Turning an attribute into an entity

I am relatively new to Node Red. I have a flow that i would like to trigger every time the Ecobee thermostat changes the target temperature. The difficulty is that this temperature is an attribute to a climate entity. How do i use the attribute as an entity so that i can trigger a flow from it?

Not sure but this sounds like a HA node issue, You may find the answer quicker here community.home-assistant.io/c/third-party/node-red . As alot a people here do not use HA.

Can you get a message from somewhere if the target temperature changes?

No, i don't think so. The problem is this temperature is an attribute of an entity as opposed to the state of an entity. I would like to trigger from a change in that attribute. I was thinking that i could find a node that allows me to trigger from an attribute change or i could find a way to turn that attribute into a state of a new virtual entity.

What are the main other uses of node red? I find node red to be a phenomenal tool.

I am not sure whether use with HA is itself a main use, but I have no idea on the statistics. Here most seem to use it for home automation but without Home Automation, which for many just seems to impose a bit of a straight jacket, but that may be a false impression on my part. But it can be used for practically anything you could think of that is computer related, though it is not always the best tool. There was a survey done some time ago which could probably be found by searching the forum.

Browse through the topics here and you will get some idea.

Can't you get this entity, whatever that is, into a message in node-red?

I suppose I could also ask the question why are you using HA if it doesn't do what you want?

The survey results are here - 2019 Node-RED Community Survey : Node-RED

I can get this attribute into a message in node-red, but how do i trigger a flow when that message changes. I guess i could poll the message periodically, but i was looking for a more elegant solution.

I was previously using Smartthings with WebCore. That was working well until i lost the ability to TTS with Alexa. After that it became increasingly apparent that i needed more local control over my home. That is when i noticed that there were a large number of people fleeing Smartthings in favor of HA. I had no idea that you could run node-red without HA.

An RBE node will do this for you.

Yep. You are absolutely correct. Thank you.

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