Can I compare a substring from Home Assistant in ESPHome

ESPHome
1

I’m trying to make a smartest possible binary sensor :slight_smile:

If my alarm is armed, the sensor reads “armed_night”, “armed_…” etc.
I want to have ESPHome turn on a LED if it is any kind of ‘armed’.

So my first thought was to make a binary sensor, and have that placed in the ESPHome device, and just have the LED react on that.

So I made a template:

{{ states('alarm_control_panel.alarmo') [:5] }}

This will just return the first 5 letters.
So I thought I could make a simple binary sensor like

{{ states('alarm_control_panel.alarmo') [:5] = 'armed' }}

This will make a binary sensor that reflects the armed state as true/false, and I can react on that in ESPHome.

But is there a better way, so I don’t make an extra sensor in HA, and just let ESPHome determine the substring from the sensor itself?

2

I’m sure it’s possible to extract the “armed” part of the text sensor with a lambda but I don’t know enough about C to help you. However you don’t really need to do this. Just use an or condition to check the full string states:

on_value:
  - if:
      condition:
        or:
          - text_sensor.state:
              id: my_text_sensor
              state: 'armed_away'
          - text_sensor.state:
              id: my_text_sensor
              state: 'armed_night'
          - text_sensor.state:
              id: my_text_sensor
              state: 'armed_whatever'
      then:
        - output.turn_on: my_led
  - if:
      condition:
          text_sensor.state:
            id: my_text_sensor
            state: 'disarmed'
      then:
        - output.turn_off: my_led
1 Like
3

Hi @tom_l
You are absolutely right, I just wanted to do it the ‘clever’ way :slight_smile: