Cant figure out how to do basic if statement from sensor read

ESPHome
1

I’m new to using ESPHome and am having a lot of issues with what seems to be a simple task. I am trying to read from a text sensor, e.g. homemade_alarm which is either on or off, and display that on an OLED screen. I have been reading through lots of articles and documentation and can’t figure out how to do this. I think the issue is with converting the text sensor to an integer. But even looking into that, I can’t figure out what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I would just like the text on the OLED to change depending if the sensor is showing ‘on’ or ‘off’:

i2c:
  sda: D2
  scl: D1
  frequency: 800kHz

sensor:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: alarm_status
    entity_id: input_boolean.homemade_alarm
    internal: true

font:
  - file: 'slkscr.ttf'
    id: font1
    size: 20


display:
  - platform: ssd1306_i2c
    model: "SSD1306 128x64"
    address: 0x3C
    rotation: 180

    lambda: |-
      if (id(alarm_status).state) {
          it.printf(64, 40, id(font1), TextAlign::CENTER , "Alarm On");
      } else {
        it.printf(64, 40, id(font1), TextAlign::CENTER , "Alarm Off");
      }

For what it’s worth, the above code just shows “Alarm On” and doesn’t change when the boolean changes in Home Assistant. The logs show:

[W][homeassistant.sensor:015]: Can't convert 'off' to number!

EDIT: Maybe the issue is because input_boolean isn’t a real sensor in HA? Maybe it needs to be converted to a sensor first?

2

Change sensor: to binary_sensor: in your esphome yaml.

The sensor platform expects a numeric float value from home assistant and “can’t convert ‘off’ to a number!” The binary_sensor: will work with the on/off from the input_boolean helper in HA. The lambda logic should work as intended once alarm_status is a binary value.

4

Thank you I will try this out