Web Comic Sensor

A Home Assistant sensor that pulls the URL of webcomic image, given the webcomic URL. I tested on a few webcomics (Penny Arcade, Mr. Lovenstein, Awkward Zombie) and they work. Compatibility is on a case-by-case basis, as every website has different ways of labeling their images in HTML.

Use with Useful Markdown Card to display the webcomic in a Lovelace card.

The latest version of this sensor is compatible with Home Assistant 0.89 or later. Previous versions of Home Assistant are no longer supported, though you can download release v0.0.1 of this sensor if you want to continue using on old versions of HA.

Features

• Instagram scraping added. Type in name of the Instagram user in the configuration to pull the latest posted IG photo.

Options

Name	Type	Default	Description
name	string	Required	Name of the webcomic, such as Awkward Zombie.
source	strong	Required	Two options, 'url' or 'instagram'. This is where the webcomic is hosted.
url	string	Optional	The URL of the webcomic, such as http://www.awkwardzombie.com/
ig_user	string	Optional	Type in the Instagram user name of the web comic. For example, 'system32comics'.

Instructions

1. In your config/custom_components folder, create a folder called webcomic
2. Download the __init__.py, manifest.json, and sensor.py and save in config/custom_components/webcomic
3. Include one of the following sensors in your configuration.yaml

- platform: webcomic
  name: "Awkward Zombie"
  source: url
  url: "http://www.awkwardzombie.com/"
  
- platform: webcomic
  name: "System32 Comics"
  source: instagram
  ig_user: system32comics  

6. Restart Home Assistant to load the sensor.
7. Check Home Assistant >> Developer Tools >> States to see if the sensor loaded correctly.
8. If the sensor state is URL found and the URL attribute is defined, then the webcomic URL was identified (hopefully).
9. Download Useful Markdown Card and install per instructions.
10. Add a useful-markdown-card in Lovelace and load the webcomic using the example below.

- type: custom:useful-markdown-card
  content: >
    ![awkward]([[ sensor.awkward_zombie.attributes.url ]])
- type: custom:useful-markdown-card
  content: >
    ![system32]([[ sensor.system32_comics.attributes.url ]])      

Support

I am studying Python as a hobby and this is my first public project. Some fixes/requests may be out of my scope but I'll try my best. I hope you find it useful!

Credits

• Useful Markdown Card - To display the comic in a Lovelace card.

Web Comics

Working Comics

• Penny Arcade
• Mr. Lovenstein
• Awkward Zombie

Working Instagram (remember not to use full URL, just the IG username)

• System 32 Comics
• Jim Benton Comics
• Nathan W. Pyle