After a recent Home Assistant core update, 6 of the entities for each switch seems to have been recreated: Up, Down, Config, Identity (1), Identity (2), Identity (6) buttons.
Any idea why this happened? I’m not entirely clear on what purpose these entities serve in the first place. It’s a bit annoying to now have 6 dead entities for each of my devices.
-harryh
The re-creation was due to updated Home Assistant code.
As to what they do …
The Up, Down, and Config entities relate to the button tapping detection.
Home Assistant displays these entities in two places:
In the “Events” category - these are for use when you have an automation that is triggered based on button tapping. If you’re not familiar with how that works, you can look at the tutorial I have in my Wiki, here: Home · jvmahon/HomeAssistant-Tools Wiki · GitHub
They also appear as buttons in the “Configuration” area of the device web page. I believe these cause an event to be generated as if the corresponding button was tapped once. In my view, these are not very useful as the actual device can generate events for 1-5 button taps, as well as long-hold and release. I generally disable these.
After the recent Home Assistant update, you may see duplicates of the "Up, Down, Config, Identify (1), and Identify (2) in the Configuration area with “No Provided” or “Unavailable” status. You can delete these…
The Matter standard requires that certain endpoint types support the Matter “identify” function. This function causes an indicator to flash, a tone to play, or some other way to locate and identify the device. In the case of this switch, Endpoint 1 is a Dimmable Light load control and Endpoint 6 is a RGB enhanced color light which is used for controlling the LED bar in the “notification / alarm” mode. The standard requires that these device types both have an “identify” function. If you click on either of these “identify” buttons, the identify function activates and the LED bar will blink a few times to let you know which switch is being identified. The standard allows that if there are multiple endpoints, the “identify” for each may do the same thing - that’s the case here and there is no difference between what “Identify(1)” and “Identify(6)” does so you can easily disable one of them. Home Assistant including these duplicates is “correct” by the standard.
So there are actually 3 each of Up, Down & Config
I, naively, would have assumed that pressing the buttons in the config section would do the same thing as pressing the physical buttons on the device. But this doesn’t appear to be the case, instead they cause the LED to flash orange similar to the Identify buttons.
-harryh
Sounds like it may be a Home Assistant bug. You might try raising the issue in the Home Assistant github “issues” section: GitHub · Where software is built