Custom Binary Sensor

Warning

Custom Components are deprecated, not recommended for new configurations and will be removed from ESPHome in the 2025.1.0 release. Please look at creating a real ESPHome component and “importing” it into your configuration with External Components.

You can find some basic documentation on creating your own components at Contributing to ESPHome.

Warning

While we try to keep the ESPHome YAML configuration options as stable as possible, the ESPHome API is less stable. If something in the APIs needs to be changed in order for something else to work, we will do so.

This component can be used to create custom binary sensors in ESPHome using the C++ (Arduino) API.

Please first read Custom Sensor Component guide, the same principles apply here and binary sensors are very similar to sensors internally.

The example below is an example of a custom binary sensor; this custom sensor is essentially the same as the gpio binary sensor.

#include "esphome.h"

class MyCustomBinarySensor : public PollingComponent, public BinarySensor {
 public:
  // constructor
  MyCustomBinarySensor() : PollingComponent(15000) {}

  void setup() override {
    // This will be called by App.setup()
    pinMode(5, INPUT);
  }
  void update() override {
    // This will be called every "update_interval" milliseconds.

    // Publish an OFF state
    bool state = digitalRead(5);
    publish_state(state);
  }
};

(Store this file in your configuration directory, for example my_binary_sensor.h)

And in YAML:

# Example configuration entry
esphome:
  includes:
    - my_binary_sensor.h

binary_sensor:
  - platform: custom
    lambda: |-
      auto my_custom_sensor = new MyCustomBinarySensor();
      App.register_component(my_custom_sensor);
      return {my_custom_sensor};

    binary_sensors:
      name: "My Custom Binary Sensor"

Configuration variables:

  • lambda (Required, lambda): The lambda to run for instantiating the binary sensor(s).

  • binary_sensors (Required, list): A list of binary sensors to initialize. The length here must equal the number of items in the return statement of the lambda.

See BinarySensor

See Also