I am new to HA. I have a home made weather station that gives a number to HA ( one for the wind and one for the rain) that updates every 5mins to te next total count ( from the pulses of the wind vane or tipping bucket. So I get a figure of say 2478 and the 5 minutes later 2479 if it has rained enough to tipthe bucket of the rain meter once. How do I go about counting this and then displaying how much it has rained
I would suggest you put the raw value in a hidden input helper, and then in your configuration.yaml, some template sensors which would calculate the values you need.
However, before the above, it would be better to back up research the best way as you ideally would prefer to have your data ending up in a climate object (so you can take advantage of various cards and dashboards etc) which has all the other correct fields by default - which I could help and suggests more but I don’t have the knowledge…