Display countdown to a set date

ESPHome
1

Hi all,
I am trying to figure out how to get my esp32 to display the days/month until a certain day.
Basically I want it to say something like “4 Month and 3 Days until Florida vacation” or “We are getting married in 219 Days”

I have been trying different things with templates in HA to write the remaining time in a datetime helper that I would then display, but did not get anywhere.
I am hoping that someone that is more familiar with templates and things can help me.

Thank you,

Markus

2

Hi,
You can achieve this reasonably easy by using the epoch time. You can even countdown the hours, minutes and seconds if you wanted.

3

Hi,
thank you for the hint to use epoch. I finally got it to work.
I had the esp32 deactivated in HA, so it never go the correct time… Once I figured that out, it was fairly easy to set up.
I even managed to use helpers in HA to set the goal date and text for the display.

text_sensor:   
  - platform: homeassistant
    name: "Reasons"
    id: reason
    entity_id: input_select.countdown_reason
    internal: true

sensor:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: goal_date
    entity_id: input_datetime.countdown_days
    attribute: timestamp
    internal: true

And then it’s only a few lines for the display:

      long daysleft = ((id(goal_date).state - (id(ha_time).now().timestamp))/60/60/24);
      it.printf(0, 0,"%ld Days until", (daysleft) );
      it.printf(0, 1,id(reason).state.c_str());