Exclude devices

[joneshf]

There are some devices that can create quite a few entities. For example, if you're using Frigate and it's doing object detection on different types of objects, across zones of a camera, it will create a device for each zone with an occupancy sensor for each type of object, plus an overall "any type of object" occupancy sensor. Which means if you have 5 zones and 4 types of objects, you get 25 occupancy sensors

The math

$$ 5 \text{ devices} \cdot \left(\frac{4 \text{ "individual object" occupancy sensors} + 1 \text{ "any" occupancy sensor}}{\text{device}}\right) = 25 \text{ occupancy\ sensors} $$

You can exclude the entities explicitly (so there is a workaround), but it's tedious and a bit error prone. It would be nice to be able to exclude entire devices in addition to the current feature to exclude entities. That would bring the number of exclusions down considerably.

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For the specific use case that motivated this request, there's an area with 30+ motion/occupancy sensors (made by Frigate and other integrations). There are also two separate group sensors that have the occupancy sensors that matter for this sort of automation (it's curated by a Human). The 30+ motion/occupancy sensors are explicitly excluded, which leaves these two group occupancy sensors. It works, but it'd be even simpler if the magic could be helped by saying which occupancy sensors to use; instead of helping the magic by saying which occupancy sensors to not use.

[tbrasser]

I tend to not assign the entire device to the area but just the entities I'm interested in.

[joneshf]

But that's the whole issue. Those 30+ motion/occupancy sensors are interesting. We have more than just Magic Areas in our Home Assistant install, so having the area on these sensors is important. Whether that's through the device or the entity would make zero difference. The issue is that Magic Areas thinks that every motion/occupancy sensor in an area is important to include in its magic by default. That's normally the right thing for it to do. But in this case, it's not.

There are occupancy sensors that are important for Magic Areas to include in its magic, and those have been curated by a Human. The issue is that there are far more sensors that Magic Areas should exclude than there are sensors that Magic Areas should include. The current features work well when there are only a few sensors to exclude (which seems to be the norm), but not when there are many.

Nevermind that I'm not migrating ~3k things (devices and entities) to a different setup all for the sake of not having to exclude 30+ motion/occupancy sensors from Magic Areas. That's a lot of squeeze for not a lot of juice. If there's some other benefit that would make it worth it, maybe. But I'm not sure what other benefits that change would bring.