Not sure if this has been suggested previously, but wanted to get my thoughts down on what I think could be a great addition to HASS.
I have a guest bedroom and bathroom, all of which have smart devices in, plugs, light switches, heating etc. Most of these have a switch where you can control them manually, but I find guests don’t like to mess with those things.
It would be great if you could create “guest dashboards” that don’t require you to authenticate in to home assistant, I suppose there’s a few ways it could be achieved:
- Signed URLs that are shared with guests (think pre-signsd URLs that AWS S3 buckets can utilise)
- Allow access from specific RFC1918 addresses (i.e. from a guest network)
In these dashboards you can add the entities that you want your guests to be able to control and nothing else. You can tweak it to make it super simple for them to use too, without having to provide access to your entire home assistant instance or mess about creating new users. If you’ve a larger house you can also have multiple dashboards for different guest rooms / areas of the house.
Some other notes:
- These dashboards could be time-limited, so they stop working once the set time period expires
- You could potentially set restrictions on what guests can do with entities, restrict them to specific service calls. You could even have restrictions on the data passed to a service call (e.g. don’t set my heating to 30C all night)
I made something using HASS APIs which exposes some entities via simple buttons only accessible via the guest network and it seems to work really well so far.
Interested to hear others thoughts on whether or not you think this would be a useful feature.