Most reliable way to power a "busy" indicator light from Google Calendar

I have setup a Govee light above my office door that I plan to use as a “busy” indicator for my family to know that I am not to be disturbed. I have been playing around with the Google Calendar integration to use meeting start and end events to be the primary trigger for this light turning on and off.

However, I have noticed that the current Google Calendar integration seems to only refresh on 15 minute intervals, and sometimes has issues with back to back meetings (which I often have a lot of).

I’m curious if anyone has had success doing something similar with Google Calendar, and if there are any other options beyond triggering a HA automation from the built in trigger the integration has.

I’m open to using Node-Red to power this, and I’ve also considered whether a webhook powered solution would give me more control.

All that said, if someone has had reliable success with HA automations and the core Google Calendar integration, I’m all ears.

I’m not doing this specifically, but do set my morning alarm in Google Calendar, which Node Red picks up reliably and then HA turns on the radio, lights, etc. I am using the “Google Calendar Node” in Node Red, not the HA integration.

I would suggest using the calendar trigger, which removes all the caveats for the binary sensor (e.g. can’t handle overlapping events, events at the same time, or events in quick succession)

This is how I currently have things setup, and for the most part, it is working. However it does appear to have some trouble with new events that added fairly close to the current time, and events that do not fall on quarters of the hour (ie. 2:00, 2:15: 2:30, 2:45).

All that said, in practice my calendar tends to fall within these limitations, and so it is working.

I’ll check out the Google Calendar Node in Node-Red when I get some more time to tinker as an alternative and see if it’s any more reliable/configurable than the HA Core calendar triggers.

The calendar does not instantaneously learn of new events since it is polling the API, so you may not see events if they are added within 15 minutes.

However, the calendar trigger should never miss events added more than 15 minutes ago, and it should not matter where they fall on the hour. The binary sensor calendar, though, has lots of caveats and will miss events if they happen in quick succession or are overlapping.

Can you clarify: You’re saying you miss events with a calendar trigger? I would like to follow up with you to confirm whether or not there is a bug here or something else going on.

@duro would be great to see what your automation setup looks like, or we can also follow up in a github issue. This is definitely not working as intended, as there are no known issues with back to back meetings as the calendar trigger entirely fixed those. Just want to confirm you’re not using the binary sensor.