I would appreciate some guidance in choosing a ready made widget or (perhaps) modifying a widget to send a boolean state to appdaemon and to display the state on the widget.
Currently I have a functioning appdaemon program to sense motion and generate a lighting sequence in response. I also have an embryonic dashboard which displays the status of the light using the standard light widget.
There is now a need to be able to manually disable the automatic sequence along the lines of a three way switch (widget) with ‘on’, ‘auto’ and ‘off’ states. Alternatively a two state switch (widget) labelled “manual” and “auto”. I do not have a need to involve HA in the process.
I understand enough of appdaemon to be able to listen for the change of state or event from the dashboard and appropriately change the lighting sequence.
The options I see in the documentation are a derived light widget, a switch widget, a mode widget, and a boolean widget. Some of these seem to be built on HA entities and others probably not.
all widgets are based on HA entities.
but why not use an HA entity if you want to be able to switch things on or off with the dashboard?
i can think of unlimited things that i can do with AD not involving HA.
what the heck, in theory you could create every existing HA component in AD, so there is no real need for HA at all.
but HA is what we did chose as the centerpoint from our home automation, and it provides us with easy to use entities.
for instance an input_boolean. so why avoid the use of thaat and leave parts out of the centerpoint, only to discover on a later point that it still would have use there?
Rene, I’m not ideologically opposed to using HA. I guess I was baulking at having to learn a new area of HA if it could be avoided. It is just that learning HA, AD and dashboard is such a vast landscape that I try to find simple paths through it. There are just so many options.
But your response has helped me to narrow my focus onto using HA input_boolean and connecting this to AD using state and event functions. Would that be correct? Then what would be an appropriate widget?
Once again thanks for your such generous assistance.
if you have just 2 options you could use an input boolean with a switch widget.
plain and easy.
if you want more options then an input select would be usefull, with the new input_select widget.
i am absolutly not against using stuff outside HA, if it has a reason ( i use some stuff around it just because its sometimes way more easy.)
but when it goes about just the basic functions from HA (as witch i see things like input_select, input_boolean, sensor, etc.) then i collect as many from it as possible in HA.
if it goes about controlling my apps then i have tons of input_booleans that i use to constrain things or to influence apps. and most of them are controlled by a switch widget.
Rene, I’ll go the two option switch widget way.
Many thanks