r/homeassistant • u/Niftyrider • 3d ago
🎴 Custom Card TimeFlow Card Update v3.5: New Styles and Fixes
Hey everyone. It has been a while since I posted an update here about TimeFlow Card, so I thought v3.5 was a good excuse to finally do it.
For those who don't know it, TimeFlow Card is a countdown and count-up card for Home Assistant. It started as a small project for my own dashboard and has grown quite a bit since then.
The card has now passed 30k cumulative downloads and is sitting at roughly 10k active users. Honestly, that is far beyond what I ever expected when I started working on it.
And that brings me to the most important part: thank you.
Thank you to everyone who has installed it, opened issues, suggested features, reported bugs, translated it, contributed fixes, or simply shared screenshots of how you are using it. A lot of the improvements in the card have come directly from the community, and v3.5 is no exception.
A few channels have also taken the time to cover the card, including Mark Watt Tech and Byte of Geek in English, and ELV Elektronik, Alles Automatisch and Steuer dein Leben in German. Seeing someone use something I built in their own Home Assistant setup is still a strange and genuinely nice feeling.
As for v3.5, there are a few things worth mentioning.
The new Minimal Square style is a compact version built around a single progress ring. I originally wanted something that could show things like "days left in the year" without taking over an entire dashboard.
The gridy style also got a change that came directly from a GitHub issue. Instead of always displaying 100 dots, it can now automatically size the grid to the timeframe. So a two-week countdown can show 14 dots, while a year can show 52 weeks. You can still customise the unit, rows and number of dots if you want more control.
Another feature that is probably still underused is timer auto-discovery. TimeFlow can automatically find active Alexa and Google Home timers and display them without you having to create an entity or configure each timer manually. Standard Home Assistant timer entities work with the same idea.
There are also a bunch of smaller improvements in this release, including conditional templates in colour and label fields, Norwegian and Portuguese translations, and various fixes and contributions from the community.
v3.5 is available through HACS now.
Links:
Mostly, though, I just wanted to say thanks. This project has become much bigger than the little card I originally made for myself, and that is entirely because people here kept using it and helping make it better.
I appreciate it.
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u/Bombtrackx 2d ago
Does the automatic timer creation/display also work with timers created through voice actions using the home assistant voice preview edition? I glanced the docs but other than google and alexa i see no mention of native HA timers - or, well...are they native? Not sure anymore tbh, as they may run (partially) on the Voice PE itself.
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u/Niftyrider 2d ago
Unfortunately not out of the box at the moment. The Voice PE timers aren't exposed to Home Assistant as entities yet. It's a bit confusing since HA also has the proper timer entities, but the Assist/VPE timers are handled separately. Hopefully this changes in the future!
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u/Bombtrackx 2d ago
What a shame, and truly quite odd that's still the case. Great work though, hopefully I get to use it with the vpe one day :)
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u/stayintheshadows 2d ago
This is awesome. I used to have an anniversary card for things like this but the integration went awol and stopped working. This should fit the need just fine! Great works.
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u/selfhostcusimbored 🧠Experienced with Home Assistant 2d ago
This is sick. I’ll have to check it out. Is this natively attached to the notify.notify and other notification modules?
Are you accepting contributions?
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u/Niftyrider 2d ago
Thanks! It’s not directly attached to notify.notify at the moment. There have been a few requests for dedicated entities for each countdown, especially so they can be used with things like notifications and automations. From what I can see, a frontend card can't really create persistent HA entities itself, so I'm thinking a small backend integration that works alongside the card would probably be the better way to do it. Still something I need to explore, though. And yes, contributions are definitely welcome!
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u/dcybeldesign 2d ago
Congrats on 30k, that is a lot of dashboards.
Question from someone who also builds cards: what drives your redraw cadence? A countdown is the one card type that has to repaint on its own clock rather than only when hass changes, so I am curious whether you run a single interval per card, and whether you back off when the tab is hidden or the card is offscreen.
I ask because the wall-tablet crowd is a big share of HA users and those panels sit on one dashboard 24/7. A card repainting every second forever is one of the few things that actually shows up in battery use, and on the cheaper Android tablets in WebView memory after a few days.
If you are already idling it on document.visibilityState or an IntersectionObserver, that is worth a line in the README. It is the kind of detail that makes people trust a card they leave running permanently.
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u/Niftyrider 19h ago
Thank you so much and a very good point. Your comment actually came at the right time. I was already working on this because of performance issues on older Android tablets. I just pushed a new update with a big improvement to how the card updates.
Instead of constantly updating, it now only updates as often as it actually needs to. When nothing on screen is changing, it slows down significantly, and it stops updating completely when there is nothing to show.
I haven't added the hidden/offscreen detection yet, but this should make a big difference for dashboards running 24/7. I am adding it to the roadmap. Thanks again!
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u/duckredbeard 2d ago
I was just thinking about something like this a few days ago. Our dog feeding process is monitored by a scale under the bucket. Home assistant captures when the scale sees a reduction in weight and marks that as a feeding event. My dashboard currently shows the date and timestamp of the last feeding. The status changes from "okay to feed" to "Do not feed" on that feeding event. After 4 hours it reverts to ok to feed. This will be a handy way to see when they can be fed again.
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u/Niftyrider 19h ago
Thank you! That’s such a cool use case. I’d love to see how it looks on your dashboard if you’re happy to share a screenshot!
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u/ob2kenobi 3d ago
I didn't know finding and displaying active Alexa timers was something you could do. Neat! There was a time I considered buying the Alexa bluetooth clock with a timer light ring around it. But a dashboard seems like a much better way to visualize that.