Home Assistant

HTTP Binary Sensor

The HTTP binary sensor is dynamically created with the first request that is made to its URL. You don’t have to define it in the configuration first.

The sensor will then exist as long as Home Assistant is running. After a restart of Home Assistant the sensor will be gone until it is triggered again.

The URL for a binary sensor looks like the example below:

http://IP_ADDRESS:8123/api/states/binary_sensor.DEVICE_NAME

You should choose a unique device name (DEVICE_NAME) to avoid clashes with other devices.

The JSON payload must contain the new state and can have a friendly name. The friendly name is used in the frontend to name the sensor.

{"state": "on", "attributes": {"friendly_name": "Radio"}}

For a quick test curl can be useful to “simulate” a device.

$ curl -X POST -H "x-ha-access: YOUR_PASSWORD" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"state": "off", "attributes": {"friendly_name": "Radio"}}' \
    http://localhost:8123/api/states/binary_sensor.radio

To check if the sensor is working, use again curl to retrieve the current state.

$ curl -X GET -H "x-ha-access: YOUR_PASSWORD" \
       -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
       http://localhost:8123/api/states/binary_sensor.radio
{
    "attributes": {
        "friendly_name": "Radio"
    },
    "entity_id": "binary_sensor.radio",
    "last_changed": "16:45:51 05-02-2016",
    "last_updated": "16:45:51 05-02-2016",
    "state": "off"
}

Examples

In this section you find some real life examples of how to use this sensor. Beside curl.

Using Python request module

As already shown on the API page, it’s very simple to use Python and the Requests module for the interaction with Home Assistant.

response = requests.post(
        'http://localhost:8123/api/states/binary_sensor.radio',
        headers={'x-ha-access': 'YOUR_PASSWORD', 'content-type': 'application/json'},
        data=json.dumps({'state': 'on', 'attributes': {'friendly_name': 'Radio'}}))
print(response.text)

Using httpie

httpie is a user-friendly CLI HTTP client.

$ http -v POST http://localhost:8123/api/states/binary_sensor.radio \
      x-ha-access:YOUR_PASSWORD content-type:application/json state=off \
      attributes:='{"friendly_name": "Radio"}'