[Feature]: group entities to one device including additional sensors

[akatsuki-meigetsu]

Domain

No response

What is actually missing?

sensor is important in IoT, if matterbridge support sensor, we can use it to create more various automations in different platforms.

[t0bst4r]

@bassrock already started working on it (#118) for binary sensors.

what exactly are you missing? What kind of sensors? What values do they have? Can you provide their attributes?

[akatsuki-meigetsu]

Like air quality sensor, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, I noticed Matterbridge could support this type sensor, thus hoping matterbridge-home-assistant plugin supporting them.

[t0bst4r]

@akatsuki-meigetsu
Basic support for binary sensors (occupancy, doors, contact sensors) was added by @bassrock in #118
We just merged it and it'll be released as 1.4.0 in some minutes.

@bassrock Let's proceed the sensor discussion over here.
The main problem is, that home assistant provides each entity on its own. At the moment we have no clue, if multiple entities are related to each other.
Actually... how does it work with apple homekit or alexa integrations?

[bassrock]

@t0bst4r The homekit and alexa integrations use the device registry to grab all linked sensors/entities as needed for things like Battery state https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/homeassistant/components/homekit/__init__.py#L1152

As far as I can tell, it looks like the homeassistant js websocket library doesn't support grabbing device ids or linked devices

[t0bst4r]

Okay, i am also using the device registry. So we could group entities by their related device and build matter-devices from those groups. But that's definetly a larger change 😁

[bassrock]

Oh i totally missed that you are pulling that info! So probably in the bootup where things are ignored there needs to be a "linking" of sorts based on device id. Then the matter devices could get more hardware info, battery state, energy usage etc!

[akatsuki-meigetsu]

I tested 1.5.0 version, however, it crushed on docker type Matterbridge(1.3.7), seemed caused by light.

[t0bst4r]

Just released a bug fix. Please test with 1.5.1

[akatsuki-meigetsu]

now working successfully, thanks !

[t0bst4r]

Oh i totally missed that you are pulling that info! So probably in the bootup where things are ignored there needs to be a "linking" of sorts based on device id. Then the matter devices could get more hardware info, battery state, energy usage etc!

I just saw the deviceId in the data I get - so it would be possible. BUT how would we decide what kind of device (DeviceTypeDefinition) we have, when having a device with different entities? I don’t see a device type from home assistant…

Example 1: smart plug

• switch.my_plug_power
• lock.my_plug_button_lock
• light.my_plug_indicator

Example 2: security camera

• switch.my_camera_privacy
• light.my_camera_night_light
• switch.my_camera_night_vision
• and like 15 more entities

and let’s not even think about media players.

i don’t think we can make it with patterns like „if it has those 5 entities“.
I would not parse entity_ids or especially not the friendly names. I would also try to keep this away from the user configuration…

This definitely needs further investigations.

[bassrock]

Yea. In my experience you pick a base one, and add aspects/or other things together and matter or homekit will auto join it all. But it def needs testing

[t0bst4r]

Yea. In my experience you pick a base one, and add aspects/or other things together and matter or homekit will auto join it all. But it def needs testing

Yes, but how do we detect which is the base one?

[bassrock]

I think thats done by looking at the primary identifiers field https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/device_registry_index#categorizing-to-device-info

Looks like the HomeKit integration assumes the entities the user allowlists is the main one, and then they grab all the linked ones https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/homeassistant/components/homekit/__init__.py#L1089

[t0bst4r]

i just noticed that i confused device registry and entity registry 🙃
so as of now, i am not querying those, but could also be an option to add it.

i am still not 100% sure about this.