Timer Bar Card

A progress bar display for Home Assistant timers.

The card currently supports timer components and a few more integrations.

With a bit of work, you can also configure the card to suppport other types of entities—even plain switches that have automations.

For numerical quantities or percentages, you may be interested in the unaffiliated bar card.

Integration support status

🚧️ Did you configure the card for another integration? 🚧
I'd love to add it here! Please submit an issue with the integration name and your configuration!

† BSH appliances - Bosch/Siemens/Neff/Gagenau. Check out issue #36 for the full card configuration!

If your integration is not listed here, there's a high chance you'll need to look at your entity's attributes and configure the card to make the card work with the integration.

Install

Timer Bar Card is available from HACS. If you don't have HACS installed, follow the manual installation instructions.

Options

Either entity or entities must be supplied. Use entity if you'd like to embed the timer inside a card, or entities if you would like to create your own card (and use the card options at the end of this section).

Nonstandard Entity Config

Customization

Card options

Actions

You can also use actions with this card to trigger services or perform actions in the dashboard when the card is clicked. The action configuration options are hold_action, tap_action, and double_tap_action.

Examples

A Basic Example

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - timer.alarm
  - timer.alarm_two
  - timer.alarm_three

Receding progress bar

By default, the progress bar will expand. If you'd like the bar instead to shrink (as if it were counting down, rather than counting up), reverse the bar direction and invert the percentage:

bar_direction: rtl # omit this for a left-aligned progress bar
invert: true

This example uses the bar_radius option to round the edges of the progress bar. I like my progress bars advancing from left to right, but you can keep the bar aligned to the left by omitting bar_direction: rtl.

Use with OpenSprinkler integration

entities:
  - sensor.s14_station_status
  - sensor.s15_station_status
  - sensor.s16_station_status
type: custom:timer-bar-card
name: Sprinkler
active_state: # This option isn't needed due to the defaults
  - manual
  - program
bar_width: 35%
compressed: true
filter: true # So only the running and scheduled stations are shown

Use with unsupported entities

By default, the card will look for duration, remaining, start_time, or end_time attribute on your entity.

You can find a subset of these attributes in the entity popup, and a full list by going visiting the Developer Tools:

STEP ONE: Assign active_state, pause_state, and waiting_state if your entity's states are not included in the defaults (refererence the example above). If your active_state is not a constant, set guess_mode to true and the card will try to guess the mode. You can also use state_attribute to fetch the state from a specific attribute.

This is the most important step! Without active_state properly set, the progress bar will not appear.

STEP TWO: Turn on card debug mode by adding debug: true to the yaml configuration.

STEP THREE: Then follow these steps in order to figure out what you need:

1. My entity has an attribute that looks like duration (for example, timespan). Supply the following configuration:

duration: { attribute: "timespan" } # If your your duration attribute looks like 0:10:00.
debug: true

The entity's start time will be computed using the last_changed property (when the entity state last changed).

2. My duration isn't in the 0:10:00 format! I need to use different units!

Use the units property and specify seconds, hours, or minutes. The default value of units is duration, which expects colons in the duration.

duration:
  attribute: "timespan" # Should look like 10 or 10.0
  units: minutes
debug: true

3. The time last changed doesn't approximate the start time well enough, and my entity has a duration-looking attribute and a start time attribute (called start).

duration: { attribute: "timespan" }
start_time: { attribute: "start" }
debug: true

4. The entity has no duration attribute but it has start time and end time (finishes_at) attributes.

start_time: { attribute: "start" }
end_time: { attribute: "finishes_at" }
debug: true

Duration will be computed as the difference between these two times. You can also omit start time if you only have an end_time, in which case the last_changed property is used as the start time.

5. My entity has no attributes!

Imagine we have a switch that will always turn off five minutes later after it's turned on. Timer bar card, can we do it? Yes we can! All it needs is a fixed duration and some love. Always love.

Make sure you have an automation to turn the switch off! See this test file for an example.

# Did you make an automation in the Home Assistant configuration?
type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - switch.my_switch
duration: { fixed: 0:05:00 } # 5 min

Like in step 1, there is no start_time configured so the card will use the time the switch was last toggled as the start time.

6. My duration actually comes from another entity

So far, duration has taken on type attribute and fixed. But there's a third type: entity! Assume there's a duration slider with id input_number.slider1.

type: custom:timer-bar-card
debug: true
entities:
  - switch.my_switch # ID of the switch, which provides the active/idle status
duration:
  entity: input_number.slider1
  units: minutes # Since the slider state is a number like 10.0

7. My end time comes from the entity's state

End times and durations can use any of the types attribute, fixed, entity (you've seen these 3 before) and state! The state type uses the entity's current state. Let's say we have a timer who's state is the time it will go off, like 2021-09-07T20:24:13+00:00! Here's how to configure the card:

end_time: { state: true }

8. If your entity doesn't meet these criteria...

🧡 please create an issue and tell me the entity so I can improve these instructions! ❤️️

You may notice you cannot set remaining. This is because for Home Assistant timers, remaining behaves much like duration, so to keep my own sanity I assume remaining=duration. Since they are equal, you don't need both! Just use duration!

Embedded in an entities card

title: Timer
type: entities
entities:
  - entity: timer.alarm
    type: custom:timer-bar-card
  - entity: timer.alarm_two
    type: custom:timer-bar-card
  - entity: timer.alarm_three
    type: custom:timer-bar-card

Icons and entity in card header

entities:
  - timer.water_timer
  - timer.water_timer2
  - timer.water_timer3
type: custom:timer-bar-card
icon: mdi:water-outline
active_icon: mdi:water
compressed: true
header_entity: binary_sensor.sprinklers
header_secondary: last-changed

Home Assistant configuration.yaml:

timer:
  water_timer:
    name: Front Lawn
    duration: "00:15:00"
  water_timer_2:
    ...

template:
  - binary_sensor:
      - name: "Sprinklers"
        icon: mdi:sprinkler-variant
        state: "{{ states.timer| selectattr('state', 'in', ['paused', 'active'] ) | list | count }}"

Go to the end for themes and multicolored icons

Style to your unique tastes

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
- timer.alarm
- timer.alarm_two
bar_height: 20px
bar_background: '#222'
bar_foreground: 'linear-gradient(to right, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet)'
text_width: 6em
bar_width: 40%

Customize appearance based on timer percentage

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - timer.alarm
modifications:
  - elapsed: 40%
    bar_foreground: orange
    active_icon: mdi:fire
    bar_height: 12px
  - elapsed: 70%
    bar_foreground: red
    active_icon: mdi:fire-alert

For each modification, you have the option of using remaining or elapsed to filter based on the time left or total time remaining in the timer. You can also use percentages (40% = 40% of duration) or durations (0:00:10 = 10 seconds). See my comment here for a more detailed example!

All modifications that match are applied, with the last modification having precedence. This means you'll likeley want to list them in increasing order of durations/percentages if using elapsed and decreasing order if using remaining, so that styles are overridden as the timer progresses farther.

Do note that remaining: 1% is equivalent to elapsed: 99%, and that for a 10 second timer remaining: "00:00:01" is equivalent to elapsed: "00:00:09".

Show only progress bar

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - timer.alarm
layout: full_row  # hides the name and icon, but not time remaining
text_width: 0px # hide the time remaining

You can also choose to hide only the entity name with layout: hide_name.

Even more options

Want to change the names of the entity statuses because they are in the wrong language or they just aren't cool enough for you? You can do that! Need to use different settings for each entity? You can do that too (replace the entity id with a YAML dict where the entity key is the ID, then you can add any other configuration option you like to change it for that entity).

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - timer.alarm
  - entity: timer.alarm_two
    icon: mdi:circle
    translations:
      idle: Gas, gas, gas!

Use with Paper Buttons Row

The card supports usage with the amazing Paper Buttons Row element! You can add extend_paper_buttons_row to your configuration to add buttons to the side of the card!

Not all options (namely hide_badge and hide_state) are not supported. Please create an issue if you need these.

type: custom:timer-bar-card
entities:
  - timer.alarm
extend_paper_buttons_row:
  position: right
  buttons:
    - icon: mdi:party-popper

Manual installation

1. Download timer-bar-card.js from the latest release and move this file to the config/www folder.
2. Ensure you have advanced mode enabled (accessible via your username in the bottom left corner)
3. Go to Configuration -> Lovelace Dashboards -> Resources.
4. Add /local/timer-bar-card.js with type JS module.
5. Refresh the page? Or restart Home Assistant? The card should eventually be there.

Using in your own custom cards

If you're publishing a custom card for Lovelace and would like to use the timer bar card inside of it, you can install the card via NPM as a dependency:

npm install --save lovelace-timer-bar-card

To avoid conflicts with the timer-bar-card-entity-row element this plugin defines, you'll need to give your custom element a different tag name.

import { fillConfig, TimerBarEntityRow } from 'lovelace-timer-bar-card/src/timer-bar-entity-row';

// Assign the tag <my-card-timer-bar-entity-row> to the entity row element
window.customElements.define('my-card-timer-bar-entity-row', TimerBarEntityRow);

// Use like this
const config = fillConfig({
    // extra customization on top of default config
});
return html`<my-card-timer-bar-entity-row
              .config=${config} .hass=${hass}
            ></my-card-timer-bar-entity-row>`;

For an example of using the timer bar card as a dependency, you can view the source code of the OpenSprinkler card.

Themes? Multicolored icons? Where?

The green and reddish-orange theme (which I called Earth) as well as the gradient theme can be found here. Neither are polished and both need work.

For multicolored icons, you can use this super-duper-hacky frontend module here until some form of support officially lands in Home Assistant. I would not rely on my module. Its purpose is merely to produce pretty screenshots.

Troubleshooting

Sync Issues

Home Assistant Time: All Home Assistant timers, automations, etc. are run using the local time of whatever device is running Home Assistant, be it a Raspberry Pi, virtual machine, etc. If the timer will do something important at 5 PM, it will happen whenever your Home Assistant device thinks 5 PM is.

App Time: One often views the Home Assistant dashboard on another device like a phone or tablet. These devices have separate clocks, and often they are synced using the Network Time Protocol. If the syncing is set up correctly, the two clocks will never drift more than 10 or so milliseconds apart.

Home Assistant does not provide any API to figure out what it believes the time to be. Instead, the card reads the time from the app (Home Assistant App or browser) to calculate how much time remains in a timer. Any discrepancies between the two times will affect the accuracy of the card. If the clocks are more than one second out of sync, the card will display an incorrect amount of time remaining.

If the Home Assistant and App Times are more than 0.5 seconds out of sync, the card will display a warning to alert you of the problem. In this case, I suggest you first visit a website such as time.is or use the command line to compare each device's time to a trustworthy source (such as time.is or Google's server). Usually, one device will have an accurate time while the other won't. Make sure the inaccurate device has NTP correctly set up (here's a guide for Raspberry Pi). For other devices, the system preferences will often have a setting like "Set time and date automatically" that should be enabled).

If you cannot synchronize the clocks, you can configure the card to calculate how out-of-sync they are and adjust its clock to match Home Assistant's clock. Please note this option may not be a reliable solution for the problem:

sync_issues: fix

You can also simply disable the card's warning using the following configuration option:

sync_issues: ignore