So… go easy on me as I’m a complete noob, still trying to get a grip on the idiosyncrasies of templates.
I don’t understand enough about Home Assistant to know how to get the automation to keep running for the duration of time that I want the updating to continue, nor to get it to compute and ‘write’ the update once per minute.
Do I use a ‘repeat’ action with a while ‘loop’ for this?
Perhaps start by describing the actual real world problem you want to solve. There may be a better way to accomplish it using state changes rather than loops. This may avoid an XY Problem.
Thanks Tom. As is often the case with extreme noobness, my question was a bit daft and I figured it out eventually. May not be the best solution, but I’ll describe what I was doing and let me know what you think.
As an exercise for understanding how it all works, I wanted to create a helper assisted timer, where the current date/time is saved as a helper, then a helper defined time is added to that date/time, to define an end time for the timer. Then I wanted a third helper to be updated every minute to reflect the time remaining on the timer. Placing all these in Lovelace, I figured this would be a good little exercise to get on top of some of the basics and see exactly what my tinkering was producing.
So I ended up using a repeat action, with the while defined with a template condition checking the endtime minus the now() time remained larger than 1. I got the sequence to first update the remaining time helper, then popped a delay of 60 seconds after that.
Works well enough.
Another way to do it is with some helpers, a template sensor and some state triggered automations. I have this timer that switches on my porch light if I’m expecting a food delivery at night:
I set the time with the slider and turn the switch (input_boolean) on.
Input boolean:
pizza_delivery:
name: Pizza Delivery
icon: mdi:pizza
Input Number:
pizza_delivery_time:
name: Delivery Time
min: 15
max: 120
step: 5
unit_of_measurement: min
icon: mdi:update
Sensor (updates every minute, or if either the input boolean or input number are changed):
- platform: template
sensors:
pizza_delivery_time_remaining:
friendly_name: 'Time Remaining'
value_template: >
{% if is_state('input_boolean.pizza_delivery', 'on') %}
{{ [ (states('input_number.pizza_delivery_time')|int - (as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(states.input_boolean.pizza_delivery.last_changed)) / 60)|round(0) ,0 ]|max }}
{% else %}
0
{% endif %}
unit_of_measurement: "min"
Automations:
- id: bd7c3114-4945-4c0b-a003-8c3d84f069ca
alias: 'Pizza Delivery On'
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: input_boolean.pizza_delivery
to: 'on'
action:
- service: light.turn_on
data:
entity_id: light.lifx_front_porch
brightness: 255
kelvin: 2700
- id: ddb3aaa9-544a-45cf-b08b-6a6dcd82848b
alias: 'Pizza Delivery Off'
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: input_boolean.pizza_delivery
to: 'off'
action:
- service: light.turn_off
entity_id: light.lifx_front_porch
- id: e0a18608-491a-48e6-90f6-fa0b1a87a0ac
alias: 'Pizza Delivery Reset'
trigger:
platform: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.pizza_delivery_time_remaining
below: 1
condition:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_boolean.pizza_delivery
state: 'on'
action:
- service: light.turn_off
entity_id: light.lifx_front_porch
- service: input_boolean.turn_off
entity_id: input_boolean.pizza_delivery
- service: notify.telegram_general
data:
title: '*Information*'
message: "Pizza delivery timer expired. Turning off front porch light."
- condition: state
entity_id: input_boolean.dnd
state: "off"
- service: tts.google_translate_say
entity_id: media_player.entranceway_speaker
data:
message: "Pizza delivery timer expired. Turning off front porch light."
This was written quite a while ago and could probably do with a bit of rework to combine the first two automations. But it works and I have a lot of energy monitoring configuration to do…
Thank you for sharing that implementation: I’m learning a lot from it.
Although the Home Assistant docs are expansive, for me, nothing beats seeing a real world implementation where the context of desired outcome is fully understood before diving into the code.