Issues with creating and updating a binary sensor

Configuration
,
1

Hi all - I think I am making a stupid mistake, but I can’t get my head around it. I have a Zigbee temperature sensor with entity name: sensor.temp005_temperature. It provides regular temperate updates in degrees Celcius with two decimals. I can see the historic temperature which confirms that HA is getting regular updates (once every 1-3 minutes). Temperature is always (slightly) different, which is what I am expecting. No issues here.

In my Configuration.yaml, I have added the following code to create two binary sensors. One to be ‘true / on’ if temperature is rising, and one to be true / on in case temperature is declining.

binary_sensor:
- platform: template
sensors:

[various other sensors]

  temperature_increase_temp005:
    friendly_name: "Temperature Increase Temp005"
    value_template: "{{ states('sensor.temp005_temperature') | float > states('sensor.temp005_temperature') | float(1) }}"

  temperature_decrease_temp005:
    friendly_name: "Temperature Decrease Temp005"
    value_template: "{{ states('sensor.temp005_temperature') | float < states('sensor.temp005_temperature') | float(1) }}"

After reloading the YAMLs, the sensors appear as an entity. However, both remain ‘off’ and are not updating. Any hints on what I am doing wrong?

Thanks a lot for your help!

2

You are comparing the same states, that won’t work…they will always be identical.
I think you should store the value in f.e. a helper, when the value changes and check that helper versus the actual sensor value, to see if it increased or decreased :thinking:

3

If you really want/need something to compare each state change to the last, you could do it with a trigger-based Template sensor, but I would go for the one of the built-in statistics integrations above.

1 Like
4

Thank you both for your quick and helpful responses. It seems that the ‘Trend’ integration is exactly what I need!
Thanks!

5

Eager to set up the Trend ‘helper’, another stupid question. I am running the latest home assistant version, yet I can’t get this helper/ integration to be installed.

I tried both options shown in the reference documentation:

  1. Click on the button ‘add integration to my HA’, and
  2. followed the manual steps to select Trend from the list of Helpers.

Both do not work:

  1. gives an error that it cannot find the helper and that I should use the latest version of HA (I am using 2023.12.4 for Core and 11.2 for Operating System)
  2. when manually installing, I cannot find the Trend helper in the list shown.
6

I can confirm doing it through the Integrations page and Helpers page both work in 2024.1 after clearing the browser cache.

You can also still configure them manually in YAML.

8

Thanks. It works!