Yeah, right…so HA says in the kitchen speakers that machine is done, while my wife is in the bedroom, so she can’t hear it…
Publishing on the whole house would be even worse… why would whole hóuse want to know when dryer is done? Thanks, but absolutely no, thanks! Blinking message on the tablet is the way to go…whenever she returns in the kitchen she’ll see it.
I have a tablet on my office wall by the door. the main page shows the weather forecast and a few often used switches. If one of us is away from it brings up a map tracking that persons location. It also has flood and weather warning notifications. There are other pages, one for media stuff, another for heating, thermostat and over ride buttons etc. I also have a page with every light on it if needed.
This dash is not used often as the automation’s just do the stuff that’s needed when its needed. I gave up bothering with camera feeds as it was easier to turn around and look out of the window. I also have voice control but that is very rarely used at all.
im with you on this! the announcements can get out of hand quickly, i only do it for things like water leaks, stuff that needs instant alert to fix a problem
I started to do lighting automations by presence and didnt like lights following me thru my house, simply because sometimes i dont want a room lit and disturbing others and other times i do. automations can be too rule based and not allow for a change of my current mood or enviroment
In other words: AI didn’t yet come to the point when it reads our minds. And hopefully it will never come to that. We certainly don’t want real-world terminator to happen. At least i don’t…
Ai can definitely steer the lost in the wrong direction, but when you have some knowledge about a topic or project you have more control over ai. I like to say ai is like a super genius 5 year old, with no structure, or concept of time or human behavior, so when ai is let loose without guardrails, it acts like a normal 5 year old that thinks its smart.
This is the ideal setup. you shouldn’t have to think much about what happens, it just happens. The only thing is, if something happened at 6am, like my son left for school, i may want to know when he left out the door, and automations can announce or send notifications, but it seems easier to have that info available to glance on a tablet, if i want to know, but not get a scheduled alert or announcement for each instance
Get ready for what seems to be a minority opinion…
I have always considered my Home Assistant, Hubitat hubs, and Tasker as a Home Convenience system, not a Home Automation system. For the same reasons that @Protoncek & @biggiebytes mentioned, I don’t have many automations for turning on lights as people walk thru the house other than the bathrooms; light under my bed for midnight trips to the restroom; and the thermostats. I might walk into my living room to watch TV on Tuesday and not want lights on and walk in on Wednesday at same time and conditions and want the lights on.
As part of that, I do have a few tablets as dashboards/information centers around the house as well as a dashboard to control my home theater. Furthermore, I extensively use Lutron Picos and similar to control as many lights from as many places as possible (for convenience).
I have a ton of flows in Node Red to control the previously mentioned Lutron Pico devices as well as dashboards used as remotes. I rarely rely on Alexa although I do have the applestrudel pallet so that I can turn fans and the lights just by saying “It’s hot in here!” and she recognizes what room I am in.
Ultimately, my goal is just to make me and my family’s life easier, not automate it.
Personally, a wall tablet is a low priority thing for me as I would have to get up off my lazy butt and walk to it where my phone is always on me and a computer is also always nearby. But, that is just me.
Wall tablets are for people whose phones are too big to fit in their pocket 
According to this rule that would be 90% of them. Phones got big. Too big. I remember when i’ve had samsung SGH-600. Boy, it was small..
Now i tend to avoid “plus” or “ultra” models, they are just too big. Normal ones (like samsung s25, NOT ultra) are just at the pocket limit.
But when i’m at home… then most of the time i don’t even know where my phone is. I don’t wanna be phone’s slave…
I cant be bothered with having lights turn on as people walk through the house, but I do have lights turn on at sunset and and as people enter and leave little used room, but generally the lights just stay on.
I have automations to turn off the TV if no one is in the room for 5 minutes, and come back on when they return and stuff like that.
Suppose all of the above tells us there is no ‘wrong way’
there are just a lot of ways
personal trajectory:
went from motion sensors lighting a room, to having all kinds of conditions. then when that couldn’t be precise enough, added presence detection, which is a real pain
didnt invest in the Mwave sensors, so reverted to a set of generic ‘scenes’ (with a lot, a lot of logic happening behind them…)
and yes I (and the family) control those scenes, either by a button in the dash, or by Assistant (HA and Google). Or several tags. and a few BT buttons haha
as for the Wall panel, I wouldnt need that for that
could be fun, which is another very valid reason…
of course there are already several displays in the house, so I dont need to double those
(energy monitor, thermostats etc)
I like the idea of wall tablets because I don’t like most voice features. I have a bad memory so if I set a word or phrase to trigger something, I’d probably forget its an option or say it wrong. Reading this has given me some ideas, kind of wish I could see examples of notifications on the dashboards tho. I feel my dashboards have become cluttered with too much stuff, but its all useful, so it’d be helpful to have a version with minimal info, and if I need to access more stuff I could press a button and see more stuff.
Yes.
And while I’m an automate the living hell out of everything guy that’s not where my perspective is. Sometimes there should be a UI.
But I see a time. Very soon in fact, where generating a picture with an LLM that backs a control - like picture card that basically is nothing more than button ranges overlaying the Pic. Then that entire dashboard page is cast to a screen with capabilities using a tool.
Thats a skill for an LLM, a very useful one in fact.
“yes the chemistry for the hot tub is a bit off. I put the report and two options to choose on the screen for you boss.”
Because sometimes you need to see the data to understand.
^^ THAT and rich digital signage are what dashboards and screens are very quickly becoming in my install.
The tablets I have have 2 purposes, 1) to show data, graphs about systems, weather, waterlevels in the river, calendar etc, and if applicable frigate video’s if something happens around my house. 2) I use other tablets to show random fotos from my entire photo collection. There is no interaction whatsoever done, all these tablets are fed by automation for their data.
I do have repurposed 2 mobile phones to act like remote controls, very fancy, but the usage with those is up until now, only me, while the data shown on the tablets is consumed by the entire family.
I started my journey with HA some time ago, from the first my mantra was “everything should work as usual” so (almost) everything work even without HA. HVAC, lights etc have all their native controls. I have also limited the automations to very predictable scenarios (porch lights follow the sun, turn off forgotten balcony lights after 1AM, use surplus PV to cool the house when I’m not at home) the rest is always monitored by HA but manually enacted.
I have a single tablet, motion activated, that display a brief status of the things, If I need I can look at it but it usually is used to start the robot vacuum for a single room when needed.
The great advantage of having HA in my case has been the monitoring of my hybrid HVAC system, with HA I have been able to tune it to my liking and reduced by far my heating expenses in winter, adjusting for weather, sun and energy prices.
There are more than a million Home Assistant installations around the world. No two are alike.
Every user is different. For me, I avoid using the phone as an interface device. I am the only one in my home who uses the dashboard on a desktop PC. My wife uses Alexa. I considered buying a wall-mount HDMI touch screen to pair with a Raspberry but decided that since my wife would be unlikely to use it and I would prefer to sit at my PC, it would just be an expensive wall appliance. Also, a wall-mounted tablet seems to me to be a poor compromise.
I do have a few HASP units at the exits to give a bit of information (outside temperature, any lights left on, etc) as we leave the house.