1.6.1-rc2

What's new

✨ New

• icon_animation can now be triggered by a Jinja condition instead of entity state — { effect, jinja }, where jinja resolves to true/false and fully replaces the automatic entity-based detection. Covers cases like a plain numeric sensor with no active/inactive concept at all, which nothing in the automatic detection could ever match. See icon_animation.
  ➡️ [Enhancement]: template/condition to trigger the icon animation directly #125 (@FoxP)
• The refresh rate of an active timer's countdown is now driven by what's actually displayed, and self-corrects against real time instead of drifting. Standard cards/badges/features refresh every second when unit shows seconds (s/timer/flextimer), once a minute otherwise (min/h/ d/natural format) — replacing the old fixed duration-based formula. Template cards get this once-a-minute refresh for free from Home Assistant's own push (no extra subscriptions); a new fast_refresh: true opts into a forced once-a-second refresh for a real ticking MM:SS countdown, at a real cost (see fast_refresh) — not tied to entity being a timer, any now()-driven countdown benefits the same way (e.g. a sunrise/sunset countdown against sun.sun). Every tick, standard or template, now lands on a round second/minute boundary and re-aligns itself on every cycle, instead of drifting from whatever moment the card happened to load. Each tick also does only the minimal work its own display actually needs (the bar + value for cards/badges, the bar alone for Tile features, a forced Jinja resubscribe for templates) instead of the full icon/badge/shape/trend/Jinja-processing pipeline - lighter, and less prone to per-tick timing jitter from that pipeline's own variable cost. The bar-only part is shared by every card type (defined once, not duplicated per type) since it's the one thing a ticking timer always needs to repaint, regardless of what else a given card type shows on top. The countdown text itself now writes to the DOM immediately instead of through the usual RAF batching (new DOMHelper.setTextNow, mirroring the existing setStyleNow) - a RAF callback runs at the next display frame, whose cadence isn't aligned to our wall-clock-second scheduling, so batching it reintroduced up to a frame's worth of per-tick unevenness on the one thing a ticking countdown makes visible (a discrete text jump, unlike the bar's own width change, which already glides on its CSS transition regardless of paint timing).
• Timer/duration seconds were rounded instead of truncated (NumberFormatter.formatTiming), unlike the hours/minutes next to them, which already floored. A timer at 332.847s truly elapsed floored to minute 5 but rounded its seconds to "33", showing 05:33 up to ~500ms before the 33rd second had actually passed - a real-value discrepancy against any reference that floors (e.g. HA's own Tile), not a timing/jitter issue like the fixes above. Seconds now floor the same way hours/minutes do.

🐛 Fixes

• bar_size: xlarge (or bar_position: below) with the icon hidden got squeezed into a single grid row instead of the extra row that size/position needs, cutting the bar off. A 1.6.0 regression - hiding the icon and needing an extra row for a large bar were wrongly treated as mutually exclusive instead of composing. Fixed for Home Assistant's own Sections grid, and also for everywhere else the card can be placed (Masonry, embedded in another card) - that fallback sizing had a second, independent copy of the same row-count logic (a hardcoded "always 1 row (horizontal) / always 2 rows (vertical)"), so the identical squeeze could still happen there even after the Sections-only fix, just never reported. Both now read the same row count from one place.
  ➡️ [Bug]: Card not rendering correctly with xlarge bar and icon hidden #133 (@Ascathon)
• bar_size: xsmall wasn't treated the same as small in the card's height/grid-row calculation, even though it's the smaller of the two - a vertical card with bar_size: xsmall still reserved the extra row meant for medium/large/xlarge bars, unlike small, which never needed it.
• alert_when with animation: ping and highlight: background silently degraded to static instead of ringing. ping animates a box-shadow around the whole card, independent of highlight's border-color/background-color - the two combine fine, the fallback was based on a wrong assumption that no matching CSS rule existed.
• bar_color_mode: segment/rainbow collapsed to a single flat color with a theme whose zones are real-world values instead of % (temperature, voc, pm25…), or with custom_theme, unless max_value happened to already match the theme's own scale. Each zone boundary is projected onto the min_value/max_value window to paint the bar - left at the flat 100 default while the theme's zones went into the thousands (voc), every zone past the first got clamped to zero width and filtered out, leaving one color for the whole bar. max_value now defaults to the active theme's (or custom_theme's) own highest zone bound instead of 100 whenever it's left unset, so the fill and the color zones share one coherent scale out of the box - an explicit max_value always overrides this and is used as-is. See max_value.
• Secondary info (unit/state text) stayed capped at its narrow bar-sharing width budget (45px–60%) with bar_position: below, overlay or
  background, even though the bar renders elsewhere for those positions and isn't actually competing for room in that row. top/ bottom were already exempted from that cap; below/overlay/ background share the exact same "bar renders elsewhere" condition (see StructureElements.createSecondaryInfo) but were missing from the CSS rule that lifts it.
• A Jinja-templated countdown (e.g. secondary: {{ now() - ... }}) froze after a few seconds instead of ticking every second. Home Assistant only pushes a fresh render for a now()/utcnow() template once a minute on its own, absent a state change on a tracked entity - the 1.6.0 rewrite removed an incidental resubscribe-on-every-hass-update that used to paper over this on Template cards/badges. Fix: a new opt-in, fast_refresh: true, forces a per-second resubscribe instead - it isn't automatic (Template's display is arbitrary Jinja text, not a fixed field the card can key a local tick off of the way standard cards do for an active timer), so it needs to be added explicitly to any Template card with a now()-driven countdown.
  ➡️ Reported alongside [Bug]: "Run" status not catched #127 (@annaoskarson)
• Hiding name or secondary_info on a horizontal card left an empty gap where the hidden row used to be, instead of shrinking the card. The content area's height was a fixed name+detail sum regardless of which rows were actually visible. Fixed for horizontal layout - vertical's ring-shaped bar still needs that reserved space, so it's unchanged for now. For a card embedded outside Home Assistant's own grid sizing (e.g. as a custom:button-card field), combine this with height: auto (an existing, previously-undocumented valid value) and frameless: true to get a card that shrinks fully to its content instead of stretching to fill the surrounding element. With the default bar_position, the bar itself shares that row with the secondary-info text rather than living in its own container - the first pass at this fix zeroed the row's height whenever secondary_info was hidden regardless, which starved the still-visible bar and shrank the name above it too (flex-shrink pulling from the wrong row). Now that height is only reclaimed when the row actually goes empty (bar elsewhere, or also hidden via hide: [progress_bar]).
  ➡️ Follow-up to [Enhancement]: JINJA Should accept more STYLE tags #129 (@emartoni)

🔧 Improvements

• The height field in the visual editor now has a toggle to switch between the slider and a free-text value (e.g. auto, calc(...)). Previously that mode only activated if the config already held a non-number+unit value (set through YAML) - there was no way to reach it from the visual editor alone.
• theme: humidity's ranges rebalanced. The comfort zone (40–60%) is now one solid green band instead of a green/teal split that read as a washed-out green rather than a distinct color, and the remaining ranges now mirror symmetrically around it (10/10/10/20 on each side) instead of the old lopsided split - a 95% reading (mold/condensation risk) used to land on deep-purple, which doesn't read as "alert" the way a 15% reading's red does, understating the actual risk on the humid end. See theme: humidity.
• bar_position: overlay's name/secondary_info text now keeps 10px of breathing room on the right edge, matching the existing 7px it already had on the left, instead of running flush against the card's edge.

🧪 Try it: demo dashboard

docs/demo-dashboard.yaml got a full rebuild — a comprehensive showroom covering essentially every option in this changelog (themes, watermarks, bar_effect, icon_animation, center_zero, bar_stack, aggregation, card_mod/UIX styling…) plus a regression-test view with one card per statically-reproducible closed issue. Import it and move the helper sliders to see everything react live: docs/demo-dashboard-helpers.yaml (all the demo helper entities as a drop-in homeassistant: packages: file, instead of creating them one by one).