Trash Night Reminder

Difficulty: Level 2

🌱 New here? Try these first:

Button Toggles a Room Light Difficulty: Level 1

Motion-Activated Room Lights Difficulty: Level 1

Never miss bin night again. Two Home Assistant Local Calendars - one for trash, one for recycle - drive a single automation that lights up the Starter Kit's RGB LEDs in a different color for each pickup. When the event starts the LEDs come on; when the event ends they go off.

Before you start

Work through these pages first. This tutorial assumes your device is flashed, the LED & Buzzer module is wired up, and the kit is connected to Home Assistant:

• First Steps to create your starter kit device in ESPHome Device Builder.
• Adding the LED & Buzzer Module to wire up the RGB output.
• Connect to Home Assistant to bring the device's entities into HA.

Find your RGB LED entity

The LED & Buzzer module's RGB strip shows up in Home Assistant as a light entity.

1. Open Settings → Devices & services → ESPHome in Home Assistant.
2. Click your Starter Kit device.
3. Under Entities, look for a light entity named RGB LEDs. Click it and note the entity ID near the top of the dialog - it will look something like light.esphome_starter_kit_rgb_leds. Keep that ID handy.

Create the calendars

Home Assistant's Local Calendar integration stores events entirely inside Home Assistant - no Google account or external service required.

Add the Trash calendar

1. Open Settings → Devices & services and click + Add integration.
2. Search for Local Calendar and select it.
3. Name it Trash and click Submit. Home Assistant creates a calendar entity called calendar.trash.

Add the Recycle calendar

1. Click + Add integration again, search for Local Calendar, and repeat with the name Recycle. This creates calendar.recycle.

Add recurring events

Add a repeating event to each calendar to match your actual pickup schedule.

1. Open the Calendar view in your Home Assistant sidebar. If you do not see it, go to Settings → Dashboards and add the Calendar panel.

2. Click the first day your trash goes out to open the new-event dialog.

   • Calendar → Trash
   • Title → Trash pickup
   • Set the start time to the evening before your pickup day (for example, 7 PM the night before). (1)
   • Set the end time to the morning of pickup day (for example, 9 AM). (2)
   • Enable Repeat and set it to Weekly on the correct day.
   1. The event start is when the RGB LEDs light up. Setting it to the evening before means the reminder is on while you are home and can act on it.
   2. The event end is when the LEDs turn back off. Make sure the end time falls after you would normally get the bins back in.

3. Click Save.

4. Repeat for the Recycle calendar on your recycle pickup day and time.

Build the automation

One automation handles both calendars. Four triggers - event start and event end for each calendar - feed into a Choose action that picks the right color or turns the LEDs off depending on which trigger fired.

Create the automation

1. Open Settings → Automations & scenes and click + Create automation → Create new automation.

Add the triggers

Add four triggers, one at a time. Each one is a Calendar trigger, and each gets a Trigger ID so the action block can tell them apart. You set the ID from the trigger's three-dot menu, the same way the Motion-Activated Room Lights automation does.

1. Click + Add trigger, search Calendar, and pick the Calendar trigger.

   • Calendar → Trash
   • Event → Start
   • Open the trigger's three-dot menu, choose Rename, and set the Trigger ID to trash_start.

2. Click + Add trigger and add another Calendar trigger.

   • Calendar → Trash
   • Event → End
   • Three-dot menu, Rename, Trigger ID → trash_end.

3. Click + Add trigger and add another Calendar trigger.

   • Calendar → Recycle
   • Event → Start
   • Three-dot menu, Rename, Trigger ID → recycle_start.

4. Click + Add trigger and add another Calendar trigger.

   • Calendar → Recycle
   • Event → End
   • Three-dot menu, Rename, Trigger ID → recycle_end.

Add the choose action

1. Under Then do, click + Add action and search for Choose.

   The Choose block works like a branching decision: it checks each option's condition in order and runs the first one that matches.

2. On the first Option, click + Add condition and choose Triggered by. Set the Trigger ID to trash_start. Under the option's Sequence, click + Add action → Perform action → light.turn_on:

   • Target → your RGB LED entity
   • RGB color → Red 255, Green 140, Blue 0 (amber) (1)
   • Brightness → 100%
   1. Amber is a warm, high-visibility "take out the trash" color that's easy to tell apart from the blue recycle night across a room. See Tune the colors below to match your local bin colors.

3. Click + Add option. Condition: Triggered by → recycle_start. Sequence: light.turn_on targeting the same RGB LED entity:

   • RGB color → Red 0, Green 128, Blue 255 (blue)
   • Brightness → 100%

4. Click + Add option. Condition: Triggered by → set both trash_end and recycle_end. Sequence: light.turn_off targeting the RGB LED entity.

5. Name the automation Trash night reminder and click Save.

What the automation looks like in YAML

Select Edit in YAML from the three-dot menu on the automation to see or paste the raw config. Your entity IDs will differ from the example below.

alias: Trash night reminder
description: Light up the RGB LEDs when a trash or recycle calendar event starts
triggers:
  - trigger: calendar
    event: start
    entity_id: calendar.trash
    id: trash_start
  - trigger: calendar
    event: end
    entity_id: calendar.trash
    id: trash_end
  - trigger: calendar
    event: start
    entity_id: calendar.recycle
    id: recycle_start
  - trigger: calendar
    event: end
    entity_id: calendar.recycle
    id: recycle_end
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: trash_start
        sequence:
          - action: light.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: light.esphome_starter_kit_rgb_leds
            data:
              rgb_color: [255, 140, 0]
              brightness_pct: 100
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: recycle_start
        sequence:
          - action: light.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: light.esphome_starter_kit_rgb_leds
            data:
              rgb_color: [0, 128, 255]
              brightness_pct: 100
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id:
              - trash_end
              - recycle_end
        sequence:
          - action: light.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id: light.esphome_starter_kit_rgb_leds
mode: single

Test it

Rather than waiting for your next pickup night, add a short test event to confirm everything fires.

1. Open the Calendar view and add a new event on the Trash calendar starting one minute from now and ending two minutes from now.
2. Watch the RGB LEDs. They should turn amber at the start time and go off at the end time.
3. Delete the test event once you're done.

Your kit is now a physical reminder for Home Assistant events!

The same pattern works for any calendar-driven reminder - medication schedules, bin days for a second home, watering days for the garden. Swap the colors, the calendar name, or the action and you have a new reminder with no extra hardware.

Tune the colors

Change the rgb_color values in the automation to match your local bin colors or whatever stands out best in your home.

Color	RGB values	Suggested use
Amber	255, 140, 0	General trash
Blue	0, 128, 255	Recycling
Green	0, 200, 0	Compost or yard waste
White	255, 255, 255	Bulk pickup or a second reminder

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