I have a lot of automations that rely on my person group that holds the status of persons in the house. Now I would like to be able to add an extra person, for the baby-sitter. As I don’t want to track a phone for that person, because we have more sitters, I would like to send the person present or away with an input boolean.
After a lot of searching I still haven’t found a solution and wonder of anyone can tell me if it is actually possible to set a person state by input_boolean.
If you have an MQTT broker setup, you can use an MQTT device tracker. Create an automation that sends the payload “home” to the topic of the MQTT device tracker when the input boolean turns on and the payload “not_home” when it turns off.
Ok, that is really interesting. Haven’t thought about that. Thank you very much. I will see if I can work something out like that.
Let me know in case you need some help, I use the same method in my system to update a device tracker when the state of a sensor changes.
@Burningstone Thanks for the offer. I just got it to work. I created a MQTT device tracker. I used the device tracker and added it to a person. Instead of a binary sensor I make use of a normal switch to set the person away or home by publishing the state of the sensor to MQTT. It works perfectly. 