At least two layers for this issue:
- First is the fact that in core lovelace cards the secondary information available is not reliable from a human readability POV; i.e. one thing I thought I could have here was information of how long the device is in its current state (using
Last Changed
, but that’s impossible given that it considers unknown states as well. If the device disconnects for a couple of seconds for some reason or if we reboot HA core, this value changes and it loses that human readability I mentioned. An example of this is the entities card below (which btw could also benefit from a secondary template field!); the switch in question isn’t modified in months, but HA shows it changed 21 hours ago!
- The second layer is more general: current entity status is related to “unknown” status’ is something that ideally would be separate from its physical status. I don’t think I have good suggestions on this, but pairing last known “real” state with a “is it still reachable by HA” state could be one way of doing it.
Templating allows us to do a lot with this, but again, from a human readability POV, I think it’s kind of messy as is.