Device Naming Conventions in Home Assistant

[@DillPL]

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

[@GlenSearle]

and off by one errors.

[@SurfSailKayak]

Definitely a huge pain point in my opinion and a solution will surely be in the works down the road. I personally feel home assistant needs to do a little more hand holding by default. Let you name things as you wish, but try it's best to already be setup where you most won't need to change the name. People will of course want flexibility and depending on how everyone's brains work the setup will be different. So, one thing that could be interesting... Keep the id set and defined to reference the device, but you can choose with naming templates how your device names are displayed... and that name might be different in specific parts of the gui. {room} - {manufacturer} {device_name}. This would also make filtering your device list more powerful. You could show only devices on a certain firmware version. etc.

[@hasspodcast]

Yeah, it would be neat to have a default naming template, that gets applied by default. Different things name things differently which can get a bit frustrating if you’re adding a few things at once for example; would be great to override that my default; plus standard names are never a bad thing! -RK

[@NSHarrison]

I like to name my devices & entities based on the vendor make & model. Then i add a friendly name & zone to identify it's purpose. This way if i repurpose a device i dont need to edit any helpers, automations, scripts etc. Eg, binary_sensor.sonoff_snzb02_01. I also maintain a separate Google sheet to help keep track of everything installed in my house.