Migrate Between Devices

[dxmnkd316]

I have a number of 433 MHz temp sensors that do not persist IDs in Home Assistant when you physically replace the batteries. They generate a random ID and that gets pulled into MQTT with the new ID so I end up having to migrate things every 4-6 months.

Would it be possible to move the device a specific Battery Notes entry tracks from the old device to the new device? I believe the only way to do this now is to fully delete the BN entry and create it again. Kind of a pain.

Thanks!

[andrew-codechimp]

Hi,
Since battery notes tracks an existing entity/battery and is tied to that this won't be possible.
Maybe raise whether the ID can be made static with the MQTT component, usually there's some identifier on a device they can track.

[dxmnkd316]

I realized I misstated what I was going for. Because now that I think about it, when I migrate other integrations from old device to new, I delete the old device and rename the entities on the new device to the old name. So for instance, MQTT generates a name like sensor.lacrosse-tx141thbv2_150_temperature for the new device. I just rename that to sensor.kitchen_fridge_temperature and my other integrations and helpers just follow that entity.

Powercalc, for instance, lets me move an instance from one device to another. And maybe that's what I'm looking for here is just the ability to move between devices. Then I wouldn't have to recreate the BN instance for each new device, just migrate it to a new device that has the same entity name for the battery.

I won't pretend to understand what's under the hood for BN, so perhaps this is a heavy lift, but thought I would mention the ability to migrate devices in powercalc just in case that's something others might be interested in as well.

I have looked into the MQTT component, but the way the RTL to MQTT add-on works is to assign it the broadcasting ID's device number. So when it's power cycled, the channel stays the same but the device's ID is generated randomly from 1-254 (presumably). Below are the various IDs I've had over the years that get picked up for these two devices. Currently they have IDs 150 and 217. I have another on a separate channel (channel 0) that does the same thing. Unfortunately there's really not any way to fix that in MQTT without modifying the topics and pointing the new topic to the old entity. Which is essentially the same work as deleting and reassigning in BN.

[andrew-codechimp]

I had a look at how PowerCalc was doing this and that's made a lot easier because you only associate a PowerCalc device with an entity. Because Battery Notes can associate with a device or an entity it's storing different ID's which aren't easy to map, plus keeping a store of battery replacement data about those ID's.
It wouldn't be impossible, but history would get confusing, which is why core helpers related to a device don't provide migration. and a very heavy lift for a small edge case.

[dxmnkd316]

Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.