I’ve been crafting complicated automations with many triggers and a choose section to have the action depend on which event triggered. I also use a lot of timers and sometimes input_* helpers to store intermediate results. Through watching some youtubers, I realized that I could simplify things a lot by using sensor groups, and other smart helpers. So, that’s what I decided to do for my next automation.
The automation I want to create is one that turns the light on when “motion is detected and either a illuminance sensor says it’s dark outside or the curtains are closed”. Here’s the problem though: the state of the curtains is not a sensor. It seems like it would be trivial to convert a state attribute to a sensor using a helper, but I cannot find a way to do this other than template sensors, and I would prefer not to use those*. Am I missing something, is this a stupid idea, is there a feature request for this already, or should I make a feature request for this?
*: I just don’t like the need to go into the entire configuration and needing to reload the configuration after I’m done. I would much rather like something that I can just edit from the ui. If that were possible for template sensors, I would probably not have bothered making this topic, and I would support that feature being added to home assistant. However, the proposed sensor seems straight forward to me, and while not as powerful as a template sensor, it would seem a lot more accessible to the average person if you ask me, and still be quite useful.