Welcome to the Wizard’s Warren!
This page is dedicated to showing and demonstrating how I built a whole-home dashboard that lives on a 24″ touchscreen display in my kitchen. I built this over the course of a few months and it was a challenge, but ultimately ended up being a really fun and enjoyable experience. This page is dedicated to showing how I built this. What this is: a collection of information on the tools, hardware, processes, and ideas that I put together to form this dashboard. What this isn’t: a drop-in grab-something-and-go solution for you in your own space.
While there are a LOT of tools and options out there, if you really want to get the most out of your Home Assistant experience you will need to learn a little bit. I know that this project let me learn a LOT. While you can definitely get there a lot quicker than I did if you wanted, the building of your own solution is very rewarding and gives you a ton of knowledge about how everything all fits together in a modern smart home.
Ok, now on to the pictures. For more picture and information see the post links to the left!
Table of Contents
- Intro: Building a Themed Home Assistant Dashboard
- Where Do I Start?
- Who Are Your Smart Home Customers?
- Is it you?
- Your spouse?
- Your kids?
- Household Visitors?
- Picking a Design
- Lots of examples
- Creating Magic
- Setting Up Floors and Areas
- Understanding HA
- Floors
- Areas
- Adding Devices & Integrations
- Lights
- Light Helper
- Temperature & Humidity
- Air Quality
- Plant Moisture
- Water Flow
- Before The Dashboard
- Setup Backups First!
- VSCode
- HACS
- UI or Yaml?
- Dashboard vs View
- Building Your First Dashboard
- Just go Play!
- Back to Step 0: Your Floorplan
- Basic is good
- Doors and Windows
- Converting Your Floorplan Into A Magical Image
- Its AI Time!
- Image Editing Your Way To Room States
- This can be a blocker
- Variations are key
- Todo List Before You Start On Your Dream Dashboard
- Backup First!
- Refreshing The View
- What Are You Building?
- Floorplan Step 1: Turning the Lights On and Off
- Start with one room
- Floorplan Step 2: Alert! Alert! Alert!
- What constitutes an Alert?
- Fancy Scripts vs Basic
- Complex Alerts – Is the Shower On?
- Automations
- Alerts
- Helpers
- Floorplan Step 3: Adding An Info Layer
- Adding Another Floor
- Let’s Go Outside!
- Alerts, Front Yard, Back Yard
- Dashboard Navigation & Kiosk Mode
- How Do You Want To Navigate?
- How About Some More Apps?
- Its Weather Time! Part 1 – The Weather View
- Its Weather Time! Part 2 – The Integrations
- Its Weather Time! Part 3 – Mixing In More Data
- Deeper Integrations: Frigate
- Deeper Integrations: Mealie