename a device can mess up in those cases, you can usually just manually fix the entity names, it’s a pain but it might be your best bet. I’ve also had luck renaming the device back to whatever the pattern in the entity name is, then renaming it to my new name, which will catch all the matching entities. It’s definitely just doing some kinda pattern matching on the entities when you rename devices though. Your best bet to avoid this is to only add 1 new thing at a time, and rename the device and all the entities for each one before adding the next. This is definitely an HA specific thing, when adding numerous devices that all create the same entities, and could happen with any device if you’re not careful, not specific to inovelli or zigbee/zwave even
I added the devices one or two at a time so I’m not sure that’s the cause but regardless, I’ve attempted multiple times to rename the devices and agreed to the dialogue box that pops up asking if I want to rename all associated entities. This renames the entities but again assigns random numbers to the end of each entity.
I’m afraid even if I go through and painstakingly rename individual entity IDs, if there’s ever a change in my setup that requires renaming (ie when I replace these blues with a few mm wave blues) that I’ll have this same problem yet again.
the problem might have come from another device that exposes an entity of a similar name, so when the next device was added, rather than the entities matching it’s name as it should, it added them as _2, and when you go to rename the device, the _2 entity doesn’t get renamed correctly, then you add another device, and it creates _3…and so on. If you don’t catch this early, a mess occurs.
You just need to get it fixed once and it shouldn’t keep happening, it usually happens when you aren’t aware of this during initial setup, and devices entities start stepping on each other as you continue to add more stuff. I’ve definitely done this exact thing to myself in the past, but i know to check all my entities now when I add/rename devices, so it does not get out of control like that on me anymore.
It’s not the most intuitive thing in the world, admittedly.
The numbers are not sequential. Even for the same device the numbers are randomly generated for the different entities of the same device.
It sounds like my best hope is to remove the device and then re-add them one by one and trying to pay attention to it as it does it.
I will try that with one and see if it makes any difference.
Removing the device and re-adding it one by one did the trick.
Each new device is being added individually and the random numbers are not appearing at the end of the entity IDs.
Thanks for your help!