Good morning,
Disclaimer: I’m a new Home Assistant user, not new to Home Automation. I’ve been using an aging and not well maintained (by manufacturer) Vera Plus for 7 plus years. I installed HA on a RPI4 Saturday evening, and I’m working on some functionality that I had issues with on Vera, to make sure it’s worth my time to migrate everything over. Yes, I know, there is a Vera integration, before anyone points that out.
I have Google Calendar integrated. I can see my calendars just fine. I followed a helpful Youtube video, did all the API stuff, etc, but the problem I’m having is figuring out how to act on events.
I use Multi System Reactor for my rules and automation. I used the luup Reactor on Vera, and transition to MSR has been easy, and as it states, it’s Multi System, so it integrates with Home Assistant and Vera easily.
What I want to do is set up some sort of binary trigger based upon calendar events. Based upon what I’ve been reading, the attribute I should be looking at to know if there is an event is offset_reached, based upon some other threads. I set up a test rule in MSR to look for offset_reached being true in one of my test calendars, and set up a test event for today, and it’s showing up as false. I know that may be more of a MSR question, but I can just as easily set up a binary switch or something in HA, and MSR can act upon it.
My question, is how? I’ve seen recommendations for setting up a binary switch for events, but now how to do it.
The events I’m looking for are based upon two calendars. 1) US Federal Holidays and 2) a School district calendar.
The US Federal holiday should be simple. If there is an event on that day (any event), I want the switch to be true. The school calendar, I’m looking for keywords “Schools closed for students” or “Schools and Offices closed”. I have a both my wife and our daughter in the school district, so some events will apply to my wife, and some will only apply to my daughter, but I can get into that minutia in MSR, but I just need to figure out how to set up a switch to verify there is a valid event.
Thanks for any help you can provide.