My local gym has a gauge on their website that shows an approximation of how many people are currently there. Being an avid Home Assistant user, of course I had to pipe that data into my dashboard somehow. For that, I created a simple n8n workflow that scrapes the data off the gym's site and dumps it into a custom entity.

Because creating a custom entity was not quite so straight forward as I'd hoped, I wanted to share how I did it.

I ended up using the input_number integration (which seems to come with Home Assistant) and defined an entity that I could reference through the API:

# configuration.yaml
input_number:
  easyfitness_auslastung:
    name: EasyFitness Auslastung
    initial: 0
    min: 0
    max: 100
    step: 1

After reloading the configuration, the entity was ready to be written to.

As mentioned, I'm using a self-hosted instance of n8n on a Raspberry Pi to automate this. Using their Home Assistant Integration, you can simply address the new entity and update its state. And just like that, I was able to add a new Gauge to my dashboard!

Continue Reading