Check Button Card is a button that tracks when it is last pressed, for the Home Assistant Lovelace front-end using MQTT auto discovery.
Features
Shows how long ago you’ve pressed the button.
Automatic sensor configuration using Home Assistant MQTT discovery.
Hold button to set custom time.
Undo unwanted changes.
Due mode to display the due time instead of last press time.
Installation
Requires a working MQTT setup with discovery enabled in Home Assistant. For more information check out the Home Assistant documentation.
The card will start in configuration mode and prompt you to create the MQTT config required for auto discovery. If the entity doesn’t exist it will be created with the entity provided in the card config. After the button is configured the sensor will show up as a Home Assistant entity and is used by the card to track the last button press.
MQTT
It is possible to publish to the MQTT topic using automations to update the button state using physical buttons for example (instead of using the UI button).
The payload should be published to the relevant sensor. If you sensor is named sensor.test_button the topic should be homeassistant/sensor/test_button/state. For more information check out the Home Assistant documentation.
color: Green
severity:
- value: 5 days
color: Purple
- value: 3 days
color: Red
- value: 10 days
color: Yellow
- value: 1 day
color: Blue
text
text:
year: jaar
years: jaar
month: maand
months: maanden
week: week
weeks: weken
day: dag
days: dagen
hour: uur
hours: uur
minute: minuut
minutes: minuten
less_than: minder dan
ago: geleden
due_in: over
over_by: over met
automation
automation:
example_value_1: as many values
example_value_2: as you want
Woww, nice work! I can use it for a lot of things…
Is there a way to define different states (for color maybe), and use this info to trigger automations? (ex: when is red, send a notification to cellphone).
When you say button, are you talking about a physical button. As I would love to put a button by our door that we press when we let the dog out. Then it would display the last time the dog was taken out!
Any automations regarding this UI button you will have to set up yourself. But yes, it is possible to make an automation that will publish the timestamp to MQTT and have it update the state of the UI button. I will add some more info to the documentation about how to publish to an MQTT discovery sensor.
I have some function nodes in Node-Red for example that update the visbility state of a button so I can hide and show them when they’re relevant using a conditional card.
I’m not sure how easy this is to set this up with HA automations (I’m sure it’s doable with Node-Red), but if you can inject the timestamp with maybe Jinja you can publish this payload to the relevant topic:
The UI by itself can’t really send any information unless it’s opened so it’s not really possible to use it directly to start automations based on its state. However you can set up an automation using the visbility_timeout set in the config to compare to the timestamp like you said and start an automation from there.
I have a Node-Red flow that compares (every 10 seconds) the visibility_timeout attribute that gets set on the sensor to the timestamp to show or hide the relevant buttons. But you can also use this to trigger an automation. In this regard I should have probably named the variable differently, but it still works.
Here’s a simple example for a function node in Node-Red that allows you to use a physical button to change the button state. This returns the payload which you can publish to the relevant topic using the MQTT node.
// Define entity_id
const entityId = "sensor.test_button";
// Get global object
const haObject = global.get("homeassistant");
// Get attributes object from entity
let payloadObject = haObject.homeAssistant.states[entityId].attributes;
// Get current timestamp in seconds
const currentTime = Math.trunc(Date.now()/1000);
// Modify timestamp in payloadObject.
payloadObject.timestamp = currentTime;
// Create string from object
msg.payload = JSON.stringify(payloadObject);
return msg;
This update will fix the config topic to use ‘json_attributes_topic’ instead of ‘json_attributes’ as this is the new format for MQTT auto discovery since 0.87 I believe.
Updating to the latest version will prompt you to update your buttons, this is only required if you’re already running an older version of this card.
This is exactly what I’ve been working on, but yours is way more advanced. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to keep track of events that have completed. Thanks!
Using this component, I have added a “Responsibilities” tab which includes the dog’s medicine, and now include my son’s Family Contributions (aka Chores). I put the app on their iPads, and gave them access to that tab. I think this gives them a better sense of fairness, since they can see at a quick glance who has done chores more recently. I have given them ownership of clicking the buttons when they have completed their task.
I’ve mostly tried publishing this via the dev-mqtt page. Even though this looks right (according the MQTT Explorer), I get an ‘Entity Config Outdated. Update?’ message. When I click the checkmark I get ‘Already exists. Incorrect entity type.’
The button is expecting the version which your automation doesn’t seem to include. I had built this in so people didn’t have to re-create all their buttons when upgrading to v0.1.0, but that means you’ll also have to include it in the MQTT payload.
Oh geez. I figured out why dev-mqtt didn’t work now. I needed to wrap the timestamp template in curly braces. I was getting that error because I was inserting a non numeric value into the timestamp property.
So, it is working when I post the following to the homeassistant/sensor/medicine_buddy_taken/state topic! Thank you.
Thanks for your work!
I realy like this card to monitor some tasks at home.
I just wanted to ask if anyone knows a way to save the last status of a button press even after a Homassistant restart?
Because every time I restart Homassistant I have to reconfigure the buttons and the information about the last button press is lost.
This probably means your MQTT messages aren’t being retained, since that’s where it saves the last timestamp.
If this is the case, I’m not sure what could be causing this though.
Having discovery enabled on your MQTT component in HA should pick up any retained messages from this card.
Could very well be your broker, that was my initial thought as well.
I’d recommend using MQTT Explorer to see what’s happening with your topics. You should see a topic for each button in homeassistant/sensors/#.
I have the same problem as well. After some restarts it seems that the messages are not retained and I get the message ‘Entity doesn’t exist. Create?’. Still don’t know in which situation this happens because some times they are kept after a restart of home assistant. I’ll do some troubleshooting and let you know if I find the answer.
Edit: it seems the messages don’t get retained. So as long as I don’t restart mosquitto in docker home assistant will have the last state but if mosquitto restarts the state is lost. Anyone know how to send the message with a retained flag? Discovery is on.
The cause of my problem with the values resetting after restarting Homeassistant was definitely the use of the embedded broker. I am now using eclipse-mosquitto as a Docker Container and the values are preserved even after a Homeassistant restart.
It seems that your problem is another one, and the values get lost after a restart of the broker? I have not yet tested whether this is the case for me with the eclipse-mosquitto broker as well.
