How do you organize your devices? Naming conventions? (2018)

[JDRoberts]

There are some existing threads on this topic already. It’s interesting to see how much the recommendations have changed from, say, 2015 to 2017, because they did change.

Looking for Standard SmartThings Naming Taxonomy Recommendations (2015)

Hi folks - relatively new ST user here (few months playing around) and have had some great experiences hooking things up, making some rules, etc. One of the things that I noticed is the diverse strategy that folks have for naming, grouping, aligning their devices to modes, etc. For example, when you add a bunch of dimmable light switches, they all show up with the same device name making it difficult to know where they are. Rinse, repeat for other device types such as bulbs, etc. I’ve been experimenting with prefixing the names with the location (i.e., Kitchen, Deck, Bedroom A, etc.). But before I start spending a lot of cycles jumping hoops, thought I’d ask Does anyone have any standing guidance on taxonomy for setting up ST from scratch for newbs? The OOB experience seems a bit ba…

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Naming Devices

Does anyone have any suggestions on naming all their devices in smartthings. On several occasions when I try to use Alexa, I get the response “There are more than 1 devices using that name” type of response. Just wondering if someone came up with a nice fluid naming convention.

As others have noted, it makes a big difference if you intend to use a voice assistant or not, and if you do, which voice assistant.

The echo groups available for the Amazon voice assistant makes it very easy to change names to be whatever you want them to be for voice usage. So you can have two sets of names, one used for voice commands and one used in SmartThings.

Google Home has some second name options, but they don’t work quite as well because it does still pay attention to the other names when it’s searching for which devices to turn on or off.

In HomeKit you can try renaming the devices, but they tend to keep bringing in the old names so it gets complicated.

I don’t know what Bixby does.

If you aren’t going to use a voice assistant, then I agree that including the room name in the device name is probably what most people do.

But if you use Google Home, that can create some issues where google home then turns off more devices than you intended because of the shared part of the name.

So a lot depends on your own specific set up, and in particular whether you are going to use a voice assistant or not.