I was reading the HA roadmap and thinking about the points where everyone (else) interacts with my HA environment. I’ve wanted displays/dashboards for a long time but mostly have either battery powered buttons or smart wall switches. These are good in that I can automate them but with two teenage children we have a lot of variability.
Tell me how everyone else uses HA in your house. Do they love it? Do they see only that buttons ‘do things’? Do they read dashboards and crave data?
I bought a cheap AIO PC on FB Marketplace and run HA’s front end on it. I also have the thermostat on an Amazon fire.
Each device has its own login so I can update what it sees. Eventually I want a 2F control, 1F control, and maybe use open hasp for thermostats. I’m also going to experiment using a raspberry pi or esp32 and gpio buttons.
If I were going to spend a little more cash I think I’d get a Chromebook that has a detachable screen and use that.
Check out OpenHasp. I have several WT32-SC01 Plus devices around my house. Using MQTT, you can easily interact with Home Assistant on touch screen devices.
I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.
All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.
For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.
Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.
Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.
No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.
…though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.
For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.
Are you using node red or keeping all of this native?
Some cool examples there, I’m going to think about them. I particularly like the walking ones.
I want to love dashboards. I love the idea of a control centre in each room but I just can’t get to the point of winning with them