Birthdays

This is a HomeAssistant component for tracking birthdays, where the state of each birthday is equal to how many days are left. All birthdays are updated at midnight.

Installation

HACS (recommended)

1. Go to integrations
2. Press the dotted menu in the top right corner
3. Choose custom repositories
4. Add the URL to this repository
5. Choose category Integration
6. Click add

Manual

1. In your homeassistant config directory, create a new directory. The path should look like this: **my-ha-config-dir/custom_components
2. Copy the contents of /custom_components in this git-repo to your newly created directory in HA

Set up

Set up the component:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
birthdays:
  - name: 'Frodo Baggins'
    date_of_birth: 1921-09-22
  - name: 'Bilbo Baggins'
    date_of_birth: 1843-09-22
  - name: Elvis
    date_of_birth: 1935-01-08
    icon: 'mdi:music'

You can also add a custom unique_id and attributes to each birthday, for instance to add an icon or other metadata.

  - unique_id: bond_james_bond
    name: James Bond
    date_of_birth: 1920-05-25
    icon: 'mdi:pistol'
    attributes:
      occupation: "Agent"
      license_to_kill: "Yes"
  - unique_id: einstein
    name: 'Albert Einstein'
    date_of_birth: 1879-03-14
    icon: 'mdi:lightbulb-on'
    attributes:
      occupation: 'Theoretical physicist'
      iq: 'Genius level'
      sense_of_humor: 'Einsteinian'

Restart homeassistant

Entities

All entities that do not have a specified unique_id are exposed using the format birthdays.{name}. Any character that does not fit the pattern a-z, A-Z, 0-9, or _ will be changed. For instance Frodo Baggins will get entity_id frodo_baggins, and Swedish names like Sven-Göran Eriksson will get entity_id sven_goran_eriksson.

Custom attributes

You can add a unique id and custom attributes to each birthday, for instance to add an icon or other metadata. To do this, add a dictionary under the attributes key in the configuration (see example above). The dictionary can contain any key-value pairs you want, and will be exposed as attributes on the entity. Fetching the attributes can be done using state_attr in a template, for instance {{ state_attr('birthdays.einstein', 'occupation') }} will return Theoretical physicist.

Automation

All birthdays are updated at midnight, and when a birthday occurs an event is sent on the HA bus that can be used for automations. The event is called birthday and contains the data name and age. Note that there will be two events fired if two persons have the same birthday.

Sending a push notification for each birthday (with PushBullet) looks like this:

automation:
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: 'birthday'
    action:
      service: notify.pushbullet
      data_template:
        title: 'Birthday!'
        message: "{{ trigger.event.data.name }} turns {{ trigger.event.data.age }} today!"

If you want to trigger an automation based on a specific name or age, you can use the following:

automation:
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: 'birthday'
    event_data:
      name: Kalle
      # age: 40
    action:
      service: notify.pushbullet
      data_template:
        title: 'Birthday!'
        message: "{{ trigger.event.data.name }} turns {{ trigger.event.data.age }} today!"

If you want to have a notification sent to you at a specific time (instead of midnight), you can use a custom templated sensor and a time trigger. Create the sensor:

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Next birthday"
        unique_id: next_birthday
        state: >
          {%- set ns = namespace(days=365) -%}
          {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
            {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
            {%- if daysLeft < ns.days -%}
              {%- set ns.days = daysLeft -%}
            {%- endif -%}
          {%- endfor -%}
          {{ ns.days }}
        attributes:
          names: >
            {%- set ns = namespace(days=365, names=[]) -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft < ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.days = daysLeft -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft == ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.names = ns.names + [birthday.attributes.friendly_name] -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
  
            {{ns.names | join(', ')}}
          ages: >
            {%- set ns = namespace(days=365, ages=[]) -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft < ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.days = daysLeft -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft == ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.ages = ns.ages + [birthday.attributes.age_at_next_birthday] -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
  
            {{ns.ages | join(', ')}}
          birthday_message: >
            {%- set ns = namespace(days=365, messages=[]) -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft < ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.days = daysLeft -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
            {%- for birthday in states.birthdays -%}
              {%- set daysLeft = birthday.state | int -%}
              {%- if daysLeft == ns.days -%}
                {%- set ns.messages = ns.messages + [birthday.attributes.friendly_name + ' fyller ' + (birthday.attributes.age_at_next_birthday | string) + ' idag!'] -%}
              {%- endif -%}
            {%- endfor -%}
  
            {{ns.messages | join('\n')}}

and the automation:

automation:
  alias: Happy birthday
  trigger:
  - platform: time
    at: '19:00:00'
  condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: sensor.next_birthday
    state: '0'
  action:
  - service: persistent_notification.create
    data_template:
      title: 'Birthday!'
      message: "{{ state_attr('sensor.next_birthday', 'birthday_message') }}"

Lovelace UI

I use the birthdays as a simple entity list in lovelace, given the above example I use:

# Example use in lovelace
- type: entities
  title: Birthdays
  show_header_toggle: false
  entities:
    - birthdays.frodo_baggins
    - birthdays.bilbo_baggins
    - birthdays.elvis

Another possibility is to use the auto-entities card. This allows you to sort the birthdays entered, an example:

# Example using auto-entities
- type: custom:auto-entities
  show_empty: false
  card:
    title: Verjaardagen
    type: entities
    card_mod:
      style: |
        #states > * {
          margin: 0 !important;
        }
  filter:
    include:
      - entity_id: birthdays*
  sort:
    method: state
    ignore_case: false
    reverse: false
    numeric: true