I’ve wondered this lots of times and in the end I usually give up and just make an MQTT sensor. But does a binary sensor have to have a platform…?
I’m trying to add a binary sensor I can set on/off in my automations. I don’t want to have it controlled by MQTT or a digital I/O pin or anything like that…simply a “flag” I can set in an automation and then use as a condition on another automation.
Use case: I want to set a the binary sensor to “true” the day before the bins are due to be collected and then be able to set it to “false” once either my wife or I have actually put the bins out.
I scratched my head over this as well for some time so I would be interested in the answers. All the components I could see all had a required value for template, the only thing I could find that didn’t was an input boolean. I used this as a basis for my door sensor that there wasn’t a native component for.
An input boolean should work for your case though, then you can just change it with an automation based on a date pattern
Update: you may be interested in this thread I just saw too!