Mark,
I have a vague feeling of unease.
Can you confirm you’ve set up Dashboards correctly and you (from the designated dashboard) can only select the views you want your mum to access ?
It doesn’t matter that ‘you’ can change Dashboards, as she won’t be able to
For Example I have 19 views (tabs really) on ‘my’ dashboard (I also have 3 Dashboards) my wife, can only see 8 views (tabs within HA)
Are you comfortable with that (ie a similar set up, to reduce your mums complexity) ?
Maintaining that from a distance will be ‘awkward’ have you added (say) configuration, so you can cut/paste config in ?
Have you also set up remote access (say) duckdns ?
Yes I also am not 100% convinced, but I see some options that might work.
First the easy question about remote access. My sister and I already have cameras at the house and some required a dns entry and hole in the router firewall. No issues there.
Your other questions are difficult for me to answer because some terms that seem obvious to you are still not obvious to me. When HA is installed I see one dashboard when I click “Overview”. Apparently that’s the default dashboard. I see I can create other dashboards and they appear in the list on the left side of the UI. When you use terms like “views” or “tabs” they don’t translate to things I see in HA. I’m sure they’re right in front of me but I haven’t stumbled on them yet. I’m not exactly sure what to google to learn about this UI so that I can have a more educated exchange with people here.
You are pretty much there.
Dashboards are created under config (the cog) and Dashboards, you can later edit the Dashboards setting user access and also go into raw wditor to paste in the yaml config you require (this is then converted to JSON so does not survive a rou d trip but its sort of close and produces the same output.
As you say Dashboards have icons on the left and come down from the top.
Standard access items and config options are also on the left and go up from the bottom.
Views are like your browser tabs but they are all under the same browser HA tab.
This allows you to put say music on one tab (view), lights on another, switches on another and heating on yet another. It helps you organise your stuff. These names (I just use an icon similar to Dashboards) go horizontally at the top.
I was watching a video yesterday about something called AppDaemon for dedicated dashboard panels. A dedicated panel would work for my mother too. She doesn’t need it on her ipad. It could sit on a desk or hang on a wall. I see this as another option, but I have to figure out how to do it well enough that it will come back up after a power fail (and robustness things like that).
I could also build a box with a NodeMCU, a switch and a couple of LEDs for her to use. The ipad/dashboard option is just so much more pretty.
Have you tried the Home Assistant companion app from the App Store? I have it installed on all our iPhones and iPads regardless of their age and it’s working flawlessly. Personally I prefer having a dedicated full screen app over using a browser.
Its 2023. Assigning a default dashboard for a given user or given touchscreen device should be a trivial operation in the manage dashboards window. How has this been overlooked?
One should be able to go to the dashboard manager, then select from a menu on that row to assign a user or group of users such as ‘Family’ to a dashboard to default the given row as their default dashboard.
