Show elapsed time rather than remaining?

[tungmeister]

Hi, I've had a look through the docs and couldn't see this as an option but I'd like to display the amount of time elapsed in the card rather than the remaining time of a timer. Is this currently possible?

[rianadon]

Unfortunately that's not supported. I've never had anyone ask for that yet. I'm curious, what is the use case for showing elapsed time?

[tungmeister]

I'm wanting to show the amount of time in a day period that some entities have been in specific states. I'm using an automation to control the timers and also reset every day. From a quick glance I'd like to be able to see the duration the timer has been active for rather than the remaining time.

[rianadon]

I see. Stopwatches are for some reason not a thing in HA, and using a timer to create one is a pretty smart hack.
I'll have to see how simple this is to implement.

[igorsantos07]

I'm on this boat as well, I think.

In my case, I use MeasureIt to sum how much time I've been active on the computer. Once that hits 3h, it triggers an automation that (1) resets it and (2) tells me to use drop artificial tears on my eyes.

That said, I don't exactly care if the timer bar is showing the elapsed or remaining time, as long as I can see the overall progress. The thing is: I have the total duration and the elapsed time, but not the remaining, so it seems I cannot use the timer bar right now :(

Not sure if adding an elapsed option (in place of remaining) would be enough for the OP, though?

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Edit: I partially patched the "issue" by creating a template which does 60*60*3 - states('sensor.tears'), but it's still not optimal given (1) I needed an extra template sensor (2) template sensors only update every minute, but then I just hide the seconds.

[gazambuja]

Any news here? I want to show the time that the oven is turned on. I put an ESP8266 and MAX6675 inside my oven and created a counter that counts the minutes elapsed since the oven started heating. I want to show how long the oven has been on.

[drewkeller]

I heartily agree that it would be nice to have a timer that can count up. I guess the resistance to such a think in the HA world is that a stopwatch is basically open-ended and there is no automated action after it has started.

A frustrating issue in HA is that anything that uses now() is only updated once per minute, so it's not very nice for showing updates of the seconds as visual feedback that the timer is running. I suppose that is done for performance reasons.

My latest thing that I was wishing I could use an up-counter for is tracking how long people are taking in the shower. I can (did) create a timer to give them a certain amount of time, but there is no guarantee they are going to actually turn off the shower at that time (I'm not too thrilled by the prospect of opening the plumbing/electricals to add a valve, plus that would not be very nice to shut off the water while someone is in there).

So why would it belong in Home Assistant? Because the STARTING event should be automated, even if the ending event is not.

Here is an interesting topic on the forums where someone created a stopwatch:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/stopwatch-with-start-stop-resume-lap-and-reset/443994

However, I find it less interesting for two reasons:

1. It depends on triggering HA every second to do the update
2. The stopwatch is basically hardcoded, so It's not easy to add more stopwatches.

Another suggestion I've seen is to use History Stats in "time" mode. Other than it's more of a pain to configure and operates differently (based on nowI(), so only updates once per minute) and the output presentation is different, I guess it's "just like" the Timer helper. Or maybe we could just admit it's not the same.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/stopwatch-helper/441079/11

Yes, I may be a bit grumpy today LOL.

[drewkeller]

I see there is a PR #200 with an implementation for this. I'll see if I can get it set up on my system.

[drewkeller]

I'll add some comments in the PR topic based on my testing of the new feature (nice!), but reading back, I saw the message from @igorsantos07 ... You say you have the duration and elapsed time, and I presume you know the start time. That's all the standard timer bar needs. It just takes some careful reading of the documentation to add the correct options. Although since that post was over a year ago, I imagine you got it figured out or don't need it any more.