Warnings and alarms

Both skins show a problem on the card it belongs to, in words, never by colour alone, so it still reads with colour turned off or to a screen reader. How loud it gets depends on how soon you need to act: a low battery waits until it suits you, a baby’s low oxygen doesn’t. A card never moves or changes height because of a problem, so you find it where you always find that device.

What counts as a problem

Each card knows its own, from what Home Assistant reports:

Card	Look when convenient	Act soon	Act now
Sensor	battery at 15% or less
Weather	poor air (US AQI over 100, with aqi_scale: US), gusts of 50 km/h or more, UV of 8 or more
Cover	a garage door, door or gate left open
Alarm	disarmed with doors or windows open (open_sensors)	the entry delay, counting down	triggered
Lock	battery at 15% or less	jammed
Owlet	the sock’s battery low	the sock off or disconnected, the base station without power, the battery critical, no new reading for stale_after minutes (3 by default)	a vitals alert: critical, low or high oxygen; low or high heart rate

An Owlet base station switched off is a choice, not a fault: both skins say so in plain words, with no warning. An unlocked door is a state, however long it lasts. The alert sensors and their names are on the Owlet page, and each card’s keys on Lay it out in YAML.

In Orb

• A warning leads the card’s status line in orange behind a warning mark, a small circled exclamation point, and a screen reader hears it as a warning: “Battery 12%”, “Jammed · may not be locked”, “Open since 10:20”. Where a card has several, the most urgent leads with a count of the rest (“Hazardous air +2”), and its sheet names every one. Compact rows keep the mark.
• Only an alarm that has gone off fills. A triggered alarm’s pill fills orange and pulses gently; an Owlet vitals alert fills the card’s control the same way and names every alert sounding, the most urgent first, with its figure: “Low oxygen · 84% O₂”. Under reduced motion they hold still.
• A problem never glows. Orb’s glow and yellow mean on; a problem gets words and the mark, never more brightness, so it never looks like a lamp switched on.

Storybook has each: a triggered alarm, an Owlet vitals alert and a sock off.

In Field

Field has no warning colour. Its screens are always dark, so it shows how urgent a problem is by how much of the screen turns light, which you notice before you read anything, in both finishes:

• Look when convenient: an outlined warning sign before its words. A battery’s is printed on the plate in place of the area; a reading’s stays on the screen.
• Act soon: the words in a light block on the screen’s first line (Sock off, Jammed); the reading stays.
• Act now: the whole screen turns light and its figure becomes the alarm (79% O₂, ALARM), a rule lines the module’s edge and its light blinks. It flashes once a second for the first ten seconds, then holds until it clears. A module drawn later, or a reconnect, picks up where the flash would be instead of starting it again.

The alert line sits under the dashboard’s title whenever something needs acting on soon or now, so a problem below the fold still shows on a phone’s first screen. Alarms come first, then the newest; three show, then “+N more”. Tap one to open that module’s panel. With nothing pressing, there’s no line.

Under reduced motion an alarm holds its light screen without flashing. So does a dashboard set quiet: true, for a nursery’s panel at night.

Open in Storybook

Every level, on a sock and an alarm, is in Storybook’s Alerts.

What a dashboard can’t do

A dashboard shows a problem only while it’s open, and only as fast as Home Assistant hears of it. Neither skin sends a notification or makes a sound. For that, use a Home Assistant automation that notifies your phone. For a baby monitor in particular, Owlet’s own app and base station are the alarm; the card repeats what they raised.