I waited a bit before joining the forum until i had my 'sea legs' under me but now I feel I've gotten a pretty good handle on things. I have about a dozen dashboards (and more coming) and can control my setup from my phone or keyboard/trackpad under the bar. originally designed as a touchscreen but i was underwhelmed by the specs and prices for a 43" touchscreen so just put a nice samsung 4K instead.
Turned out to be a great WAF and awesome addition to our bar area. Everyone loves it.
Specs
HA running on a PC server in virtualbox
TV has a mini PC jammed between the back of it and the wall
TONS of HACS customizations. You guys are the best!!
Lots of goodies; display rotation to prevent burn-in, integration with rachio, dinamica coffee machine, dishwasher, reolink cameras, fitbit (with obnoxious celebration animations), roborock, sonos, eufy, etc.
Vacuum dash pops up as soon as robot starts to clean and goes away when it docks
fitbit has celebration screens when i hit 10, 20 and 30k steps (bronze/silver/gold)
i can fling youtube video IDs from my phone to the display and by default it randomly pulls in various live news sources (using google cloud API) and also make it go full-screen
full screen music visualizer
tons of other cool easter eggs.i forget but i have tons of neat tricks.
still stringing up security cameras which is why there are repeats (will be 6 total) and yes, there are still some rough-around-the-edges stuff i need to work on. seems endless
without further ado, here's my first HA project! let me know what you think. Sorry for the glare on the display; its morning here and we have lots of windows.
Oh and yes the phone control is a browser tab instead of the HA app itself. i found that was the easiest/fastest way to get to that hidden dashboard since i've always got the browser open on my phone anyway.
thank you! i've added jpettitt's weather radar card and tied that to NWS alerts to auto pop-up the radar full-screen. when my ecowitt arrives in a few days i'll tie that in as well so i'll get more targeted weather conditions. finally i realized i could set up my tv through smartthings so i am using that to turn it off at night and turn it on the next morning and switch source to PC.
because i'm insane, i also decided to create a 'night time' dashboard since i found the bar display a little intense later in the evening so this switches dashboards at 8pm every day.
simplicity is your friend its a $400 mini-pc shoved behind the tv connected via HDMI. set the bios to auto-re-login if power failure or after system updates and the ONLY thing running on the PC is a web browser. The browser is running in 'kiosk-mode' (F11) and the HA dashboard is running in 'kiosk-mode' which creates a completely immersive dashboard.
if you buy a samsung, you can use the 'smarthings' app to do basic stuff like turn the tv on/off on a set schedule and change the source automatically to the hdmi the PC is on (which is annoying to have to do each time you turn the tv on using the remote since samsung defaults to their annoying free tv channel playing full-screen), auto mute it, etc.
thats it. pretty foolproof and survives the tv turning on/off automatically each day, power failures and system reboots.
ETA for control since its not a touchscreen, i have a keyboard with a trackpad i keep behind the bar (its in the top pic above) and have an ever-evolving mini-dashboard control page on my phone which works GREAT to change dashboards, control music, feed video IDs to the YT panel, etc. start with the keyboard combo and after you get everything the way you like, have claude or chatgpt build a dashboard for your phone that has everything you would want to do on it.
ETA2 - when prototyping; i am on a PC with a 27" monitor and i keep a separate browser window open with the exact 4K dimensions so as i modify dashboards, it refreshes instantly so i can see if there is an issue or the bane of my existence...SCROLLBARS!! you have to be careful when building the dashboards to make sure its constrained within the 4K limits; one extra pixel too long and your whole display is ruined with an unsightly scrollbar.
thank you for the suggestion;i looked at changing that but if i disable smartthings that takes away my ability to set the tv to turn on and off on a schedule. i also added my ecowitt ws90 and reworked the weather-related dashboards including jpettitt's fantastic weather radar loop. Now i have a dedicated 'ecowitt' dash, 'rachio' dash and 'weather radar loop' that is automatically displayed during NWS alerts or significant rainfall or wind on my ecowitt. could HA BE any more fun? this is just too much.
