String that pretty prints started time (ago) does not handle long durations

[neel-m]

I have a multiple devices that stay up for a long time. One is currently running for more than 1469 hours and the string says: started 1 week 4 days ago

Looking at events I see:

retry: 30000
id: 996648978
event: ping
data: {"title":"genny","comment":"monitoring for Genny","ota":true,"log":true,"lang":"en"}

event: state
data: {"id":"binary_sensor-device_status","name":"Device Status","icon":"","entity_category":2,"value":true,"state":"ON"}

event: state
data: {"id":"sensor-uptime","name":"uptime","icon":"mdi:timer-outline","entity_category":2,"value":1469.893,"state":"1469.89 hours","uom":"hours"}

Looking at the js code I saw that it was dividing the value it gets from the ping by 1000. This is probably causing the value to wrap around very quickly since 32-bits can only hold so many milliseconds.

Is there an easy way to turn off the friendly time stamp string, since it is wrong pretty quickly and annoying when that happens?

Current config:

web_server: 
  port: 80
  version: 3

time:
  - platform: sntp
    id: sntp_time
    timezone: America/Los_Angeles

[neel-m]

I see the problem now. The esphome side does this:

  this->events_.onConnect([this](AsyncEventSourceClient *client) {
    // Configure reconnect timeout and send config
    client->send(this->get_config_json().c_str(), "ping", millis(), 30000);

So, it using millis() as its time which will rollover in almost 50 days since it is a uint32.

epshome has an uptime_seconds_sensor that might be a better choice, since seconds is probably more than adequate for the resolution and that would provide 1000 times the duration, which is likely enough for just about anyone.

This, of course, would require changes on both sides so it would be a breaking change.

[RFDarter]

I don`t think it would be considered a breaking change, since it would still work but only show a wrong time if the esphome version and the webserver version are miss matched.

But I guess we could make sure the PR on the webserver would only be part of a release at the same time as the PR on esphome would get merged to prevent that.

Are you able to make the changes and open the PRs?

[andrewjswan]

At the top of the WEB page I see:

ESPHome Tracker · started in 2 weeksin 5 days 

But:

Uptime 2586698 s
ESPHome Version 2025.7.4

Which is equal to just over 29 days

PS: By the way, what is weeksin?