Noobish Automation questions

[BrianGGG (Brian)]

Hello. I’m just getting started on Home Assistant. Since this is all new to me, I have what is probably a set of N00Bish questions about automations and scripting.

Starting with the project at hand: I have several Reolink cameras connected to an NVR. The Reolink iPhone app is OK, but it doesn’t send a picture along with the PUSH notifications (for easy diagnosis of person detection). It also does not support the idea of a “temporary mute” on motion, e.g. don’t want to see a bunch of messages if I’m in my back yard.

I’m starting to test automations to detect motion and to send a snapshot via a push notification when that happens.

This has led to two high-level questions:

1. What to do about persistent variables? Would this be a template sensor possibly? The goal would be to store whether I have called for a “mute” for a particular period of time or not. This variable should stay active beyond any single automation.

2. What about modular programming? Can I call a script including an input parameter? I will have multiple automations (one for each camera) and it would be nice to call a script and pass the snapshot filename as the only thing that changes across cameras.

Sorry for the basic questions, and guidance very much appreciated.

[msp1974 (Mark P)]

For your mute, if you are looking to have it for a standard time, then i would you a toggle helper (for mute on/off) and then have an automation that if the toggle helper has been turned on for x time, turn it off. You can then use the state of this toggle helper in other automations/scripts.

description: ""
mode: single
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.mute_motion
    to: "on"
    for:
      hours: 1
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - service: input_boolean.turn_off
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: input_boolean.mute_motion

Yes you can pass values to scripts. See scripts documentation.

Scripts