Home Assistant Holiday Wolfram Alpha Sensor!
I was inspired again to get this done when I saw a @TheJeffreyStone code change on his repo. He had developed some Python scripts to create sensors that would give you a countdown sensor to various holidays and dates in Home Assistant. I remembered my stuck todo list item and decided to give it a go. My method would be using straight YAML and a great website API called Wolfram Alpha. This computational engine had an API that allowed you to use the REST API component in Home Assistant to give it natural language queries and get the results back in very usable JSON formats. For the Holiday Sensor, this solution was fantastic since it would solve one of the issues I had been having for a while. Namely, floating holidays like Mother’s Day, Easter and Father’s Day. Since those holidays occurred on different dates each year, it was much more difficult to program against them in Home Assistant YAML.
With the ability to just ask Wolfram Alpha, “How many days until Easter?”, this problem was solved for me. This whole sensor opens up a bunch of possibilities for different lighting scenarios and speech output based on results from Wolfram.
I now have a bunch of holiday sensors that have numeric values in my Home Assistant. My next plan for these sensors is to use them in Speech Notifications and also to leverage them for my Outdoor Holiday lighting. I plan to color the house differently when various countdown sensors reach various thresholds. I think this should be pretty easy.
The whole solution is free as Wolfram allows for up to 2000 API calls per month. I’d love to hear if you come up with some cool new queries that I didn’t think of. Leave them in the Github repo or drop them in the comments.
Repo LIST:
JeffreyStone - https://github.com/thejeffreystone/ho...
Secrets Sample - https://github.com/CCOSTAN/Home-Assis...
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👋 About this channel: My name is Carlo. I've been running Home Assistant for a BUNCH of years. Almost from the very beginning actually. This channel is focused on bringing what I have implemented at my own house to you so that you can bring it to your house. The channel will be a mix of reviews, tutorials, and inspiration. It is a companion to my GitHub site that holds all the code for my Smart Home and my main site where I keep the more in-depth technical writings. I hope you will enjoy the videos and consider subscribing.
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