How My New Smart Home Dashboard is GENIUS 

This took WEEKS and I put a lot of thought into the dashboard 🙌 I tried to show more about "how" I created this, like you've been requesting in the comments. But if you want to dive even deeper, here is the article with YAML code: smarthomesolver.com/reviews/how-i-built-my-automated-dashboard/

Now I’ve got to rebuild all my dashboards and install esp modules in all my rooms, because this is a great idea.

I was skeptical of the conditional items until you got to the garage door open condition. That's genius! And helped me understand better what you're trying teaching us.

It's not often a video comes up that really has a brilliant idea that can have a meaningful impact to my HA instance. This is one of those. Didn't even know that there was a conditional card - sweet!

“This dashboard changed my life” sounds dramatic, but for anyone who has a really detailed and integrated home assistant set up… it’s an understandable statement!

Dude, this is why you're the smart home GOAT! Awesome work!

This inspired me to redo my mobile dashboard. I’ve got a long way to go but have made a great start. Thanks for your inspirational and educational videos!! Please keep them coming.

I've been using conditional dashboards for some time now, for managing all settings for everything in my house from pihole, home networking and ESP-home utilities and resources. It's amazing for decluttering these menus. But what you have done has taken this to the next level and applied to the whole house. I need to start working on this now 👏

I watch the video you made of Dan's Dashboard , it was very intuitive. I made changes to my overview dashboard and using the bubble card to open more option's , so if needed I would push the living room light icon to turn on/off the main living room light at the samectime the bubble card pops up displaying all the lights and scenes created for that room so it can be changed without scrolling or going into another dashboard. The conditional card is used for diary events and changes my custom button - media card on the main dashboard depending on what I am watching giving extra information on the source I am watching or listening to. It really does add value.

That's brilliant. I wasn't so much into dashboard until recently. I felt like Homekit was enough, and finally I tried to create my own dashboard on HA. It's good, but what you are showing is definitely next level. Thanks for the tips and the idea, that's awesome !

That's pretty game changing actually

And now im suddenly looking into seting up room assistant. Thanks Reed

Sweet! I'm gonna use this!

I have also been using my dashboard with BLE tracking and I have been loving it. I recently I moved over to a “Bubble Card” dashboard and I love the way the room tracking integrates with the popup card. I set the “action button” on my iPhone 15 pro to open up a browser to home assistant and it will immediately popup with the room I’m in.

LOVE it! Now I need to rebuild my entire dashboard. Again. Haha. Awesome video

Thanks for this video - I'm not finished with ones for my tablet and phone but this is a big step forward

When technology gets Advanced, Indeed we need a teacher like you to teach us those things ... Great job!

Nice! Really easy way to get a very intuitive dashboard going.

Great! I will try here too! ❤Tks!

The workout routine is paying off, keep it up!

Amazing ideas. Love it 🎉

I'm officially impressed 🤩😁

This is a great idea! Right when the video started I was thinking ESPrensense with a dashboard. I have been trying to come up with different ideas using them. Now I gotta start working on a new dashboard haha

I'm a fan. I did something similar to my dashboard under a "quick view" tab, to check lights, TV, and fans that are still on.

very excited to try it out! nice video thx

Nice! Thanks Reed.

Looking sharp Reed!

This is pretty brilliant! I've used conditional cards on my main dashboard to draw attention to sets of conditions which don't normally make sense - home vacant, alarm armed, but HVAC in normal comfort mode - and display a markdown card with colored text to draw attention. But I love this idea, even without room presence sensors - lots of the PIRs have an occupancy value they present as well and I can just use that to create a dynamically adapting dashboard based on where people are in our home at any given time. Of course, now I'm going to have to play with the ESP sensors too :)

And here I am, having just finished setting up ESPresense beacons (after finding your video about it months ago), sitting here thinking "okay, so what do I do with this now?". And Reed comes in and gives the perfect answer.

Thanks for this!

Some great tips there. I have a different approach as have low vision and home assistant has been great for making controls really big and easy to see. That does mean more tabs or scrolling so I might try conditional elements.

Awesome video! I need to set this up for my smart home! right now I'm working on getting all the assistants talking to HA so it does'n't matter which smart assistant I talk to. :)

that cool, need to try that thx

I know what you are talking about. I always used the default HA dashboard, that is not very user friendly. Thanks to your video i have managed to create my own and it so much easier.. I love it already, and hopefully my wife and kids can learn how to use it soon. Thanks for the video

Well done!

Hey Reed. Great video. This is 100% accurate and exactly how all our dashboards should be setup!

Brilliant!!

Great video! I'm looking forward to a Smart Home future where this type of stuff is built into the ecosystem without even having to manually create these smart dashboards. But in the meantime, or in case that future never comes, this is the way to go! Thanks for these tips.

Fantastic!!

this is genius and inspiring

These are seriously great ideas. Hide the clutter, show what's important. Make it easy to use, make it idiot proof. That's how you create something you're actually gonna use and like to use.

Haaaa mannnn 😂 now I into the rebuild process of a new home page of my dashboard. Especially for cameras! Im putting Conditionnal camera feed to the home page qhen a unifi camera detect a person or a vehicule. Genius !! Thank you sir !

WOW Reed! Big jump in the right direction towards AI. This is very cool 😎. Thanks again for sharing.

Wow, Thanks!😀

I love your channel. Thank you for the inspiration. I just have one problem with carrying my cell with me. I don't want to be the slave of my phone and have to carry it all over the place.

I was sceptical until you mentioned the manual room select. So you're eating the cake AND you're keeping it! Great Ideas, i'll look further into this.

Nice idea, directly did the same with one difference. I only have one dashboard but different conditional cards for my wife and me. In the conditional card I check for the active user and then show the related cards. So I save in dashboards and do not need to update two if I add something. Only the cards. And for the cards I can show thing that are more important for the related person.

Awesome!

tbh your genius, you make youtube videos about your smart home, make money, and get cool tech in the process

Recently upgraded to the HA Green and it's been a solid choice for my dashboards and quick controls!!

Love your videos. Could you recommend a beginner's video for someone who wants to setup and use Home Assistant

Great video. I tried doing the room detection with Bluetooth proxies, but I could never get it to work properly. Not sure if the rooms are too close together or too much interference, but they always had disconnects and half the time would tell me I’m in another room.

Now, that's cool.

The custom tab-redirect-card is also a great way to switch between rooms based on conditions, like where you are

This is genius!!! Thank you. I need this, I don't have a any presence sensors at all. I only have WiFi devices. Which sensors would you recommend for someone who's starting from scratch? Thank you!!!

This is awesome! Is there a way to make a card conditional based on time of day?

Since I live in a small apartment and what separates my living room from the bedroom is one wall and my living room from the kitchen is one wall, having Bluetooth presence detection is not gonna work. The nice thing about having a small apartment is that I can basically walk anywhere in the apartment and have my one Bluetooth speaker play music without losing connection.

Well done Reed. The bluetooth sensors are still a little in front of me, but now you have inspired me 🙂. . . my wife will probably kill me but oh well.

Love it, i knew about the conditional card though.. However bluetooth room tracking, i was thinking before too.. BUT i really downside is that you always have to keep your phone with you. I dont know about others but when i'm home, i sometimes leave my phone in the living room, while going up. However i was thinking even a bit futher... maybe its better to have a smartwatch bluetooth pair instead of phone. If u leave the phone and go upstairs, your watch is still pairing (i know what if u charge your watch.. but that happens less than dropping my phone to a place).

It also works with BSSID if you have multiple access points, in case you don’t have room presence set up yet

Hey Reed, I've got a similar setup but I use the Chips card, to me it saves space and the chips can also be conditional. I have two chips cards at the top of my dashboard, one that allows me to toggle individual rooms (they come on automatically via motion and BT). The other chips card has the contextual notifications like you have the vertical stack for, those things that I probably want to do one action with, or just be notified of (ie garage door open would close on click and refrigerator door open would just be for visibility). Love it!

That is pretty darn cool Reed! However, I must say you know how people all over the world are walking around looking at their cell phones all the time and not necessarily taking advantage of their surroundings (e.g. park, beach, spouse ha, ha, etc.) well personally I think home automations should be just that...automated. In other words (and I think you know what I am about to say), I think automations should be taking place behind the scenes w/o user input from a cell phone dashboard. Guess I'm more impressed with Jarvis, but hey AI is here and hopefully it will be so much more helpful for us automation nerds/geeks in the future. P.S. Always enjoy seeing a new vid coming out from you. Thanks again, Rob

Very cool, Reed. Been thinking about the same since your video with Dan. I recently spruced up my mobile and tablet dashboard, but opted for a simple, static layout that allows me to see everything important and frequently used in one view with no scrolling required. What’s it been like maintaining/updating multiple dashboards (yours + Aly’s) as your smart home evolves?

nice Idea for the dashboard, I would like to do it, i have already an ESP32 to control Switchbot finger but I do not know if can load something else for this ESP32. Would be nice if you can make an example video to understand how you setup the ESP32 devices in your home and also how did you do it when you have users are in different Zones of the house.

Great ideas, dashboards finally evolving to use ability. I think HA might be the way to go. Any way to figure how best to get started and grow into what you’re doing with it. Now I’m using SmartThings and just thinking it might be time to jump.

On top of my dashboard I use mushroom icons with colors and most of them are conditional. That saves already a lot of space! And under that section an action section with conditional items which requires to do an action for it. Really usefull!

Awwww you beat me to it. I hadn't seen anyone do this before. I've been waiting to get room presence implemented into my smart home before doing this exact thing. i didn't think about the hiding of stuff that I just glance over and don't care about though. Like having my garage door not there if it's closed, or making an "away" dashboard. For tablets in rooms, do you just have them always on that room or do you allow them to select their own room too so you can change settings to something that's not in that room?

very nice build. I wonder if it will work with the Aqara Presence Sensor FP2 instead of the $5.00 sensors

Reed, I just wanted to say that I love seeing your journey into Home Assistant. It seems like you're getting more and more fancy with it by the week. Keep up the great work!

entity filter cards are also an option. but since they work differently from conditional cards, there is a need for both.

I use similar concept in my dashboard

I use bubble card front-end. When I click a room just popup a popup with stuff from that room. also the room button show if there is any light on in it.

Nice, might look into this. Do you have a suggestion to FORCE a wall-dashboard. to be zoomed out to like 70% instead of being at 100% when the app restarts? can't find where to do this

Tying room presence detection to conditional dashboard cards is a great idea! Is there anyway to avoid duplicating all of those cards across the multiple dashboards, though? I’d imagine if you ever have to make a change it’d be a pain to make that change in all those different places.

To anticipate the next room you might need you could log what times each user is in each room each hour of the day, then an algorithm could identify trends and possibly anticipate which room you want to be in next based off of those trends. Maybe a button named “suggested “ at the top could appear when a trend has been identified. This could be done for automation or shortcutting to the room you’re looking for. I think a simple version of this could be calculating time spent in each room each hour and then comparing each day to see if time in each room lines up with other days at that time. The more days the trend is spotted the higher the confidence rate, then all you’d have to do is set the confidence threshold you would like for a suggestion to be triggered. Just an idea.

I have used concepts similar to these on our dashboards, and yes it makes it much more usable than the overloaded and cluttered dashboards I usually see. Some things I have used also in case they are helpful: - The auto entities card available via HACS allows you to automatically show/hide entities based on multiple filters. This is an alternative to the "one by one" nature of your conditional card. - I have a view per room and use the tab redirect card available via HACS to automatically switch tabs based on my presence. I have updated that card so that it switches on dashboard load or when the conditions change which allows me to then "override" to a different tab, like your dropdown. But it allows conditions per user, which eliminates duplicating the dashboards. - Some of our entity states allow me to more immediately switch user's state rather than solely using the presence detection, e.g. our bed sensors. - If you did want to maintain the two dashboards for you and your wife, check out the decluttering card in HACS. You can define the "template" dashboard in one spot and then implement it twice, which will make your upkeep easier.

This is cool if you have big single level house with big rooms. Having a multi storey house with some small rooms next to each other kind of defeats the purpose of having ble in each one. I am pretty certain ble would be connected to the previous room or adjacent room when walking into a pantry or laundry room let's say. Good idea of having drop down list of rooms for manual selection.

Hi, Please create a video of how you made the conditional card, especially the dropdown? Thank you.

So what’s the best way to accomplish those tasks butting from the video you are referring to?

Hey Reed, I think this is a great idea and I wanted to take it a step further, so I used the auto entities card to automatically grab every light entity for the room I am in. Works pretty well, just needs your room names from ESPresence to match the area names in home assistant (I have to replace underscores with spaces and capitalize the words) Card code: type: custom:auto-entities card: type: entities filter: template: > {% set location = states('sensor.sam_s_apple_watch').replace('_', ' ') | capitalize %} {{ states.light | selectattr('entity_id', 'in', area_entities(location)) | map(attribute='entity_id') | list }} exclude: []

Great idea! However, the question in the beginning "I forgot to turn off the back patio lights" makes me think that there can be another view possible - hierarchical grouping. This is essential for houses with multiple floors with bathrooms and bedrooms on each floor and multiple outdoor ideas. Say I want to check that the 2nd floor hallway smoke detector is working - I should be able to either: - Navigate to the indoor->second floor->hallway->smoke detector. At the same time, it would be great to also have a more "functional" view available, where I could just: - Navigate to Devices->Smoke detectors->Faults and see if there are any faults visible The above does not replace the dashboards - the dashboard are still the best solution for a room tablet or to represent favourite function and states (dynamic states you mention are perfect to highlight what may need attention etc.). I think it is essential for those tasks where you have a lot of entities and need to navigate to a specific one.

I'm pretty sure you can restrict dashboards to certain users, and define default dashboards for users as well. That's how I control my tesla's HA based GDO. Telsa doesn't get to see everything, just the GDO.

can you do conditional also with specific day time? ;show this state after 18:30;

I've been thinking about conditional cards for a while. But they don't work nicely with the new sections layout yet (they're always full width). But they are essential for good dashboards as you say!

But what app are u using for the dashboard? Could u do a step by step? 🙏🏼

Hey! By the way home assistant added a CarPlay feature to there app so now you can like open garage doors and stuff from the cars screen. I know you drive a Tesla and teslas don’t have CarPlay but you might mention this so people that do use CarPlay know cause it wasn’t really announced well. Btw I love your videos!!

I only use one little screen with my dashboard, so conditional cards have been a must since day one 😅.

I felt this because I don’t know what to put on my work dashboards. 😢😂

This is what having a smart home should be and what I have been hoping to have Apple Home “figure it out”. Maybe if Apple starts using AI in iOS 18 in 1-2 years it’ll come to the Home App. I feel like if I get into the car and am connected to Bluetooth or CarPlay (before the car dashboard displays the app) it would be nice to have the garage button jump to the top.

How much control over the Bluetooth Proxy do you have? If in just binary present/absent I can see problems with being in neighbouring rooms or it’s analogue and you get an signal strength to adjust I can see how it works. Not that I have enough sockets to power those chips: maybe when the newer ESP chips with Zigbee rather than Wifi are supported they could be battery powered… for example I would not have power in my closet, if I had a closet. Not sure I’ve ever had a closet.

How did you create this Room select drop down? When I try to do this I need to select an entity for the values in the drop down, but I can‘t find a entity with all the rooms

This sounds good and very impress, I bet you spent hours creating a new dashboard. However sent you have your garage door only show when is open, my question is how do you see the garage when is not open? You have to wait into someone open the garage to show on your dashboard. The way I fix my dashboard to have so many icons is by adding tablets on every room that will useful for that room instead of looking for a specific room. For example my office show only what I need; motion sensors, garage door, lights, media player, cameras and door locks, also I have a automation when either doorbell see a person it will pop up on the dashboard. In the bar tablet; it control all the medias, LED lights, fire place, same automation for person arrive will popup on the tablet. The kitchen tablet, will display what we need, lights, vacuum, how much hot water we have left, alarm, forecast, outdoor motions, fans, thermostat, shades and other. The kitchen dashboard is different than other dashboard I created a dashboard that icon will flash when a light, door lock, fan are on or when motion is detected or any shade open. In the living room I have a tablet show shades, lights, vacuums, TV’s (regular tv and Apple TV) Garage door, Locks, Room temperature, doorbell cameras and motions detection. Also I have push button to automate most of my needs so does icons I don’t need. On the bedroom I already have display (google and Alexa) didn’t need a tablet sent I only have a fan and light so either I’m using voice assistant or a push button, one click will turn off the light and turn on the fan, double click will turn off the fan and turn the light back on and long press will open the shade to 20%. Did the same to the other rooms so when I get guess they can used the push button. My dashboard only has a sprinkler tab icon because I have 8 zone didn’t want to put 8 icon on any of the tablets. Most of this icon can be hiding by using animation. Aqara FP2 is one of the best automation I created, also ring sensor is another way I don’t need icons on my dashboard. My porch icon is not on any of my dashboard because I used automation for sunset and sunrise to turn on the light on and off. I still enjoy your videos and ideas.

Great video showcassing the power of the conditional card! Maybe I missed it but additionally you can also set the condition based on who is currently logged in. For me setting up Bluetooth presence was a pain with Multiple floors so I can't do this. But my biggest problem is that not everyone in my house has their phone or a device with them wherever they go. Which made me setup principles for my smart home. For example to not be dependent on someone having their phone with them or knowing exactly where they are.

Nice! What theme is that? I know u use Mushroom, but are you using the theme also?

I have two suggestions. 1: Your dropdown menu should automatically change the room that is selected versus having an auto mode, this way you don't forget to set it back to auto. 2: you should have a more button which would show the controls for the rooms surrounding the current room, this would be a good workaround to Alie's complaint.

How do you achieve the "Resume schedule" button with Ecobee (after someone has manually changed the temp? I can't seem to figure this one out!

I’m about to start the floor plans and planning to build my first home, and I want it to be smart. Nothing fancy, but yes daily useful (like cameras, motion sensors, door/windows sensors, temperature sensors, leak sensors, home security system, light switches, garage door, etc) The question is; if you could do all from scratch, what brands/systems would you look into? (I do have various Google Assistants) I’m looking into go fully Wyze products, combined with Sonoff’s light switches. Nowadays I have (but wouldn’t mind starting from scratch); google Nest cameras (like 8 of them), google nest hub, google nest wifi router and extenders/speakers, wyze doorlock, a few OG wyze cameras, chromecasts in all tv’s…

To fix the issue of not knowing which room you’re about to enter, maybe you could break the no scroll rule and have controls for adjacent rooms below?

My first thought was "what if you are used to seeing entities in a certain area of a dash and now you have to scan and confirm whether for example the garage isn't in the list and therefore open?" That can be overcome by not overfilling a dash, but that would probably be my issue with conditional visibility.

Best use of the dashboard I've seen yet!! Excellent, trying to implement into my own setup.