Trigger specific Vestaboard Plus Messages

[jamestalbot3]

Is there any way I could use this integration to trigger specific messages/plugins that are set via Vestaboard plus? For example, I currently have it set up in the app to show me NYC MTA updates every 15 minutes, but would love to be able to use an automation to trigger that as I'm getting ready to leave or at a button press. I haven't found any way to pull that sort of data. Apologies if this is a dumb question, still getting the hang of everything.

[DanielBaulig]

Sadly it's not possible to trigger specific Vestaboard Plus messages using this integration. You can however, push text and messages to Vestaboard using this integration. The two aspects you'd have to do would be to

a) find a source of the data you would like to display (this are usually other integrations providing this data in form of sensors and services), for your use case for example using the Home Assistant Realtime GTFS integration (no affiliation or experience with it, just did a quick Google search).
b) Layout the data in a Vestaboard message that you can then display on your board using vestaboard.post.

This is certainly more work than what Vestaboard Plus provides and can seem a little intimidating, especially if you are new to Home Assistant, but it would be a great learning experience and ultimately provides an unbelievable amount of flexibility in terms of what to show on your board and when. For example, I display date and time, outdoor temperature, air quality, solar panel production, battery backup charge level, electric car charging status as well as HVAC status, upcoming calendar events and a customizable status message on my Vestaboard. All the data is pulled from various Home Assistant integrations and pushed to the board using this very integration.

[RobDemandt]

Just a question on using sensor output in the post command. Would you be willing to share an example of the code you use? Running into formattig issues and need to see some examples for time/temp/etc.