Is there a way to create a manual “shell” entity to set states on, to use as a variable for other items? For example, I don’t want to always query multiple sources for live data, I want to be able to (for rough example, this is not exactly what I want to do):
Have a switch on my main page to set the state of this manual shell entity to “home” or “away” (for setting an alarm, let’s say)
Other automation that runs will query that state and not take action of state = away, etc.
OR
Take the value from a sensor (e.g. GPS) and set the state of the shell entity to those coordinates (for use later, e.g. hourly reporting).
I can do all of this with entities that have been discovered, etc…but I want “shell” entities that act more like variables that I can manipulate…or maybe I’m missing a different way of accomplishing this?
What you’re talking about sounds a lot like the approach @bruhautomation has taken with his status input selects.
For example, he has a input select set up for his personal status:
ben_status:
name: Ben Status
options:
- "Home"
- "Work"
- "Away"
- "Sleeping"
initial: "Home"
and later calls back to the state of that input select as a condition in automations. While it could be manually triggered, he can affect changes to it based on other inputs like GPS or presence detection devices.