Compact alarm tile with last armed / disarmed date: I need to see your alarm configs

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1

Hi everyone,

I am considering a small Lovelace card for alarm systems, and before writing a single line I would like to see how your alarms actually look in Home Assistant.

The idea is a compact status tile: a coloured icon for the state, the name, and above all the date of the last arming and the last disarming. It would sit in a row next to other tiles instead of taking a full card.

Let me place it against what already exists. nielsfaber’s alarmo-card (GitHub - nielsfaber/alarmo-card: Home Assistant card for controlling the Alarmo component · GitHub) covers the control side very well, with a keypad, countdown timers for entry and exit delays, and diagnostics on blocking sensors. It only works with the Alarmo integration though, and it shows no date at all, which is also true of the built-in alarm panel card. What I want to add is the part nobody covers: a tile that works with any alarm integration and answers “armed since when” and “last disarmed when”. Arming controls would be in there too, and a keypad is not off the table if that is what people need, but the tile and the dates come first.

My problem is that I do not own a real alarm panel. I have four alarm_control_panel entities through Arlo, which is enough to prototype, but they have no code and none of the intermediate states a real system goes through. So I need to see real configurations.

If you have an alarm in Home Assistant, this is what would help me:

  1. The panel and the integration you use (Alarmo, Verisure, Ring, Konnected, Ajax, the built-in manual alarm…), and whether you already use the alarmo-card or the built-in alarm panel card.
  2. The Developer Tools / States output for your alarm entity: the state plus the full attributes block (please mask anything personal). Non-standard states are especially welcome: my Arlo panels report a Schedule state that does not exist in the Home Assistant standard, and a card has to cope with that.
  3. Do you need a code to arm, and to disarm? If so, what would you rather have on a card: a full keypad, the standard Home Assistant code dialog, or a default code stored in the entity settings so that nothing is ever asked? And would you want to arm from this card at all, or only read the state?
  4. Which arming modes you actually use (away, home, night, vacation, custom bypass).
  5. Any companion entities: battery, tamper, siren, last triggered sensor.
  6. Your recorder retention (purge_keep_days), which defaults to 10 days.
  7. And most importantly: would a last armed / disarmed date actually be useful to you, or am I the only one who wants it?

Item 6 matters more than it looks. The date of the last arming cannot come from last_changed. That attribute is rewritten on every Home Assistant restart (on my own system, a single restart reset it on 1813 entities at once), and it only ever describes the current state, so it can never give you both dates. It has to be read back from the recorder, and your retention is what decides how far back the card can look. If an alarm has been armed for three weeks and the recorder only keeps 10 days, the last disarming is simply out of reach.

Thanks to anyone willing to spend two minutes on this.

2

Hi, there are quite a lot of options.
These are a few of my attempts and the first is the one I use:

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3

Thanks Nick, that is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for, because your three attempts settle something for me.

Between the alarmo-card with the keypad hidden, your chip and buttons version, and the native tile card with the alarm modes feature in the third screenshot, the compact form is clearly already solved, three different ways. So “make it compact” is not the gap I thought it was, and I would rather find that out now than after writing a card.

While checking what already exists I also came across one I did not know: cataseven’s Alarm and Security Card (GitHub - cataseven/Alarm-and-Security-Card: A highly customizable alarm panel card for Home Assistant · GitHub). It is in the default HACS store, it works with any alarm_control_panel entity rather than Alarmo only, and it brings a keypad, zone display, an automations block and an Activity log. Worth a look if you have not seen it.

What none of them do, as far as I can tell, is answer “since when”. The native tile can show last changed through state_content, but that attribute is rewritten on every Home Assistant restart, so it ends up telling you when you last rebooted rather than when you last armed. And no card shows both dates at once: armed since, and last disarmed.

That is the only thing I would really be adding, so here is the honest question, and you have clearly tried more configurations than most. If the card you already use showed “Armed since Sunday 22:40” and “Last disarmed Monday 07:15”, both read back from the recorder so they survive a restart, would you switch? Or is that a detail you would never actually look at?

A no is genuinely useful to me here.

And if you have two minutes, three small things would help whatever I end up doing:

  • which integration is behind your alarm entity
  • the Attributes block from Developer Tools / States as text, mainly supported_features, code_format and code_arm_required
  • your recorder purge_keep_days
4

Hi @Nick4 , Would you mind sharing the first one of your Card? It’s exactly what I am looking for. Thanks!

5

Hi, this is the YAML code so you also see the card that is used:

type: custom:alarmo-card
entity: alarm_control_panel.alarmzonehall
name: ' '
keep_keypad_visible: false
button_scale_actions: 1
button_scale_keypad: 1
states:
  disarmed:
    color: green
  armed_home:
    hide: true
    color: green
  armed_night:
    color: blue
  armed_away:
    color: red
show_messages: true
show_ready_indicator: true
show_bypassed_sensors: true
use_code_dialog: false
hide_keypad: false
use_clear_icon: false
6

Thank you Nick. Looks like the alarmo card needs the alarmo integration to work. Unfortunately I have Ring.