[Feature request]: Bosch BTH-RM230Z (RBSH-RTH0-ZB-EU) standalone temperature entität

[h1nnak]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Hello everyone,

i'm following the development of Bosch appliances with great interest. Many thanks to everyone involved. Now for my request: I would love to be able to use a standalone temperature sensor, just like the humidity sensor is available. See here:

Currently, I've created a "helper" to display the temperature.

Describe the solution you'd like

Could you please consider adding this feature?

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[burmistrzak]

@h1nnak Well, it's certainly possible. This is somewhat related to a question I posed earlier.

Btw. the reason why you see a dedicated humidity sensor is because of an incomplete climate entity implementation in Z2M. Ideally, humidity would also be part of the climate feature and not exposed separately. Just FYI.

Unfortunately, HA is a bit silly and only supports sensor.* entities and not entity attributes (e.g. current_temperature of a thermostat) in most places...

@Koenkk Should we expose a separate sensor for current temperature? At its core, this is a HA issue after all.

[Koenkk]

@burmistrzak I would prefer to not expose duplicate data, I think for this you can create a virtual/helper sensor in HA?

[burmistrzak]

@Koenkk Yes, that's what most people (myself included) are doing. So we're on the same page here. 😊

I'd suggest we lobby the HA folks to also support entity attributes (e.g. current_temperature and current_humidity of climate entities) in places where sensor.* can be used. Thoughts?

[Koenkk]

to also support entity attributes (e.g. current_temperature and current_humidity of climate entities) in places where sensor.* can be used. Thoughts?

I don't fully understand, you mean having virtual sensors based on entity attributes?

[burmistrzak]

I don't fully understand, you mean having virtual sensors based on entity attributes?

@Koenkk Yeah kinda.

Treat relevant attributes like e.g. current_temperature of climate entities automatically as (virtual) sensors everywhere in HA.

In some places (e.g. History) this is more or less already the case. However, even newer dashboards like Areas still insist on sensor.* entities and don't accept attributes.

[Koenkk]

I see, that's sound like a feature request for HA indeed (until that the virtual sensor can be used)

[h1nnak]

If I understand you both correctly, it's not a z2m problem, which means I have to report the feature request directly to Home Assistant. Where should I report it, to core, supervisor, or frontend? Or somewhere else entirely?

[burmistrzak]

@h1nnak Correct! Depending on the use-case, your best bet would probably be HA frontend or core.
You basically want to use relevant entity attributes (e.g. current_temperature from climate) instead of only entire sensor entities.

[h1nnak]

@burmistrzak thanks for your answer. I just checked “HA Fronted” to see if there was already a feature request like this, and lo and behold: LINK. So hopefully something will happen.

[burmistrzak]

@Koenkk Circling back to the feature request at hand, I totally agree with you that exposing the same data twice isn't useful.
However, after reviewing the thread @h1nnak linked, it looks to me like exposing both, a climate and temperature entity is current best practice.

Quoting @piitaya from home-assistant/frontend#24948 (comment):

In general, it's a good practices for integration to provide two entities : one climate for control et one temperature sensor for history.
Indeed, the climate entity only keep history for few days while the sensor keep history forever as they are stored as long term statistic.

Also, we technically wouldn't expose anything twice, at least when it comes to the MQTT payload. We would simply tell HA (via discovery) to add a dedicated temperature sensor consuming existing MQTT data.

So until the HA frontend is updated to also accept entity attributes, having long-term stats for thermostats & Co. via the way of separate sensors seems like a good compromise.

But it's ultimately your call. I'm fine with it either way. 😊

[Koenkk]

Let's first see how many z2m users are interested in this future, the more sensor you discover the more data HA has to keep track off. For now you can create a virtual sensor.

[burmistrzak]

@Koenkk Yeah, let's see how many folks are interested.
If we ever do implement this, we should probably make it a global device-specific option to expose temperature and/or humidity as separate sensors to HA.