Automation based on sun angle not triggering

Configuration
1 
alias: Morning Lights On
description: ''
trigger:
  - type: motion
    platform: device
    device_id: 1f63b4c053dd7170788116662b41d19c
    entity_id: binary_sensor.officesensor_home_security_motion_detection
    domain: binary_sensor
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: sun.sun
    state: 'true'
    attribute: rising
  - condition: numeric_state
    entity_id: sun.sun
    attribute: elevation
    above: '-5.0'
    below: '45.0'
action:
  - service: scene.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: scene.lights_on
    metadata: {}
mode: single

In the morning when I walk into the office and the sun is between -5 degrees and 45 degrees, turn on the lights…

I can see this morning that the motion detector triggered at 7:22 AM which should have had sun rising and angle between -5 and 45… (NOAA online calculator says at that time sun elevation would have been 15.79 in Los Angeles)… but it didn’t trigger. Am I doing something wrong here?

2

I’m getting a little rusty, but my guess would be you have the wrong state for the first condition. I.e., the rising attribute is a boolean, not a string. So try removing the quotes:

  - condition: state
    entity_id: sun.sun
    state: true
    attribute: rising
3

Ok, will try that. This was actually created in the GUI editor, so the quotes were put there by the editor… meh. But thanks!

4

I think you can do it in the GUI editor. Just click on the three dots in that condition and select “Edit in YAML”. Then you can remove the quotes. But I don’t really use the GUI editor.

5

The GUI editor will keep “fixing” true to 'true', even when you edit other automations.

The only answer is to split the automation out into another file. For example:

automation: !include automations.yaml
automation mine: !include my_automations.yaml
1 Like
6

Again, I don’t use the GUI editor, so I don’t know how well this would work, but another solution could be to replace both conditions with a single template condition:

{{ is_state_attr("sun.sun", "rising", true) and -5 < state_attr("sun.sun", "elevation") < 45 }}
7

If the UI editor is changing a boolean to a string using an attribute (that is supposed to adopt native datatypes automatically) then this sounds like a bug that needs to be reported.

1 Like
8

Ok, so in fact after removing the quotes using the YAML editor in the gui, it did work this morning!

I agree with @finity that this is a bug, but not sure where to report.

9

There’s an issue in the frontend repository already:

However, it is stale for some reason. I don’t currently have time to read through it, but if you believe it still applies, please comment on it to prevent it from being automatically closed.

10

thanks, added a comment and a link to this topic.