GeoTime

GeoTime is a custom Home Assistant integration that calculates local time, timezone, sun status, and a day/night person image from the current geographic location of a person or device_tracker entity.

The integration works from the latitude and longitude already provided by Home Assistant. Timezone lookup and sun calculations are performed locally; no external geocoding or timezone API is required.

Features

For each configured person or device_tracker, GeoTime creates three sensors and one image entity:

• Local Time — the local clock time at the tracked entity's current location. The sensor exposes the generated GeoTime day/night image through its entity_picture for dashboard use.
• Sun Status — Above or Below, based on whether the sun is above the horizon at that location. Sunrise and sunset are exposed as attributes when available.
• Timezone — the IANA timezone name, for example Europe/Copenhagen.
• GeoTime Image — the source entity's picture with a day/night indicator in the upper-right corner. This image entity provides the generated image used by the Local Time sensor.

Day/night image

The GeoTime image uses the entity_picture from the selected person or device_tracker as its base image.

A small indicator is added in the upper-right corner:

• ☀️ Sun when the sun is above the horizon at the tracked location.
• 🌙 Moon when the sun is below the horizon at the tracked location.

GeoTime updates the generated image when the source entity changes and updates the day/night indicator according to the sun status at the tracked location.

The generated image is exposed as a real Home Assistant image entity and is also exposed through the Local Time sensor's entity_picture, making the Local Time sensor convenient to use with dashboard cards that support entity pictures.

A generated image entity will typically look similar to:

image.person_1_geotime_image

The exact entity ID depends on the name of the configured entry and can be changed in Home Assistant's entity settings.

Dashboard example

The generated image can be used as the background of a Picture Elements card while the Local Time sensor provides the displayed time:

type: picture-elements
image_entity: image.person_1_geotime_image
elements:
  - type: state-label
    entity: sensor.person_1_local_time
    style:
      left: 50%
      bottom: 5%
      transform: translate(-50%, 0)
      color: white
      font-size: 18px
      font-weight: 500
      text-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7)

Cards that support entity_picture can use the Local Time sensor directly.

Requirements

The selected source entity must:

• be a person or device_tracker entity;
• expose latitude and longitude attributes.

The day/night image additionally requires the source entity to have an entity_picture attribute. If no source picture is available, the local-time, timezone, and sun-status sensors continue to work normally.

Installation with HACS

1. Open HACS in Home Assistant.

2. Go to Integrations.

3. Open the menu and choose Custom repositories.

4. Add:

   https://github.com/ricobach/HA-GeoTime
   

   and select Integration as the repository type.

5. Install GeoTime.

6. Restart Home Assistant.

7. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration.

8. Search for GeoTime.

9. Select the person or device_tracker entity you want GeoTime to follow.

Configuration

GeoTime is configured entirely through the Home Assistant UI and appears as a regular Home Assistant integration.

To change the tracked entity later, open Settings → Devices & services, select GeoTime, and use the integration options.

Recorder recommendation

The Local Time sensor updates frequently and its historical values are usually not useful. To avoid unnecessary growth of the Home Assistant Recorder database, you may want to exclude GeoTime local-time sensors from Recorder.

Add the following to configuration.yaml:

recorder:
  exclude:
    entity_globs:
      - sensor.*_local_time

After changing the Recorder configuration, restart Home Assistant.

This does not disable the sensor. The Local Time entity continues to update normally and can still be used in dashboards, automations, and templates; its historical states simply will not be stored in the Recorder database.

If you already use other integrations with entities ending in _local_time, exclude individual GeoTime entities instead, for example:

recorder:
  exclude:
    entities:
      - sensor.person_1_local_time
      - sensor.person_2_local_time

Example

If person.example is currently in Copenhagen and has:

latitude: 55.6761
longitude: 12.5683
entity_picture: /api/image/serve/example/512x512

GeoTime can expose information similar to:

Local Time: 12:07
Sun Status: Above
Timezone: Europe/Copenhagen

The generated GeoTime image shows the source picture with a sun badge in the upper-right corner. After sunset, the indicator changes to a moon badge. The same generated picture is available from the Local Time sensor through entity_picture for compatible dashboard cards.

Notes

GeoTime uses timezonefinder for offline coordinate-to-timezone lookup and Home Assistant's available Astral library for sunrise, sunset, and sun-position calculations.

For polar regions where sunrise or sunset may not occur on a particular date, GeoTime falls back to solar elevation to determine whether the sun is above or below the horizon.

Issues

Please report bugs or feature requests through the GitHub issue tracker:

https://github.com/ricobach/HA-GeoTime/issues

License

GeoTime is released under the MIT License.