Something that was always on my todo / wish list was making my own integration, but it never happened until now! My knowledge of python is still quite basic, but I still wanted to give it a try. To start off simply, I decided to build an integration that shows the occupancy of a large number of parking garages in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
You are probably wondering when can I use this integration? It’s available from version 2021.06!
Sensors
When you add a garage via the UI, you get 4 sensors in your overview:
- Free space long
- Free space short
- Long capacity
- Short capacity
The first 2 sensors indicate how many parking spaces are still available in the garage, the term “long” stands for spaces intended for permit, subscription holders or other reserved purpose. the term “short” stands for places that serve as regular paid parking space, so use that sensor to calculate whether a garage is running empty.
Currently, the data retrieval interval is set to every 10 minutes. The capacity sensors are fixed values and indicate the maximum capacity of a garage for the specific type of: “long” or “short”.
Not all garages keep data for long-term parking, in that case entities are only created for short-term parking.
Binary sensor
In addition, there is also a binary sensor, which has a data class for warning. You might think that this sensor indicates whether a garage is closed, unfortunately that is not the case. With an “OK” state, the data provision for a parking garage works fine, when it states “Problem” then there is a problem in the information provision of the municipality, for that particular garage.
This of course tastes like more, it won’t be my last! If you have any nice ideas that I can also integrate, please let me know, the preference is still with open data APIs
