I wanted to create a status indicator which would turn on as soon as at least on or more devices in my home are turned on. Normally I could use the group state of my group group.all_rooms which works fine if you only have lights and devices using the on/off state. Unfortunately I have Sonos speakers which go into paused state as soon as you stop the music.
Therefore I created a binary template sensore which would map on/playing to on. This was quite a hassle to me as it involves a lot of Jinja coding. Unfortunately the template preview in the dev tools of home assistant are quite limited. Sometime I just got a blank output instead of an error message.
configuration.yaml
binary_sensor:
- platform: template
sensors:
something_on:
friendly_name: "Licht/Gerät an"
value_template: >-
{%- macro is_on(entity_id) -%}
{%- if entity_id.split('.')[0] == 'group' -%}
{%- set result = namespace(on=false) -%}
{%- for child in state_attr(entity_id, 'entity_id') -%}
{%- set result.on = result.on or is_on(child) == 'True' %}
{%- endfor -%}
{{- result.on -}}
{%- else -%}
{{- is_state(entity_id, 'on') or is_state(entity_id, 'playing') -}}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endmacro -%}
{{ is_on('group.all_rooms') }}
I had to create an automation to trigger the sensor update every 5 seconds. Otherwise the template sensor would only be triggered on a state update of group.all_rooms. So far I couldn’t notice any impact on the performance of my Raspberry Pi 3.
automations.yaml
trigger_status_light_update:
trigger:
platform: time
seconds: '/5'
action:
service: homeassistant.update_entity
entity_id: binary_sensor.something_on
Just to complete the configuration, here are my groups.
groups.yaml
all_rooms:
entities:
- group.kitchen
- group.living_room
- group.bedroom
- group.hallway
- group.creative_room
- group.bathroom
kitchen:
...
“Licht/Gerät an” represents my binary sensor. I also added buttons to turn of everything and to turn on/off the heating.
