The big bunch of things

[bewee]

After using the gateway for more than a year, lots of things have accumulated in my overflow which I just want to put all together in a group and forget about:

• Things for rules: add-ons like the date time, calendar and scheduler provide things you only really need when building rules
• Things you only have because they emit events: I have a USB remote that I use to control some stuff. The thing that belongs to it basically only emits events on click (which are then used in rules and/or Node-RED).
• The already mentioned USB remote is recognized by the operating system as 3 different devices. Similarly, I have got 3 things for my PC: a presence thing, a WoL thing and a thing with custom HTTP actions for shutdown/hibernate/sleep. I would prefer to "merge" these different things into one

Strongly related to this: hiding things (part of #2357) or moving them together into a group (part of #2826)

Concerning merging things: To me this sounds like something that is well-doable using an adapter add-on. However, I feel like this solution is again perceived as more of a "workaround"?

[madb1lly]

Hi @bewee,
Good initiative to list these kind of things. Here's my situation:

• Lots of things to do with heating system, but I only really need a few on the main screen - overrides, adhoc on/off, schedules could be grouped as I rarely touch these
• Phones presence states could be grouped, these states just feed into rules, they aren't important most of the time
• System monitoring parameters could be grouped, I only look at these when the Gateway isn't working well
• DateTime and Waking hours feed into rules, I don't ever look a the state of these
• Scene controller is interesting, it could be used to replace many of my heater controls (overrides, adhocs) but I set up my controls before the Scene controller was available
• Low battery notification and the 30 minute timer just feed into rules for automating other things, I don't need to see these on the main screen only when troubleshooting
  
  Cheers 🙂
  Note that the Things you see disconnected are part of a recurring problem I have where some adapters periodically seem to stop and need restarting, but it's like whack-a-rat, if I restart one then another stops working! Anyway, that's off topic.