🎉 Birthday Pop-up Card & Automations

Welcome to the Birthday Pop-up Card & Automations project! 🎂🎈
This was inspired by the incredibly creative berkansezer77 and borrows some of his brilliant components to bring birthdays to life on your Home Assistant dashboard.

It takes a little time to get everything set up, but once it's rolling, it’s an absolute treat. You might find faster ways to do it, but this guide walks you through the process that worked best for me!

⚠️ First GitHub project here—please excuse any rookie formatting or explanation issues. I’m learning as I go!

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📋 Project Overview

This guide shows you how to set up a fully automated and interactive Birthday Card experience on your Home Assistant dashboard. You'll also learn how to use calendar events as automation triggers for push and TTS notifications.

I started with birthdays, but I ended up expanding this setup for other calendars too—once you get going, the possibilities are endless!

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✅ What You’ll Need

Required:

• 📅 Google Calendar Integration
• 📷 Generic Camera
• 🍄 Mushroom Card

Optional but Awesome:

• 🎨 Card Mod
• 🧱 Vertical Stack In Card
• 🌐 Browser Mod

📝 Note: My calendar events are named in the format “FirstName's Birthday.” This naming is essential for automations and photos later on. You can customize it, but this setup assumes that format.

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🛠 Step 1: Set Up the Calendar Sensor

Let’s start by pulling upcoming events from your calendar.

Add this to your configuration.yaml, then update the calendar entity and reload from Developer Tools:

template:
  - trigger:
      - platform: time_pattern
        minutes: /1
    action:
      - service: calendar.get_events
        data:
          duration:
            hours: 2191
            minutes: 0
            seconds: 0
          start_date_time: "{{ today_at() }}"
        target:
          entity_id: calendar.YOUR_CALENDAR_HERE
        response_variable: raw_events
      - variables:
          scheduled_events: "{{ raw_events['calendar.YOUR_CALENDAR_HERE'] }}"
    sensor:
      - name: Calendar Scheduled Events
        unique_id: calendar_scheduled_events
        state: "{{ scheduled_events.events | count() }}"
        attributes:
          scheduled_events: "{{ scheduled_events.events }}"
        icon: mdi:calendar

This creates a new sensor: sensor.calendar_scheduled_events.

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🧩 Step 2: Break Out the Data

Next, we extract useful info from that sensor.

You’ll create 4 new template sensors in Settings > Devices & Services > Helpers > Template Sensor.

Example:

Name: sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_msg_1
Template:

{{ state_attr('sensor.calendar_scheduled_events', 'scheduled_events')[0].summary | replace("'s Birthday", "") }}

Repeat this process for sensors 2 through 4:

{{ state_attr('sensor.calendar_scheduled_events', 'scheduled_events')[1].summary | replace("'s Birthday", "") }}
{{ state_attr('sensor.calendar_scheduled_events', 'scheduled_events')[2].summary | replace("'s Birthday", "") }}
{{ state_attr('sensor.calendar_scheduled_events', 'scheduled_events')[3].summary | replace("'s Birthday", "") }}

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📅 Birthday Dates + Countdowns

You’ll also want to set up sensors to display the birthday date and how many days remain.

• Birthday Date Sensor Templates
• Days Until Birthday Sensor Templates

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🖼 Step 3: Dynamic Birthday Images

Here’s where it gets cool 😎

Instead of writing 70+ if conditions, I created dynamic image sensors that generate the file path based on the person’s name!

Example Sensor:

sensor.birthdayimg1
Template: /local/png/birthday/{{states('sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_msg_1')}}.png

You’ll need 4 of these (just change the number). Then, upload matching images like /local/png/birthday/Nicholas.png.

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📸 Step 4: Generic Cameras

Now display the images using 4 generic cameras:

Camera URL:

http://homeassistant:8123{{ states('sensor.birthdayimg1') }}

These will show up as camera.birthday_1 through camera.birthday_4.

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💬 Step 5: Optional Clean Output Sensors

These sensors give a cleaner message for the dashboard, showing things like “is Today” or the actual birthday date.

{% if states('sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_date_remain_1') == 'Far Away' %}
  {{ states.sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_date_1.state }}
{% elif states('sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_date_remain_1') == 'Tomorrow' %}
  is Tomorrow
{% elif states('sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_date_remain_1') == 'Today' %}
  is Today
{% else %}
  is in {{ states('sensor.calendar_birthday_schedules_date_remain_1') }}
{% endif %}

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🎨 The Cards

Mobile Pop-up Version (Browser Mod):

📱 Pop-up Birthday Card

Wall Panel/Kiosk Version:

🖥 Kiosk Birthday Card

I used AI-generated children for my demo pictures…because, well, Photoshop fatigue is real.

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🔔 Automations

TTS Birthday Shoutouts:

This automation checks if someone’s birthday is today and announces it via your smart speakers.

🗣 TTS Birthday Automation

I trigger mine when I turn off my morning alarm!

Push Notifications:

📲 Day-of Push Notification

🌅 Night Before Reminder

To make this work, set up a binary sensor like this:
🔌 Birthday Tomorrow Binary Sensor

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🎁 Wrapping It Up

Thanks for checking out my birthday automation project! It started as a fun little idea and evolved into a fully dynamic dashboard experience.

If you try this out or make it better, I’d love to see your setup!
Feel free to fork, star, or submit issues and improvements 🚀