The BEST Dashboard I’ve EVER Seen! Smart Home Tour 

What's crazy is that I had to leave so much out too. I just didn't have enough time to film everything it could do.

@@SmartHomeSolver how about publishing a B roll on your other channel as a further compendium of inspiration and ideas? 😀

Thank you ☺ (I'm the guy in the video) It's been a challenging and fun journey creating it and I'm still making changes and improvements. Thanks to Reed for making the video about my labor of love and obsession 😏 I'm very grateful

@@dandixonus Dan, it shows more of love than obsession 😀 (mean that as a compliment). Would you please be willing to share some code, tricks, or other how tos through Reed's site or gitgub? As you show, the tech is fun, but the UX makes all of the difference, especially for those of us whose families likes to say, "why can't I just flip a switch to turn on the light?" It turns our families of begrudging participants into fans.

@@dandixonus Honestly very impressed by the time and effort you put into your dashboard it is absolutely incredible

UX is an obsession of mine. Thank you! Two things I think about a lot: How do I make more things happen in my home automatically? AND How do you make manipulating the universe easier and more intuitive?

Is there a place where I can download this as a template?

This would be basically be learn how to write code 101

It's higly customized... you have to be a developer to be able to do that. What we saw in the video is probably the 500th iteration of that dashboard

Me too. I guess he just wired them into a cord.

I agree! The link for the mp3 chime is github.com/nimroddolev/chime_tts

Same, I would love to do something similar. but i don't need 5+ tablets. maybe 3 at most. I am a absolute N00B when it comes to coding, I have been able to make a basic barebones dash that works reasonably well. and has about everything I need. would love to see how he did those auto-close tabs/menu's as that is something I would like as well

I'll see what I can do. I plan on doing some major updates to my dashboard inspired by a lot of what Dan has done. So maybe Dan can give me some tips and I'll share with you guys along the way.

@@SmartHomeSolver thanks @smarthomesolver! I shared one of your other videos in the Node Red HA discord earlier this week, because your advice and sample automation code could help another community member that was looking for help using Tesla car location detection entities. Thanks for giving all of us opportunities to "pay it forward" by learning and growing from each others' innovations!

Thank you! I'm happy to share more, but documenting what I've done would be a full-time job itself. Is there anything specific you have questions about?

@@dandixonusthanks so much for the quick reply. Among it all, the most compelling Ux I saw runs from 2:39-3:10 in the video, where the lighting scenes open a section on the same screen (no scrolling, etc.) for a range of toggle brightness and hue presets with the color palette displayed as well. This functionality would be ideal in my home, and I’m confident that I and many others could adapt this core functionality to many use cases. Thanks!🙏 Btw, I loved how you named scenes by city.

​@@ha_tinkerer1191 I'm using tons of conditional cards on the dashboard to show and hide everything. Every section and reminder has its own input_boolean helper/variable to toggle visibility. The preset name, modes, brightness, speed, and twinkly light mode are also all helpers (what Home Assistant calls user defined global variables) that are used to assemble the final command sent to the lights in a final lighting script that applies the settings. There are around 10 scripts that all work together to make this happen. All of the visible controls in the lighting scenes are created with the Custom Button Card addon (along with lots of custom templates and javascript code). The color palette is created by reading the results of a python script that reads the light colors after they've been applied, saves those values to helpers, and then assembles HTML code in a custom_field inside a custom:button-card to display the colors in use. The whole thing was a very slow iterative process where I got one thing working, then built upon that effort with the next.

I was trying to figure out how to replace a couple of bright, but non-controllable LED lamps I bought years ago for working on projects. I also experimented with the Hue Play lights, but they weren't bright enough. It turns out that the Hue outdoor floodlights are the brightest color-controllable lights that Hue makes (correct me if I'm wrong), so it was just a matter of figuring out how to mount them.

@@dandixonus Well they'd better be for that price right? I have them on the front of my house and I thought it was ridiculous how they are set up to be mounted. High on the wall in the back of my TV room will be awesome though!

@@dandixonus how did you go about powering them. Did you just wire them to a electrical cord?

@@yellowmello There's a small box in the base of the outdoor lights that is where you connect in the main power (and is where the Zigbee antenna is); the power from that to the LED lights themselves is lower powered (since LEDS don't need as may watts). I used a cut-off extension cord to run power to the small box, then added a 2-3 meter long smaller cord that was rated high enough for the power coming out of the box and ran that through the monitor arm and to the light itself.

Thank you for the kind words. I haven't looked into that at all. What would be the best way to share this? Perhaps a GitHub repository of the scripts, automation, helpers, and dashboard templates and code?

@@dandixonus A GitHub repo was what I was thinking. I was also particularly wondering how you made the dashboard that showed when HA was rebooting?

@@dandixonus Yes! A github repo would be amazing. How can we find it if you post it?

​@@pandaboy6621 You can create an automation that triggers when Home Assistant shutdown (search for Home Assistant in the triggers) Then I set 2 helpers/varaibles with the requested icon and message. I play an audio notification using my primary notification script (the one that chimes before the message) I loop through each dashboard and use the service: fully_kiosk.load_url to change the dashboards to a dedicated message page that is a single Custom Button Card that shows the helper values with the icon and message. The URL is actually a javascript command so the whole page doesn't have to refresh: javascript:history.pushState(null,"","/lovelace-main/message");window.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent("location-changed"))

​@dandixonus, yes, please can you share your config file. I'm in love with the functionality of your dashboard. This is the best dashboard I have ever seen in all my years of using Home Assistant.

There wasn't ever a master plan. What you see in the video is the result of 2 years of continuous iteration and improvements. What cool thing could I add or improve today? For example: My curtains weren't closing soon enough in the evening, so yesterday I changed them to close based on the outdoor light level instead of time relative to sunset. Not at all dissimilar to the software I make (Universe Sandbox) there wasn't ever a grand plan, but slow and iterative improvents that continuously build on one another. That said, thoughtful naming of every device is super helpful. I spent a long time renaming all my hue lights before importing them into Home Assistant when I started this journey 2 years ago.

Agreed. What I've done isn't reproducable without hundreds of hours of custom work. I'm also excited by how AI could make this level of automation possible for more people

Please don't use AI to try to help you with your automations and dashboard design. AI does not "know" what it is doing. It's just performing some searches and tries to piece together information. More often then not, it does it wrong. In fact, referencing AI for a solution is against the rules in the HA forum. You can read about it in the blog from January 23, 2023. The same applies in the Discord. StackOverflow has a similar policy.

I've got a few Hue dimmer switches around the house as backup, but mostly use the dashboard controls, motion sensors, and automations to control the lights. (and thank you, I'm the guy in the video)

@@dandixonus Gotcha, my only problem will be other people and future kids. Any suggestions for dealing with others ha? I dont want to make it to complicated for my wife on turning on/off or dimming lights. Thanks for all the help!

ALSO, I Love Philips Hue Lights, which is another reason why I am asking haha

It's difficult to see, but I think he's using flat cables. In some shots (e.g. 5:00 & particularly 8:10), it looks as though the cable may have been customised (cover removed at the point it connects to the tablet; it appears to be bare metal and very thin). At 8:15 you can see a very thin connector in the charging port (unless it's just a cover for the charging port!). If you search for 'flat usb c cable' on Google search, and select 'Shopping', you'll see some examples with very thin cables and sharp 90 degree connections to the cable.

I'm not that familiar with professional home automation systems, but for me, most of the joy was in doing it all myself. Looking up the KNX dashboards (the first time I've heard of these, and maybe I'm wrong), it doesn't look like they provide the customization that the wild-west of Home Assistant dashboards allow for 😏 That said, hard wiring is always superior to wireless, regardless of the system, and I wish more of my devices were wired.

@@dandixonus for sure no objection to the building and tinkering part of it 😀 We have a KNX installation (that came with the house when it was built) and dashboards, which I think are structured in a visualization server that then has control panels, can do pretty much anything you can think of. It kinda depends on which system you choose and some are locked to be configured by professional installers. We actually just upgraded the server to a 1Home one. At the moment is actually still bridging the old system while we configure this one because we had a closed system from ABB which frankly was terrible. But in practice you can do whatever you can think of with KNX and in fact our old system has all the sensors and controllers for the pool setup on the dashboards which was a custom feature made by the contractors when they built the house. But yeah I totally get your point tho because I like to build stuff too. On the other hand we have a more than average complexity system here and have yet to have something fail and or lag to do whatever whilst being able to still work offline and integrating with all the normal switches my mom is used to when she comes around xD

Haha. No worries, I do go outside 🌲

@@dandixonus lol not knocking it I was more so saying that I could see this in a movie 🎥

(copied this from a reply I made earlier) Before switching to the Samsung tablets, I was using Google Nest Hubs (which were so slow and unreliable that I got rid of them). All of the tablets are mounted using magnets and by adding a metal sticker on the back of every tablet. For the desk mounted tablets I used these (and painted them black): Scosche MPOHM MagicMount Pro Magnetic Phone Holder Mount But ripped off the suction base and added large 3"x3" decorative washers for weight and then set those into "Rubber Furniture Caster Cups, 3 x 3 Inch" that just happened to fit well. For the wall mounted tablets, I had already cuts holes in the wall for the Nest Hubs and had installed "Mount Genie Google Nest Hub Wall Mounts." To make them work with the tablets, I added a tablet wall mount magnet inside the space to hold the tablet there instead. It was an experimental process to get it to work with a mount not designed for it, and it is hard to describe without photos. I also secured a string to the back of the tablet so if the magnet or adhesive fails, the tablet won't hit the ground or pull on the power cables. The 2 tablets mounted inside the wall are both very near an existing outlet or light switch, so I added an extra outlet inside the wall (consult an electrician unless you know what you're doing) which has a USB plug that is connected to the tablets with a flush USB-C cable.

@@dandixonus oh nice, thanks for the details! I hadn’t thought about using a magnet mount for some reason