As much as I love the ESPHome project, there are some features that seem like they’d be essential in an embedded/IoT firmware sdk yet their implementation remain left as an exercise to the user. This post is about one of those “Wait, that’s not built in?! How old is this project?” features: timers.

ESPHome, Timers and You

To be clear, ESPHome does have all of the primitives needed to build basic timers. You can get basic non-blocking pauses in automations with the delay: action.

What

Hidrate Spark bottles are one of a small but growing number of ‘smart’ water bottles. In this instance, ‘smart’ refers to some mechanism for reporting on and tracking the bottles content over time.