Store persistent state of many lights programatically

Third party integrations AppDaemon
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#1

Hi there! First time commenter, long time user and fan of AppDaemon and HomeAssistant. I have a small conundrum about how to store state using AD, hope that someone can give me a hand.

I have three lights and a zigbee remote in the living room, this remote has 5 buttons reserved to store and restore states, and I use AppDaemon to handle all zigbee actions related to the remote.

My aim is, when I long press a state button, I want to store somewhere the state of all three lights as they are in that moment , and when I short press the same button, I want to restore the lights to that previous state.

Now, my question is “where and how to store that state?”. For other automations, I create a sensor or whatever in HA (statically in the .conf files if I want the state to persist across HA reboots, or dynamically in AppDaemon, if I don’t need that). However, this time, I feel like creating 15 different virtual lights in my conf files is a terrible hack. Ideally I would like to do something programmatically in AppDaemon. Does someone have a better idea?

I could be convinced to use the AppDaemon namespaces. However, I don’t like it much from the aesthetics POV (state should be a HA thing). Also, the last time I tried to use them, it worked well for a while, and then an update to AppDaemon hosed my whole system until I managed to work out that the issue was in the namespace I was storing state in, so after some hours of very frustrating debugging, I deleted the namespace and never looked back.

#2

I use template lights for this:

light:
  - platform: template
    lights:
      first_light:
        friendly_name: "First light"
        turn_on:
          service: script.no_need_to_exist
        turn_off:
          service: script.no_need_to_exist
      second_light:
        friendly_name: "Second light"
        turn_on:
          service: script.no_need_to_exist
        turn_off:
          service: script.no_need_to_exist

Then you can copy the attributes in appdaemon with:

        attr = self.get_state("light.tomas_bed_lamp", attribute="all")
  
        self.set_state("light.first_light", attributes = attr['attributes'])

This way, all data is stored in HA.

#3

The scene integration has a service call to create a scene on the fly. It can be used to store states.

First button create the scene, do stuff… second button apply the created scene. No app daemon just straight HA.

#4

Thank you for your answer! I kind of wanted to avoid having to create an entry for each light and state as I would have to create 15 of them, and my yaml files are dirty enough as they are. Though TBH I hadn’t thought of using templates for that. Would that store other states beyond ’ on/off’? Like brightness or color.

#5

Gotta say I’m allergic to YAML :p. You mean using the ‘scene.create’ service? Wouldn’t that scene be discarded when HA reboots?