DAILY STEPS COUNTER WITH HOME ASSISTANT

I use Home Assistant to monitor and automated things around my house. When my ViFit connect step counter broke a few years ago (it was literally run over by a car) I was left without a step counter.

Recently I found out that Home Assistant’s Android app also reported the phone’s internal step counter to Home Assistant. Unfortunately, it reports it as a total number of steps taken only, not as an hourly, daily or similarly useful value. It’s not really helping to know that I’ve taken half a million steps since I last reset my phone.

I was searching for a way to use the current value of the step counter sensor as a gauge and just show the difference between the current and the last reading as a graph. At first I thought about using an automation to periodically update a sensor, or maybe even use a local MQTT pub/sub combination that triggers respectively. But then I thought: That’s gotta be easier! And then I found the Utility Meter integration which can do exactly that! It’s not meant for this, but hey, when has that ever stopped anyone.

The configuration is simple enough: find your configuration.yaml file and add these lines:

utility_meter:
	yourname_steps:
		source: sensor.<yourphone>_steps_sensor
		cycle: daily

Validate your configuration through the web GUI, restart Home Assistant and you’re done. You can rename “yourname_steps” to any (unique) string you want and you can find the proper sensor name for the source attribute in the developer tools. Just search for “steps_sensor” and you’ll find it.

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Category: blog

Tags: homeassistant steps pedometer