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.

[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.

[chris-1243]

I have an Iluminize 511.344. This remote has multiple endpoints. Events are not sent correctly.

0x000d6f001668b62f_events.txt
home-assistant.log

Any chance to have this corrected? I wish I could help more but I am to limited in such coding.

[mundschenk-at]

@chris-1243: These logs seem to be truncated, but the problem appears to be that the additional endpoints are not explicitly exposed (some devices do). It never came up during testing and I'm not sure I can currently distinguish between devices that have multiple unrelated endpoints (with distinct exposes) and those that have a single exposes section that should be "copied" for each endpoint.

[chris-1243]

@mundschenk-at This test was done on my main network and as a lot of work was not fully ready, I reverted to the standard 1.42.0 in a hurry.

One log is from HA directly and there is not more. Just that this event is not recognised. (I may provide it...)

The other "log" is a copy/paste of the payload in MQTT Explorer.

According to Iluminze.ts, device 511.344 should have defined endpoints.

I will try to provide more logs. Just tell me what would be helpful

[mundschenk-at]

0x000d6f001668b62f_events.txt is definitely truncated if you copied that from MQTT explorer (part of the discovery topic), but I don't need any more data. As I've said, the issue is that the endpoints are not part of the exposes (as opposed to e.g. this device).