0Bin collections in Home Assistant

I’ve been devel­op­ing my Home Assist­ant based smarthome setup for around a year now (since leav­ing SmartTh­ings) and after an ini­tial steep learn­ing curve I’ve been veyr happy with home assist­ant so I have star­ted work­ing to expand the things it does as I am con­if­dent it offers a long term basis for my smarthome. One thing I wanted to add was bin col­lec­tion data to remind me which bin is due when. As I live in Shef­field I needed to pull this data from the loc­al author­it­ies out-sources pro­vider (veolia). The fol­low­ing details how I did this, build­ing very much on the work of oth­ers who have done it already for oth­er regions

I used a script which i mod­i­fied from vari­ous examples on a HA sup­port thread by Rob­Brad. For this script to run I needed to install the beau­ti­ful­soup mod­ule on home-assistant.

Install BeautifulSoup python module

• Install the Super­visor add-on ‘SSH and Web Terminal’
• Open the ter­min­al from the main left-hand menu
• Use the com­mand pip3 install beautifulsoup4

Add a script

• I use the ‘Samba Share’ super­visor addon to access my home assist­ant files dir­ectly from my win­dows PC — unless you already have a pre­ferred access meth­od I recom­mend doing the same
• browse to \\ha-ip-address\config
• cre­ate a python-scripts folder
• Cre­ate a new python script in this folder — I called mine bin_collection.py
• Insert the fol­low­ing script 

  from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  import datetime
  from dateutil import parser
  import requests
  import json
  
  url = 'https://wasteservices.sheffield.gov.uk/property/############'
  page = requests.get(url)
  
  if page.status_code != 200:
      exit(1)
  
  soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')
  
  out = {}
  bh3s = soup.find_all('td', class_="service-name")
  bpds = soup.find_all('td', class_="next-service")
  
  for i in range(len(bpds)):
      bin_colour = str(bh3s[i].contents[3]).lower().split('>')[1].split(' ')[0]
      out[bin_colour] = parser.parse(bpds[i].contents[2].lstrip().split(',')[0]).strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
  
  print(json.dumps(out))
  

• You will need to replace the ############ with the unique num­ber for your prop­erty which I will explain how to get in the next step

Get your unique address

• Browse to https://wasteservices.sheffield.gov.uk/property/
• Enter your post code and select your address from the list
• Make a note of the new url. Use it in the url line in the script above — the only part you will need to change is the 12 digit num­ber at the end

Call your script from configuration.yaml

• A simple entry in configuration.yaml is all that is needed to make the script run
• You may want to adjust the fre­quency of the run. Mine runs once per day. 

  sensor:
   - platform: command_line
     name: "Bin collections"
     command: "python3 /config/python-scripts/bin_collection.py"
     scan_interval: 86400
     command_timeout: 60 #needed as the website is slow to respond and will often timeout if left at default
  

Create entities for each type of bin using configuration.yaml

• Imme­di­ately under the above sec­tion (so still under the sensor: sec­tion) add the following 

   - platform: template
     sensors:
       black_bin:
         device_class: timestamp
         value_template: '{{ (states("sensor.bin_collections")|from_json())["black"] }}'
         unique_id: "black_bin"
       brown_bin:
         device_class: timestamp
         value_template: '{{ (states("sensor.bin_collections")|from_json())["brown"] }}'
         unique_id: "brown_bin"
       blue_bin:
         device_class: timestamp
         value_template: '{{ (states("sensor.bin_collections")|from_json())["blue"] }}'
         unique_id: "blue_bin"
  

Display the results on the front end

• To show the res­ults on the front end simply add a card with the 3 sensors on it (spe­cific­ally sensor.black_bin, sensor.blue_bin, and sensor.brown_bin)
• Note you may need to restart home assist­ant to load the new sensors you added to configuration.yaml

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.