I have an 8" Amazon Fire tablet in the kitchen, connected full-time to a dashboard created with HADashboard. Despite the colourful and sometimes garish things that others have done with HADashboard, I think the default look is smart.
But I’m conscious that, though this looks good and basically does what I want, the features of HADashboard are limited, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of active development, its documentation, which is kind of adequate, has been moved out of the main docs onto its own site. I’m happy to write my own code, customise it heavily, contribute to the docs, to make it do what I want to do, but I’m wondering if I should think about one of the new kids in town?
I know some people just use Lovelace directly - I guess you just point your tablet at one of the tabs of your main UI - but that’s probably not ideal for a touchscreen without lots of customisation. And each time I come to the forum, there seems to be activity on the Button Card thread, and the Tile Board thread, but since each of these have over 2000 posts now, it’s a bit time-consuming to work out the current state of play! There are no doubt others…
So here’s a question to the experts: if you were starting now and wanting to have a setup a bit like mine, is HADashboard still the thing to use? Or what would you start with as the basis?
One example is that some (most?) of the widgets are display-only; they don’t execute actions when you tap them, which, given the limited screen space, I’d like to do. I can lock my car remotely, for example, and it would be nice to do that if by tapping if the lock widget shows it as unlocked. I can create my own widgets if needed, I guess.
I’d also quite like a camera widget that cycles through a sequence of cameras…
Tileboard is able to trigger scripts and automations.
I’d also quite like a camera widget that cycles through a sequence of cameras…
So would I, Tileboard only allows for a single camera per tile, but with some changes this may be possible, I’m currently trying to make it cycle thru grafana graphs by changing the URL on the Image when the tile is pressed.
Are you able to display an Alarm Keypad in full screen on HA dashboard? Like the keypad, and only the keypad? I have a 7" tablet I want to use for this purpose.
At present, I’m still on the original HADashboard, and still hoping for an update to the official version. Investigating other options is on my to-do list, though!
The github page for Tileboard would suggest that all the layout and options etc need to be coded, rather than click, configure and position etc. Is this the case?
The github page for Tileboard would suggest that all the layout and options etc need to be coded, rather than click, configure and position etc. Is this the case?
I really liked TileBoard for my wall-mounted tablets. Lots of options you can customize on everything, but requires a decent understanding of Javascript to configure.
However, I’m trying to redo everything in Lovelace now so I can take advantage of some of the custom cards that are available.
I just got a tablet set up this week, and decided to go with MQTT Alarm Panel, which has a “secondary page” that can display a webpage, so I set up a single lovelace page for the alarm panel. Basic overview of stats I need at that entry way. I will look at some other options for a couple more tablets around the house.
Massive second for HomeHabit. Having only just started with Home Assistant, I was absolutely staggered that there was no suitable out of the box dashboard UI app. (FYI I came from Domoticz with a completely custom Dashing UI). I have wall mounted dashboards on tablets and want specific but varied layouts, with attractive simple widgets from a consistent pallet. I want total and custom control on where these are laid out, how they are sized on each dashboard, etc. I want to create and fiddle wit the layout on the device itself. These displays mainly show cameras, multiple temperature sensor gauges, switches (used to boost heating and also display if its on), clock, weather and commute times. One dashboard takes advantage of the ability to launch out to other apps.
Lovelace is such hard work, and makes layout so hard. Several other options are quite garish and quite a lot of work. Home Habit takes seconds to set up a new tablet and play around with the layout, gauge threshold colours, icons etc. I’m kinda shocked that Home Habit seems to be so far ahead for my use case, yet seems to have relatively little use.
Is my use case for multiple permanently on, simple but attractive wall mounted easily customisable displays so unique that no-one else feels like this?
Possibly because it’s a closed-source, paid app ($20 per device) that is independent of the Home Assistant project. Whereas Lovelace is free, open-source, and part of the Home Assistant project.
I believe it started as “Project Rotini” (circa 2015) for openHAB and was initially met with great interest, enthusiasm, and involvement by the openHAB community. Some of that excitement waned when the author changed it from a free to a paid app (it’s his right, of course). Many beta-testers were rankled by the change. The app’s scope was broadened to include other home automation systems and the original “Rotini” was deprecated (that rubbed a few users the wrong way) in favor of a new design (and name, in 2018). Fast forward to the present and it’s now known as HomeHabit.
