I’m not a big fan of the regular Home Assistant panels. I don’t see the benefit of being able to control your smart home from a wall-mounted panel if you have to get close to it before you can use it. There are many ways to use the Home Assistant dashboard to do other things.
See the news you want in one place
You might not think of Home Assistant as a place to get your news, but it can be exactly that. You can do it Create a dashboard to display news that you can easily access on your phone, tablet or computer. The beauty is that you can decide exactly which news sources to include, so you only see the news that interests you.
A simple option is to use RSS feeds. There are several ways to pull RSS feeds into Home Assistant, including natively Feedreader integration. By default, Feedreader polls RSS every hour and sends events to the event bus, so automations can be triggered when a new article appears.
One problem with Feedreader is that it only exposes one entry at a time, so you can’t add more than one story card to your dashboard. There are many Individual components available in HACSas Nourishingit can expose multiple entries at once, which can be more useful.
You can use special cards as later RSS accordion card To display stories from your RSS feeds on your dashboard. Once installed, you have one place to access all the news and information you want without the content you don’t care about. With the right cards, you can scroll through stories from each source until you find something that looks interesting, and then open the story to read it.
- Dimensions (external)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 oz
Home Assistant Green is directly the pre-built hub of the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without installing the software yourself.
Track your location history
Create a Google Maps-style day view
If you use the Home Assistant Companion app, it can track your location. In the default Map view in Home Assistant, you can see the locations of you and other family members. However, this view only shows the current location of tracked devices; it doesn’t show where you are.
It is possible to create a dashboard that presents an alternative version Google Maps Timeline feature. This feature in Google Maps shows you a history of where you’ve been based on your device’s location history. It works well, but it can be a little frustrating to know that such detailed location history exists at all.
With Home Assistant, you can achieve a similar result without spending too much time worrying about what Google is doing with all that data. there is one Location Timeline Card This creates a timeline-style view of your location based on Home Assistant location history. Your journeys are shown on the map along with details of your movements throughout the day.
Of course, you must have location tracking enabled Home Assistant Companion app for this to work. You can change location settings in the Home Assistant Companion app, and you may also need to grant permissions in your phone’s settings. Once your location is shared, you should be able to add a Location Timeline card that shows the history of your location throughout the day.
Create a simple guest dashboard
Allow guests to run your home without instructions
You can spend years building your smart home the way you and your family like it. The problem is that when you live in your smart home, you know all its quirks. If someone else is visiting, they don’t have the same knowledge of how things work.
There are two main options. You can give your guests a large instruction manual that covers everything they need to know for your smart home. Or you can set guest mode that disables most of the more complex automations and just leaves the important ones in place.
However, this still doesn’t give your guests the ability to control your smart home. They might want to turn on the lights, turn up the heat, or just watch Netflix. This is where a dedicated guest control panel can help.
You can display your guest dashboard in a wall mounted display or give them a tablet that opens directly to the guest dashboard. They can then use the dashboard to control what they need to control without breaking any nice automation or having to fumble around in the dark.
You can include things like a QR code for guests to connect to Wi-Fi, a limited set of controls for lights, heating and other essentials, and even a remote control to control the TV so they don’t spend hours trying to hit the right inputs or buttons. If you make your guest bar good enough, they may even come back again.
Custom panels can be more useful than universal ones
A dashboard that tries to show too much difficult to use or understand. Sometimes a job well done can be more useful than a dashboard. The beauty of Home Assistant is that you can create as many custom dashboards as you like.
