Tasmota switch restarting gives false positive in Automation

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

Hello community a fresh HA user here.

I have these NOUS A1T Tasmota flashed switches for which I have an Automation set up on the Current Power to send my phone a notification whenever it gets below a certain threshold.

Now this is working as intended but somehow the switch always restart once a day between 19:00 and 20:00 and this somehow gives a false positive for the Automation to trigger. That is because the Current Power gets set to undefined.

I’ve tried a numeric state and a Device trigger, but both keep getting a false positive when the device restart. Is there a way to only trigger the automation if the given value get below said threshold while ignoring the device restart?

Until now I have only used the frontend automation editor and haven’t dabbled in yaml configuration.

I followed this video to set up the switches and HA if that helps.

[PeteRage]

What I sometimes do is use a template trigger with a “for” clause. So you can set it to wait for the condition to be true for 1 minute.

Automation Trigger

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

If I understand correctly the “for” clause will help the temporary switch from 0 to undefined to be ignored? I will definitely give this a go when I get home.

[PeteRage]

It can or you can create a template that does not trigger on undefined state.

Give those a try and if needed post your automation.

[Troon]

Add a condition that the from_state isn’t undefined.

As you’ve not provided any details of the sensor, I can only guess that it’s an attribute of the switch. If so, something like:

condition:
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['current_power'] not in ['unknown', 'undefined'] }}"

should stop false positives of a transition from undefined to a number.

If you need any more help, please post the YAML of your current automation.

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

Here is my YAML of one of tthe automations:

- id: '1701256232862'
  alias: Droger
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id:
    - sensor.garage_droger_energy_power
    below: 5
  condition: []
  action:
  - device_id: 992757a119feee7bfd82572a6009ef40
    domain: mobile_app
    type: notify
    message: "\U0001F32C️ Droger is klaar \U0001F44D"
  - device_id: 43b2ebde334bed21f9f889362ade4e94
    domain: mobile_app
    type: notify
    message: "\U0001F32C️ Droger is klaar \U0001F44D"
    enabled: true
  mode: single

Should I then formulate the condition as follows, or what is the attribute in this case?

- condition: template
    value_template: "{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['sensor.garage_droger_energy_power'] not in ['unknown', 'undefined'] }}"

[Troon]

- id: '1701256232862'
  alias: Droger
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id:
    - sensor.garage_droger_energy_power
    below: 5
  condition:
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['sensor.garage_droger_energy_power'] not in ['unknown', 'undefined'] }}"
  action:
  - device_id: 992757a119feee7bfd82572a6009ef40
    domain: mobile_app
    type: notify
    message: "\U0001F32C️ Droger is klaar \U0001F44D"
  - device_id: 43b2ebde334bed21f9f889362ade4e94
    domain: mobile_app
    type: notify
    message: "\U0001F32C️ Droger is klaar \U0001F44D"
    enabled: true
  mode: single

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

Thanks, that’s simpler than I thought. I will give it a go

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

So that didn’t work and found this piece of code and integration to find the former value. The previous state was Unavailable. So I will give that a go tomorrow.

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

@Troon

    value_template: "{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['sensor.garage_droger_energy_power'] not in ['unknown', 'undefined'] }}"
  action:

Also just setting a condition that return false will still perform the action of automation is triggered. How?

condition: template
value_template: "{{ 0 }}"

[Troon]

@svondervoort

Also just setting a condition that return false will still perform the action of automation is triggered

Triggered by the trigger block or run manually? When you run the automation manually, the condition block is ignored — only the action is run.

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

Yeah I triggered it manually. I wish there would be an easier way to test this, the false positive happens somewhere between 19.00 and 20.00.

Im also trying to get a helper template to return the previous state but it’s not working right now.

state_attr('sensor.garage_droger_energy_power')

One thing I noticed from the SQL is that the dashboard widget returns Unavailable while clicking through to the attributes reveals unavailable so now I included both in the array.

I also read in the state docs I could check on is not none, so I should add that to the mix as well.

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

Small update: no luck as of yet. I tried

{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['sensor.garage_wasmachine_energy_power'] not in ['unknown', 'Unknown', 'undefined', 'Undefined', 'unavailable', 'Unavailable'] }}

And

{{ trigger.from_state.attributes['sensor.garage_droger_energy_power'] is not none }}

But the action (notification) is still send.

I tried setting an SQL query as stated before to get the previous value (see screenshot). Not sure what to do/try next.

[svondervoort (Sander van de Vondervoort)]

In the end the solution was to create an input_boolean helper and set it to true when power gets above threshold. Then use the input_boolean as the condition for the notification automation and set the input_boolean back to false when triggered.