Support for Home Assistant Event Entities

[bdr99]

Home Assistant has added a new entity type called event entities. It was merged in home-assistant/core#96797 and was released in HA 2023.8. This entity type makes it easier for users to discover the events available on a device and create automations involving them.

On this documentation page, Zigbee2MQTT currently suggests using device triggers as the recommended way to listen to events from a Zigbee device. It would be awesome if Zigbee2MQTT could support event entities as a new way to accomplish this. The event entity could replace the legacy sensor entity (legacy_triggers: true), and potentially the device triggers as well, since I assume that HA will automatically generate device triggers for the event entities on a device.

HA has added support for event entities in the MQTT integration in this PR: home-assistant/core#96876

[stadros83]

Does Z2M send events entities now ?

[bdr99]

I don't think so.

[Mincka]

Great suggestion. I'm new to Z2M and I was looking for something similar of what's done with Deconz integration: a button press sends an event on the event bus on HA. It's so easy to use in automations...

  trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: deconz_event
    event_data:
      unique_id: 00:17:88:01:06:06:81:5c # Stable ID that does not change like the HA device ID
      event: 1002 # Click (xxx2) on left button (1xxx)

As HA users, we know that the device trigger is sadly the worst method in the long term and it should not be recommended.
The MQTT trigger is not user friendly, needs a little bit of templating, and it's quite verbose.
Finally, the state method seems like a workaround, that seems to work great, but feels also like a hack to handle button events with the "sensor" domain.

Current method with states (the state value is cleared immediately after the value is set):

automation:
  - alias: Respond to button click
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: sensor.my_switch_click
      to: 'single'
    action:
      entity_id: light.my_bulb_light
      service: light.toggle

The shortest equivalent (mono button device, any click type trigger), with the support of the Event entity, would be:

automation:
  - alias: Respond to button click
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: event.my_switch_button
    action:
      entity_id: light.my_bulb_light
      service: light.toggle

The state of an Event entity is always the timestamp of the last event for a button.

Sample for Fibaro (Z-Wave JS) that now creates event entities:

It's possible to support multiple buttons with trigger IDs and multiple types of button press with a conditional switch.

automation:
  - alias: Respond to button click
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: event.my_switch_button
    action:
      - choose:
          - conditions:
              - condition: state
                entity_id: event.my_switch_button
                attribute: "event_type"
                state: "short_release"
            sequence:
               - entity_id: light.my_bulb_light
                  service: light.toggle

Detailed examples and documentation:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/event/
https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/entity/event

[celindho]

Do you know of any updates related to adding this functionality to Zigbee2MQTT?

[bdr99]

No, unfortunately I do not.

[mundschenk-at]

I have created a PR.

[Mincka]

Congratulations on the merge! I saw you had a hard time to find and support all the different event types.
I'm thinking about one specific type of device, with rotary action like this one.

I'm not sure it will be supported in v1 since I saw no sign of "rotary" in the PR, but maybe I'm wrong.
Do you think this is something that could also be supported?

[mundschenk-at]

Thanks! Except for some wildcard actions, the PR supports all actions, but not in an optimal way. The dial_rotary_left_fast etc. actions will currently result in

{
  "event_type": "dial_rotary_left_fast"
}

instead of something like

{
  "event_type": "dial_rotary",
  "direction": "left",
  "speed": "fast"
}

I hope to add parsing for the remaining wildcard actions and at least the more common/important input devices before the next release (i.e. in November).

[Mincka]

Great! And that's completely understandable that the event_type may change during these first iterations.
That's really a great news. I see a lot of work ahead in a few months to update all the automations. 😱 But in the end, this will be a really cleaner approach.

[mundschenk-at]

I've updated the action parsing in dev, including support for the Hue Tap actions. Please let me know if there are any issues.