Expose binary sensor entities for booleans

[sethiele]

Expose binary sensor entities for booleans

[azalin1975]

Just to throw in my two cents.
If you need and want any of these sensors to be binary_sensors, you could create either a template sensor or a threshold sensor. What I did was create a threshold sensor since I did not have any experience with template sensors until not so long ago. I created a threshold sensor and set the upper limit to 0,5. This way when for instance the ischarging sensor is 1, it will be above 0,5 and thus be true. When back to 0 the sensor is set to false because that is obviously lower than 0. I created these kind of sensors in HA for _ischarging, _islocked and _isconnected.

I then also decided to dig into the template sensors because I wanted to add my NIU moped/scooter on a map. So I created a template sensor like this:

  - sensor:
    - name: NIU MQi GT
      unique_id: niu_mqi_gt_device
      state: "{{ states('binary_sensor.niu_scooter_is_locked') }}"
      picture: /local/local-images/niu-scooter-mqi-gt.png
      attributes:
        latitude: "{{ states('sensor.niu_scooter_axelf_latitude')  }}"
        longitude: "{{ states('sensor.niu_scooter_axelf_longitude') }}"

Which shows me an image of the scooter/moped (taken from the NIU official website and uploaded it to my own HA to prevent any dependancies on their website structure) in the location reported by the sensors.

Now, I am fully aware you don't need to create a template sensor for this, you can justr use the _scooterconnected sensor but I wanted a custom image to appear on the map instead of the letters of the sensor name. I had no idea if I could modify the existing sensor to accomodate for this. So, if someone has a better way of doing this, I am happy to take suggestions for my configuration.

[marcelwestrahome]

Why do you want to change this ?

[syssi]

Please keep in mind: This isn't an easy task and will be a breaking change. I will try to describe the required steps to be able to register binary_sensor entities:

1. Move the platform schema from sensors.py to __init__.py. So we can load & setup the platform like this:

niu:
  username: [email protected]
  password: mysecretpassword
  country: 49
  scooter_id: 0

2. Introduce a DataUpdateCoordinator to retrieve the data from the API endpoints once and distribute these data to all entities (sensor and binray_sensor).

This is the preliminary work that is necessary to be able to register binary_sensors (with boolean state). I have avoided this work until now because the the added value is low.

[sethiele]

Hi,
it follows the documentation, and it generates a better view (with better semantic) in the UI.

[marcelwestrahome]

component has a new setup