This WTH was inspired by the sibling one about the overview of currently active automations as well as this FR.
The idea is to have a global overview of all upcoming time-based events. Clarifications:
- “Events” generally means all entities whose state is a datetime and lies in the future relative to when the overview page is opened/refreshed
- According to this logic, the overview would simply show everything that is upcoming, meaning that whatever is upcoming would not necessarily trigger something. This would be a purely informative overview.
- An example implementation could be a time chart with marks indicating the events/entities (their friendly names) and the zero position on the X-axis indicating “now”.
Something like this (as a list) is already shown in the History, but it is heavily intermixed with other messages. For example:
Solcast PV Forecast Peak Time Tomorrow changed to <date_time>
Sun next Midnight changed to <date_time>
This post explores the idea further, albeit it limits itself to a UI card.
Benefits of this feature I can think of:
- Obviously, quickly understand what would happen next
- Maybe, have a respective sensor that would be assigned the information about the next entity/datetime globally. The sensor could be used for notifying about the next upcoming thing
- Help identify “hot spots”, e.g. many things happening/triggering at once or very close to each other, and, respectively, help with subsequent timing optimizations by spreading things out throughout the day
- Understand when would be a good time for maintenance/restarts/etc