Showing diiferent attributes on UI

[fsa317 (Frank)]

Hi, so I just imported some devices from VERA. In some cases, like my motion detectors I want to show the last trip time on the UI without having to click around. I’d prefer to show it in “time since” (e.g. 5 minutes ago), but would take even showing the raw datetime.

I found this link

Sensor last_updated on dashboard

Pretty basic but it works so it’s a good starting point if someone else wants it. Basically there’s a simple python script that checks the last_updated time for an entity and returns how long it’s been in hours. You then create some custom templates for each item you want to check and you can see if that sensor needs to be checked or not. [45] I put this in my .homeasisstant dir but it can live anywhere you just have to update the template accordingly get_last_updated.py #!/usr/bin/env pyth…

but I’m not convinced this is the simplest way. Any tips are appreciated.

[treno (travis reno)]

I have a similar situation with my Nest thermostat. I want to show “Away-Mode” from my lake house nest thermostat on the main GUI page. I do it by creating a template sensor, based on the nest thermostat data like this:

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      lake_house_away:
        value_template: '{{ states.climate.lake_house.attributes.away_mode }}'
        friendly_name: 'Lake House Away Mode' 

Now, assuming the last_tripped time is an attribute on your particular sensor

sensor:
  - platform: template
      sensors:
        detector1_tripped:
            value_template: '{{ states.sensors.detector1.attributes.last_tripped }}'

If instead you to show the elapsed time (in seconds) you would do it like this:
sensor:
- platform: template
sensors:
detector1_tripped:
value_template: {{as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(states.sensors.detector1.attributes.last_tripped)}}

Finally, if your sensor doesn’t export a last_tripped attribute, you can always use the last update state like this:

{{as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(states.sensors.detector1.last_updated)}}

Learn to use the templates developer tool in home assistant. It is your friend.