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Rooms & devices

How to organise your home in Bifrost: group devices into rooms, and tidy the device inventory (glyphs, de-duplication, receiver binding, TV remotes, and merging). Live control lives on the Dashboard and Floor Plan; configuration lives on the Rooms and Devices pages.

Rooms

A room is Bifrost's core grouping. It can hold any mix of device types — lights, speakers/receivers, power devices (switches, plugs, fans), and sensors — and is the high-level control surface: turning a room on/off fans out to every member, a brightness change touches its lights, and volume/mute fan out to its speakers.

Room configuration (membership, links, audio calibration, quick buttons, enable/disable, merge) is on the Rooms page. Live control (on/off, colour, scenes, quick volume) stays on the Dashboard / Floor Plan.

Members

A room aggregates members two ways:

  • Direct assignment — add lights/audio/power devices to the room on the Rooms page, or assign a single device to a room from its row on the Devices page (one direct room per device).
  • Linked provider groups (Sync) — many providers already define their own groupings (Hue rooms/zones, Sonos rooms, Home Assistant Areas). Press Sync on a provider (Settings → Providers, or Sync all) and Bifrost mirrors those native groups and links them to Bifrost rooms — creating a room if one of the same name doesn't exist, or linking into the existing one. Sync covers both lights and audio.

A room's effective members are the linked groups' devices plus any directly-assigned ones, so you can start from a provider's layout and tweak.

Audio members & per-room volume

Speakers added to a room get a per-room volume offset — a trim (e.g. −10 / +5) so a quiet speaker and a loud one even out when you set one room volume. A room's volume/mute fans out to every media member with its offset applied. Configure the media members and their offsets on the Rooms page.

Quick-control buttons

Each room can carry quick-control buttons — small glyph buttons shown on the room's Control card, left of its power button. Each does one thing on a chosen set of members: power (toggle), volume or brightness (open the shared editor scoped to those members), or scene (apply a saved scene). Add them on the Rooms page.

Occupancy (presence sensors)

A room with motion or occupancy sensors among its members gets a live, provider-agnostic occupancy state — a Hue motion accessory and a Home Assistant binary_sensor are interchangeable presence inputs. Presence-driven behaviour reads this room-level state rather than any one sensor; the first consumer is the wall tablet's display power saving (blank while the room is empty, wake on motion — see Kiosk control).

Automations

Sensors, room occupancy, and device power can drive automations — "when this, then that" rules that run in the hub. See Automations.

Enable / disable & merge

  • Disable a room to hide it from control without deleting its setup.
  • Merge two rooms into one (Rooms page → merge). Useful when a synced provider group and a room you made by hand are really the same place — merging folds the members together instead of leaving duplicates.

Scenes

A scene is a saved snapshot of live state, re-applied later:

  • A Home scene captures the whole home (every light + power device).
  • A Room scene captures just one room's effective members.

One Home scene can be the Restore Home default — a one-tap reset after a power blip resets bulbs. Manage scenes on the Scenes page; save/apply a room's scenes from its control fly-out. (See also the /scenes API.)

Devices

The Devices page is the full inventory — every device of every domain, regardless of room: lights, media, power, remotes, sensors (read-only readings — motion, contact, light level, temperature, humidity), and an "Other devices" section for anything Home Assistant exposes that Bifrost doesn't natively model (climate, covers, locks, …), with controls derived live from the entity. It's a configuration surface, not a control one: enable or disable a device, pin a glyph, assign it to a room, and resolve the special cases below.

Glyph override

Each device shows a glyph derived from its type/kind. Pin a different one by name (e.g. a switch that actually drives an LED strip can show the strip glyph). The override is used everywhere the device appears.

Cross-provider de-duplication (shadowing)

A physical device reachable both natively and through Home Assistant (e.g. a Hue bulb that HA also exposes) imports as two rows. Bifrost clusters them by hardware id (MAC) after each discovery and shadows the integration copy under the native one — native always wins. The shadowed copy stays tracked but is hidden from control and room membership, and collapsed on the Devices page.

Matching is exact-MAC only (safe to auto-apply). For a device that exposes no hardware id, link a duplicate manually from the Devices page. When you flag a capability the native provider is missing versus its HA twin, file it — de-dup hides the HA copy, so an unfiled gap is a silently lost feature.

Binding a source to a receiver

A source device (TV, streamer, console) that has no volume of its own can be bound to a receiver / AVR that does. Once bound:

  • Volume & mute route to the receiver.
  • Power, input/source, and transport stay on the source.
  • The receiver mirrors the source's power: powering the source on wakes the receiver and switches it to the source's input; powering the source off takes the receiver down with it — the bound pair behaves as one appliance.

Many sources can bind to one receiver. Configure this on the Devices page; it maps to PUT /audio/devices/{id}/receiver.

TVs & the on-screen remote

A TV/streamer can expose a virtual remote — a D-pad, navigation, volume, transport, and app-launch tiles — opened from the Remote button on the TV's audio fly-out. The remote auto-pairs to its TV: when a remote entity and a media_player share a hardware id (Home Assistant commonly exposes both for one TV), Bifrost links them during discovery — no manual step. App names are tidied to their brand (e.g. Hulu, Prime Video), and you can pin the ones you use.

If the TV's volume is owned by a receiver, bind it (above) and the remote's volume keys drive the receiver.

Merging complementary devices (composite)

Sometimes one physical device shows up as two complementary entities — for example HA surfaces a TV's transport on one entity and its input list on another. Merge them into one on the Devices page: pick a primary, and the companion's state and controls (now-playing, sources, a receiver binding) merge into it. This differs from shadowing — a composite keeps the companion's abilities (union), whereas a shadow discards the duplicate. Maps to PUT /audio/devices/{id}/companion.