Finally! After a few attempts I have the rest sensor natively doing the work. Thanks @Robbrad and @lolouk44 for sending me over to this thread and the help 
Now I need to rework my date calculation and I should be able to do the automation, will be using LIFX to indicate the bin colour that I need to take out the day before bin day.
Nice work man
That is a great idea!!
Yeah, I’m stuck again. Lol. Need to learn how to join the date that I get (yyyy-mm-dd) from the JSON response/value/attribute with time 00:00:00 as this is the only way I can calculate two dates and just fake the time of both being 00:00:00. Also noticed that the new collection date doesn’t rollover once this weeks collection is done.
Is it possible to just compare/subtract two dates with value being this? yyyy-mm-dd instead of having to use yyyy-mm-dd 00:00:00? Or how I can combine yyyy-mm-dd with 00:00:00?
Dates are stored internally as seconds from the epoch, so you should be able to.
Thanks buddy. Works a treat!!! Sorry it’s taken a while for me to reply. I’ve had a few family issues happen latley, so been busy sorting them out, and only just looked at this tonight.
The output is all the code for the page, so I’ll need to save that to a file and scrape out just the info that I need or work out a way to save just what I need.
My local council is nice enough to provide PDFs for east and west sides broken down day by day.
Similar to mentioned above, you have to enter your postcode and house name/number to get the right PDF.
My thinking is of scraping the page somehow and OCRing the PDF to get the relevant days and bins … weather that works or not is a different matter 
Can you share what you have done already - e.g. what you have to date
Currently I’ve reverted back to using my google calendar with 3 repeating entries for my green, yellow and red bin. They get imported into home assistant. I then configured a template sensor to calculate the days until bin collection. I then use this in my automation to determine which bins need to go out the day before. Notification is done via LIFX bulb.
An issue I’ve found is my template sensors dont seem to update unless home assistant is restarted. The code works fine and updates when I test it in the developer/templates section of home assistant.
I’ll post the code I have in place once I have access to my hass.
Using the rest sensor and getting the data from the council servers I’ve discovered that they don’t update the information until the actual collection day.
Example:
Organic is weekly so I could ignore the item_organic date and just use item_garbage and item_recycling to determine what bin is due the following week. With that in mind I can only get 2018-07-16.
To my knowledge the only to calculate two dates is by converting it to timestamp and for that I need YYYY-MM-DD 00:00:00.
So how would I use something like states.sensor.penrith_waste_info.attributes.results.0.item_recycling and combine it with 00:00:00. So I can then use that within as_timestamp(2018-07-16 00:00:00) / 86400. There’s obviously more to that, but that’s all I remember without looking at my configuration.yaml.
Option 1: Stick with my google calendar, but I need to resolve why hass is not updating the template sensor.
Option 2: Use the info from the council so I don’t need to use the google calendar, but I need to figure out how to process the data and also not sure if I’ll still have an issue with the template sensor.
I would simplify where possible, you have a rest sensor that gets data / present that sensor - anything where logic is required then opt for a different solution - I did mine using bash which worked out the next thus date and grep’ed for that in the JSON (that filtered the day I needed)
Your saying the council only give the info you need on the day of collection - there is no further in the future information? then its going to make the logic difficult - do we have the right url here to cURL - I noticed there is an offset parameter.
If you were doing this from a PC manually to find out the bins - which site would you go to to get the data?
This is the information that I get from the rest sensor.
This is what I’ve observed. As you can see this week’s bin collection is still showing even though it has passed already. So like what I was saying I could always just ignore item_organic because this is a weekly thing and just use item_garbage and item_recycling.
{{ states.sensor.penrith_waste_info.attributes.results.0.item_garbage }}
Would give me 2018-07-16
{{ states.sensor.penrith_waste_info.attributes.results.0.item_recycling }}
Would give me 2018-07-09
How would I calculate these dates with the current date? Or is the only way to do it is something like below:
value_template: '{{ (as_timestamp(states.calendar.hass_calendar_fgo.attributes.start_time) / 86400 - as_timestamp(as_timestamp(now()) | timestamp_custom("%Y-%m-%d 00:00:00",true)) / 86400) | int(0) }}'
This is what I’m currently using to read the dates from google calendar as I have no idea how to calculate two dates to get the remaining days to use the rest sensor data. I have limited coding skills.
My google calendar method is all in place with the template sensors and the automation in place to indicate on my LIFX only problem is the template sensor doesn’t seem to update. Only updates when I reboot hass. The best would be to use the rest sensor as I don’t need to manually update the dates, but again I dont know how to solve the date calculation issue.
This is what’s in my automation. This is what I managed to get working, I’m sure it can be done a better way.
alias: 'Notification: Bin (LIFX GREEN+YELLOW)'
trigger:
- at: '18:00:00'
platform: time
- at: '19:00:00'
platform: time
- at: '20:00:00'
platform: time
- at: '21:00:00'
platform: time
- at: '22:00:00'
platform: time
- at: '23:00:00'
platform: time
condition:
- below: '2'
condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.bin_service_fgo
- below: '2'
condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.bin_service_recycling
- above: '2'
condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.bin_service_residual
- condition: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.people_home
state: 'on'
action:
- data:
brightness: '204'
color_name: green
cycles: '2'
entity_id: light.living_room
mode: blink
service: light.lifx_effect_pulse
- delay: '2'
- data:
brightness: '204'
color_name: yellow
cycles: '2'
entity_id: light.living_room
mode: blink
service: light.lifx_effect_pulse
It’s a bit crap the council don’t tell you what’s next even though the date has passed
Could you split the sensor into 3 and have a value template hide that sensor if it’s past the current date?
Which council website do you use(don’t have to tell me your address)
Thanks for all your help @Robbrad. I finally got something up and running. The zenid was causing me grief, but you help and that python script you made works a treat. It just pretty much reads the HTML and outputs it on screen.
I added some magic with awk & sed to cut down to the table I needed and removed any extra white space, then saved it to a txt file. I then set up a command line sensor for each bin that uses sed to read a specific line fron the txt file and voila, I now have the following thanks to your help.
As my rubbish is picked up weekly regardless of public holidays, I can just set the python script to update once a week, probably Monday night at midnight after collection day, and it should be good to go.
I might look at combining these at a late date somehow to have just the next collection date, and what is to be collected.
Thanks again for you help with this.
Nice work - looks good
Okay, I finally have a working solution. Using rest sensor to the server and no more google calendar. Red box is just for debug and I’ll eventually remove.
Next Collection date uses the date from garbage or recycling if it’s within 1 to 7 days. The same is used for the Bin Type, it’s used to determine the icon to display and bin types.
I’ve tried to do this in the past and got nowhere. My council is Stevenage and their form is here - http://www.stevenage.gov.uk/find/
I’ve tried various commands, for example curl --form txtPostcode='postcode' --form txtNumber=555 http://www.stevenage.gov.uk/find/ but no dice. If anyone is able to point me in the right direction i’d be very grateful.
Hi All,
Decided I’ll share my solution to this problem which is much lazier and despite no api available for the page doesn’t require running external scripts.
My collection page looks like that (Address is fake):
https://www.aylesburyvaledc.gov.uk/bin-collections/766313148
And I decided not to parse the table but just to use a scrape sensor to get information from the text field above the table. I only need the text in bold so it goes like:
select: ".collection-next p strong"
After that I use the template sensor to set the name of template to the bin type, value of the template to the date (by simply removing all the text before the date), and image to the image of the bin from the same website so my sensor looks like that:
- platform: template
sensors:
waste_collection:
friendly_name_template: >-
{% if "GARDEN" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
Garden waste
{% elif "RECYCLING" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
Recycling waste
{% else %}
Regular waste
{% endif %}
value_template: >-
{% if "GARDEN" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
{{ states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape')|replace('GARDEN WASTE',"") }}
{% elif "RECYCLING" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
{{ states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape')|replace('RECYCLING + FOOD WASTE',"") }}
{% else %}
{{ states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape')|replace('WASTE + FOOD WASTE',"") }}
{% endif %}
entity_picture_template: >-
{% if "GARDEN" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
"https://www.aylesburyvaledc.gov.uk/sites/all/themes/avdc/images/bin-garden.gif"
{% elif "RECYCLING" in states('sensor.waste_collection_scrape') %}
"https://www.aylesburyvaledc.gov.uk/sites/all/themes/avdc/images/bin-recycling.gif"
{% else %}
https://www.aylesburyvaledc.gov.uk/sites/all/themes/avdc/images/bin-refuse.gif
{% endif %}
And the resulting card in lovelace for this sensor looks like that:
Superb thanks for sharing - I originally tried this method, but it didn’t work for my situation.
I managed to get a cURL url for your site. Need to do some more testing to see if the request can be simplified.