I finally found a way to know whether my IR devices are really on or off
For a long time I wanted to automatically turn off my TV when leaving the house or going to bed. But the damn thing is pretty old and I control it via a RM Pro by Broadlink and sometimes it does not react to the IR commands being sent.
This means I can never be sure whether the TV is really on or off. And when I don’t know it, it means Homeassistant doesn’t know it either so if I include the TV in my turn everything off when I leave automation it could be that the TV gets turned on instead of off.
Why? Because the IR command for On and Off is the same thing.
Template Switch
Out of accident I stumbled upon the Template Switch and got the idea to use it with a TP-Link Smart Plug HS110 which has a Powermeter. If the old thing is drawing power it means that it is propably on.
Long story short, here is the template switch config I now use to avoid accidentically switching my TV on:
- platform: template
switches:
tv:
friendly_name: Fernseher
value_template: "{{float(states.sensor.tplink_tv_power_usage.state) > 10}}"
turn_on:
- condition: state
entity_id: switch.tv
state: 'off'
- service: switch.turn_on
data:
entity_id: switch.broadlink_tv
turn_off:
- condition: state
entity_id: switch.tv
state: 'on'
- service: switch.turn_off
data:
entity_id: switch.broadlink_tv
It works great and I quickly adopted it to my old receiver in the bedroom and my RF controlled sunblind. You can find these in my whole config under https://github.com/eifinger/homeassistant-config
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