Hey all, I’ve been building a dashboard for Home Assistant that takes a different approach to most and wanted to share it in case anyone else has the same itch.
The premise: I had an old iPad2 gathering dust and wanted to turn it into a permanent wall display. Most existing dashboards are built for modern hardware and reflow to fit the screen, which is great for general use but can bring older devices to their knees. Heavy frameworks, lots of JavaScript, animation everywhere - a 2014 Fire HD or a smart TV browser doesn’t stand a chance.
HAven is built specifically for this situation. No frameworks, no transpiling, no dependencies - just vanilla JavaScript that runs on anything with a browser. It also takes a fixed-canvas approach rather than responsive design: you design at a specific resolution and HAven scales the whole layout uniformly to fill the screen. Old tablet, budget Android, smart TV, doesn’t matter - it just fits.
A few things that might make it worth a look:
- Zero install - drop files into your HA
www/folder and open a URL. No addons, no server-side code - Lightweight by design - vanilla ES5 JS, surgical DOM updates only, no re-renders. Snappy even on slow hardware
- 13 widget types - labels, buttons, sliders, switches, bars, gauges, camera feeds, history charts, a calendar agenda, and more
- Config-driven JSON - state-based colors, icons, and visibility all in one file, no automations needed
- Visual designer - drag and drop editor with live preview if you’d rather not hand-write JSON
It’s still actively developed so rough edges exist, but it’s genuinely running on a screen in my house every day.
Repo and docs: GitHub - TommySharpNZ/haven: A lightweight Home Assistant dashboard for screens that Lovelace left behind! · GitHub
Happy to answer questions, suggestions and feedback is very welcome.
