unknown devices

Unknown Device Management

The integration can help manage devices that appear on the network but are not yet part of your Home Assistant device registry.

What this covers

• Discovering unknown devices during normal polling.
• Automatically cleaning up stale unknown devices after a period of inactivity.
• Choosing whether unknown devices should be treated as a whitelist or blacklist.
• Manually adding MAC addresses to the filter list.
• Selecting specific discovered devices from the options flow.

Setup options

These options are available when adding the integration or changing it later via the Configure menu:

• Add all devices: When enabled, newly discovered devices are added to the device registry.
• Cleanup devices: Sets the inactivity period in minutes before untracked devices are removed.
• Unknown devices filter mode: Choose Blacklist or Whitelist.
• Select unknown devices: Pick discovered devices to include or exclude.
• Manual MAC address list: Add MAC addresses one per line for the filter list.

How it works

When unknown device discovery is enabled, the integration evaluates each new device against the current filter rules. Devices that pass the rules are added to Home Assistant; those that do not are ignored or removed depending on the current cleanup settings.

Notes

This feature is especially useful if you want Home Assistant to stay tidy and only track the devices you actually care about.

Related Pages

• Device Trackers — Per-client device tracking.
• Entity Reference — All core and optional entities.