Flash your lights when your team scores

Difficulty: Level 3

In football, baseball, hockey, and soccer, your Apollo M-1 already throws a splash in your team's color when they score. This automation brings the rest of the room along: every time your team puts points on the board, your lights flash. The opponent's scores, kickoff, halftime, and the final leave the lights alone.

Not for basketball

A basketball game has around a hundred scoring plays, so the panel only celebrates the win, and this automation would flash your lights on almost every basket. Use it for NFL, college football, MLB, NHL, MLS, and Premier League teams.

Before you start

• Your M-1 runs Game Day Scoreboard and follows your team, in My team or Favorite teams. See Getting started (Game Day Scoreboard).
• The scoreboard is added to Home Assistant through the ESPHome integration.
• A light in Home Assistant that you want to flash.

How it knows your team scored

The scoreboard's Game Status entity sums up the game in one line, with the team the panel follows first:

The panel shows	Game Status reads
A game to come	DAL vs PHI | Wed 7:20 PM
A game in progress	Live | DAL 14, PHI 7
Halftime	Halftime | DAL 14, PHI 7
The final	Final | DAL 31, PHI 28

Game Status changes when a game starts, when someone scores, and when it ends, not on every play. The automation compares the old and new value, and runs only when the same game is still live and the first score, your team's, went up. When the panel switches to a different game, the lights stay off.

Live games mode

In Live games the panel follows a game picked for you, and the first team listed is whichever side it follows, so the automation flashes for that team. The panel moves to another game when that game ends or after Switch every minutes; a switch to a different game never flashes the lights.

Find your Game Status entity

The automation watches one entity on your scoreboard. Copy its ID now so you can paste it into the automation in the next section.

1. Go to Settings → Devices & services and open the ESPHome integration.

   

2. Open your scoreboard's device and click Game Status.

3. Click the gear icon and copy the Entity ID. It ends with _game_status.

Create the automation

This is where your lights join the celebration. You paste a ready-made automation, then point it at your Game Status entity and the light you want to flash.

1. Go to Settings → Automations & scenes and click Create automation, then Create new automation.

   

2. Open the three-dot menu in the top right and choose Edit in YAML.

3. Paste the automation below over what's there.
4. Replace sensor.game_day_scoreboard_2f6a70_game_status with your Game Status entity ID, and light.living_room with the light you want to flash.
5. Click Save and give the automation a name.

Flash the lights when my team scores

alias: Flash the lights when my team scores
description: Flashes a light when the team the Game Day Scoreboard follows scores.
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: sensor.game_day_scoreboard_2f6a70_game_status
    # Only state changes, not attribute changes
    to: ~
conditions:
  - condition: template
    value_template: >-
      {% set before = trigger.from_state.state.split(' | ') if trigger.from_state else [] %}
      {% set after = trigger.to_state.state.split(' | ') if trigger.to_state else [] %}
      {% if before | length >= 2 and after | length >= 2
            and before[0] in ['Live', 'Halftime'] and after[0] in ['Live', 'Halftime'] %}
        {% set old_line = before[1].split(', ') %}
        {% set new_line = after[1].split(', ') %}
        {% if old_line | length == 2 and new_line | length == 2 %}
          {% set old_team = old_line[0].rsplit(' ', 1) %}
          {% set new_team = new_line[0].rsplit(' ', 1) %}
          {{ new_team[0] == old_team[0]
             and new_line[1].rsplit(' ', 1)[0] == old_line[1].rsplit(' ', 1)[0]
             and (new_team[-1] | int(0)) > (old_team[-1] | int(0)) }}
        {% else %}
          false
        {% endif %}
      {% else %}
        false
      {% endif %}
actions:
  - action: light.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: light.living_room
    data:
      flash: long
mode: single

Your lights now celebrate with the panel. The next time your team scores, the M-1 shows its splash and your light flashes.

Make it your own

• Not every light can flash. If yours ignores flash: long, swap the action for a scene in your team's colors, or a short color change followed by a delay and a scene that puts the room back.
• Football's extra point counts as its own score, so a touchdown and the extra point after it flash twice. Add a delay of a minute at the end of the actions and keep mode: single to flash once per score drive.
• Play a sound too by adding a media_player.play_media action to the same automation.