WTH don't we have a Chores/Tasks/Todo's automation/integration

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
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WTH don’t we have the support for multiple todo/task/chore lists? It’s a common thing in a house hold that people do. We all have lists of things we do on daily basis, backlog items, etc. Everyone needs a reminder to do things. So why not have an integration (build-in) that enables your automation to assist you with this?

Yes we have the shopping list integration. However the things you can do with it are limited. Most common complain being you can only create one. Also yes, you have other integration like grocy or the one from Google… however I like these information to be locally available.

Feature list:

  • Create multiple lists that contain checkboxes of things todo
  • Todo’s can be assigned to people in HA
  • Todo’s can be marked as done
  • Todo’s can reappear after a certain time span (IE: take out trash on a weekly basis, empty dish washer on daily basis)
  • Todo’s can have a live span (IE: Do taxes before date X)
  • Icall file which contains all tasks with a TTL

Automation ideas:

  • Unlock TV when son has complete all chores of a list
  • Announce what chores are still open and need to be done today
  • Announce when a chore is done
  • Send a notification when a chore is almost reaching it’s live span and still isn’t done
  • Home Assistant adds upgrade notes on a todo list (IE: Remove something from yaml because deprecation).
  • Add todo item to a list from automation (IE: Battery has been detected to be low, so add todo item to change battery)
  • Mark item as done by automation (IE: Battery has been detected to be full, so mark item to change battery as done)
  • Announce todo is added through automation (IE: Battery has been detected to be low, so announce it that this needs to be done asap)
  • Mark all items as done
  • Mark all items as todo (IE: A daily list that you need todo each day)

A todo contains the following properties:

  • Creation date
  • Update date
  • End date
  • Marked
  • Marked by
  • Title
  • Assigned to (optional)
  • Reappear date (the next date it should appear)
  • Reappear frequency (daily, weekly, etc)

Entity contains the following:

  • Creation date
  • Update date
  • Title
  • Array of todo’s not done
  • Array of todo’s done

Events:

  • Event when todo is done
  • Event when todo is not done and TTL is passed
  • Event when list is completely done
  • Event when a new todo is added through automation
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I have been thinking about how to solve a similar challenge. I want to remember to take my meds and was thinking of adding a ToDo item of sorts and then I can scan an RF Tag in the morning to say “Yup, I’ve taken my meds” but if I have not and I leave the house, or it gets to a certain time I can send a notification to the Companion App.

Similarly, if I have not taken meds at night and I get into bed (I have a bed occupancy sensor) my Google device can do an announcement to want me - and again push a notification to my phone so I can clear it if I have taken meds but forgot to scan the RF tag.

I would also like to use the ToDo items for maintenance tasks around the house. Taking out the trash, cleaning the vacuum cleaner, doing a tub clean on the washing machine etc.

So actually if one has a ToDo item and it can be ‘scheduled’ as recurring every x days and they can pop up as-and-when once can again drive some automation around that.

I guess for my use case I’d prefer to have the option to have both lists and not, or else have some lists with only one item in while other lists have multiple items

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Yes really good use case scenarios for this. My wife also takes meds and would be good to add them to a daily todo list indeed.

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The Chores/Tasks function is basically the only part of the Grocy add-on I actually use on a daily basis. With @teachingbirds’s custom integration and card it is easy to monitor chore/task status, add one-time tasks (but not repeating chores) and check them off when completed from the dashboard. With that said, I’d love to see a built in integration that makes it easier to set up… Grocy can be frustrating to get running and daunting to set up.

7 Likes
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This is something I never knew I needed in my life until just now.

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6

Yeah I use grocy for my weekly eating schedule and add it to our IOS calendars. The task part of grocy I didn’t like much.

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I created a chores dashboard for the weekend with native HA functionality.

I described it here Home Assistant dashboard: Chores | vd Brink Home Automations

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I wrote an MQTT-based recurring chores system here:

The “settings” are the name of the chore (prior to renaming in the entity dialog) and the duration in hours and are located under the for_each line. All chores are “grouped” under an MQTT device. As any entity with an unique ID you can modify everything afterwards (but do not change the entity id as the automatic system uses it to track usage and expiry)

To display them something like the following is enough for me:

type: custom:auto-entities
card:
  type: entities
  title: Tâches récurrentes
  show_header_toggle: false
filter:
  include:
    - entity_id: /switch.todo_/
      state: 'off'
      options:
        type: custom:multiple-entity-row
        secondary_info:
          attribute: last_done
          format: relative
        toggle: true
      sort:
        method: friendly_name
    - entity_id: /switch.todo_/
      state: 'on'
      options:
        type: custom:multiple-entity-row
        secondary_info:
          attribute: expiry
          format: relative
        toggle: true
        card_mod:
          style: |
            hui-generic-entity-row { opacity:0.4 }
      sort:
        method: friendly_name

It looks like this:

image

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Yeah I saw that. Looks neat.

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While I whole-heartedly agree, that it is a definite WTH, that there is no (good) task integration/support, I don’t think it would be a good idea, to integrate the backend directly into hass itself. It would only create another data island, even if you provide an ical file or similar. But how would you get that into other applications like mail readers or calendars, that also support tasks?

Rather use existing services and integrations like CalDAV, Google Calendars or Todoist, that already support tasks and extend those integrations to also provide access to those tasks.

I think the biggest issue currently is, that you currently can’t represent tasks very well in hass. Would each task be a new entity with entity_id, so that you can more easily work on them? Do you really want to keep them forever in your list of entities, which would just be cluttered over time with them?

Imho, there is a similar issue with calendars and events and why there are only binary_sensors, that indicate if there is an active event or not. But no good way to work on an individual calendar event basis.
I have never really used the shopping list integration. I quickly activated it. But it doesn’t seem like it generates any entities for list or entries? I might be wrong about that though.

Might be because hass is very much focused on long-lived entities, not so much entities or “things” that may only be available/relevant for a short period of time.

That is just my two cents. But I have really wanted a task integration forever. :smiley:

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If HA would provide an ICAL for your phone then you could integrate it. I do this for example with Grocy. Grocy generated an ICAL that I integrate with IOS calendar. That way I know on which day I’m going to eat what.

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Just will add that something like that would be a great integration to have for the reverse scenario: HA telling you to take care of something that it monitors as a result of tracking use/consumption.

For example, a to-do list where HA would enter request to change particular batteries, or tell you to run the drum clean programme on your washing machine because you’ve used it 30 times since the last time.

I think the problem is two-fold – one is integration with some external todo package which exists. Second is that I do not currently see how to display to dos in the Dashboard even if HA could read them.

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There are Grocy integrations and Grocy cards via Hacs. Granted, I didn’t like that integration, view and the way it works.

I agree with the battery things and washing/dryer machines.

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Really like this discussion, since I‘m a heavy user of the check-button-integration (GitHub - custom-cards/check-button-card: Check Button Card is a button that tracks when it is last pressed, for the Home Assistant Lovelace front-end using MQTT auto discovery.) - what basically does what is discussed here but is missing some features… (and no longer maintained)

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I have been building some custom task backend api (in TS, based on cron string for repetition). And was going to build a frontend for it too.

I tried Grocy but there is so much things to set up and you can’t really notify anyone when the state changes without parsing the attributes of the chores… Not user friendly at all if possible.

The main goal of this is:

  • have a list of one timed or repetitive chores
  • a scheduler will trigger events in HA with parameters of the task
  • a notification should be triggered to everyone/assignees (HA users with android companion app)
  • notification should have actions or redirect to a UI to perform an action (complete, participate, cancel)
  • some actions on a task should dismiss of the notification (complete, cancel)

I don’t want to have automations and helpers for all that. I want it deeply integrated with notifications but that’s my use case and it requires to keep a reference to the notification for updating/dismissing. I can isolate behaviors based on events and have the notifications through automations. So it’s more generic but won’t integrate as well as I was expecting.

My main problem is that I must make it an addon. And working with addon is a bit particular and I have been having a hard time setting up everything.

Is the need still there? If not, I can just carry on my “fun project” with deep custom code. If yes, I’ll do that in a generic way.

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For the ones coming through this feed or still following this conversation.

I’ve been building this: GitHub - HolyNoodle/family-companion

Be cool with the quality of code, I was mainly exploring how to do.

Testing it in my HA instance. We’ll see if it works.

There is much work to do to improve quality of the code and the feature (also the UI and stats).

But that’s a start.

PS: I’ve found that you can achieve almost the same thing (here notification are only for people at home) with blueprints.

Edit: The addon is close to production state. Please use issues in GitHub to send features and bug reports.

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17

cool cool. Shame it’s an addon seeing I use Home Assistant Container. Would’ve loved it to be a HACS addon.

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Along the way, someone told me about their work:

Maybe it can help you. It’s a component.

HACS has no add-ons. It’s said everywhere :stuck_out_tongue:

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19

gave it a try - and it is exactly what I was searching for!

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Actually, the only thing I need in this: Let the Shopping list be a standard integration like all other and make it possible to have more of them with different names.
That will be enough to make me happy :wink:

3 Likes