So I’m completely new to HA, and I’m just diving in.
I’m running hass.io on an a RP4 with the nortek Zigbee/Z-wave stick. I’ve added two Sengled Element Classic bulbs and a Hue dimmer switch. I’ve gotten the on and off buttons working famously, but I’m struggling with adding the dimming functionality.
I’ve tried what I’ve found in several other posts about dimming:
But I keep running into the same error - when I try to get the current value of the brightness, I repeatedly get this error:
Error while executing automation automation.ken_brightness_up. Invalid data for call_service at pos 1: expected int for dictionary value @ data[‘brightness’]
Here’s the device info:
And here’s my current automation. I’ve confirmed that hardcoded brightness settings work (e.g. 10, 255), and this was the simplest step I could think of to get the programmatic value and add 10 to it:
it looks like this to me.
All values in HA are stored as strings
You need to convert this to a number before adding 10 (question what happens if it’s already at say 250 and you add 10 ?)
Try : -
brightness: {{ states.light.ken_level_on_off.attributes.brightness | int + 10 }}
And change data to data_template as well.
Edit: also try to avoid the states.xxx notation and rather use state_attr(xxx), this will not give you an error when the entity is unavailable as recommended here in the docs.
Every time you use a template in the data part, you need to use data_template. Don’t know if it is documented explicitly smewhere, but you see in the examples of the templating docs that they always use data_template
Burning = Burningstone
Its just a quick reference to someone else on the thread without having to use their full name
eg we often call pnbruckner - Phil
you can’t shorten Mutt much though !
A template is a statement that ‘has’ to be evaluated at run time (ie you want the level at the time of the trigger not some arbitrary ‘set value’), it’s offered up in jinja format (a print method used to format text), in this case it’s basically passing up a bit of python to the sandbox
Anything like {% set var = sensor.time %} - this is an evaluation statement
{{ var }} or “{{ var }}” - these are print statements - the quotes are dependent upon usage, try to use double quotes on the outside and only single quotes on the inside.
Curley Brackets usually indicate a template
Edit: another tip. You as the owner of a thread get notified when anyone posts to it, to engage with another member (so they are notified) you have to use the reply button in their post
Edit2: Burning is also correct about errors at startup (and its generally a lot shorter too) so you ‘should’ replace : -
This may not work as you intend, you have not converted the strings to numbers.
Eg 2 > ‘100’ = true
You also have a lot of unnecessary \n bits
Not quite sure what you want us to do ?
Nothing more needed, thank you! I believe the \n bits are put there by the Configurator plugin when given multi-line input. I haven’t yet set up Samba to allow me to edit the files in a more traditional way…
Haha totally missed that comment xD It’s always the data_template
If I understand the docs correctly, he doesn’t need to do this with state_attr(xxx)
From the docs:
states('device_tracker.paulus') will return the state string (not the object) of the given entity or unknown if it doesn’t exist
state_attr('device_tracker.paulus', 'battery') will return the value of the attribute or None if it doesn’t exist.
The subtle difference is states(xxx) returns “state string” and state_attr(xxx,xxx) returns “value of the attribute”. Don’t know if my understanding of this is correct, however I can confirm that it works for me with state_attr(xxx) without casting it to an int first.
Ah that’s interesting, but without something (template editor) to check with, I’d always go with belt,
braces and a bit of string
Edit: casting a string to int gives you a number (as long as its not “Beware of the Zombies !” (or such) casting a number to int still gives you a number (hence the multiple methods of holding your pants up)
If I remember correctly, state_attr(xxx,xxx) does an attribute gathering operation that will eventually box the returned value to it’s “correct” data type. I’d have to go back and look at /helpers/template.py to be 100% sure of that though.
def state_attr(hass, entity_id, name):
"""Get a specific attribute from a state."""
state_obj = _get_state(hass, entity_id)
if state_obj is not None:
return state_obj.attributes.get(name)
return None
