I’ve been working on something called Home Status because I kept running into the same problem with my wall tablets.
I had plenty of dashboards. What I didn’t have was a good way to glance at the screen and immediately understand what’s happening around the house right now.
So instead of building another dashboard full of buttons and entity cards, I started building more of a notification/awareness layer for Home Assistant.
The idea is pretty simple: Home Status watches the house and decides what information is actually worth putting in front of you.
Right now mine can surface things like doors/windows, alarm state, washer/dryer/dishwasher status, weather, irrigation, faults, news, camera/doorbell video, and other household activity.
The part I’ve probably spent the most time on is trying to make the information feel natural instead of looking like raw Home Assistant data.
For example, I don’t really want my family seeing stuff like:
night_dry
power_off
cleaning_is_complete
I want:
Dishwasher Drying
Dishwasher Complete
Front Door Closed
Alarm Disarmed
Home Status now has a normalization layer specifically for that, so eventually whole devices and entities from different manufacturers can hopefully speak the same kind of language.
I’ve also been experimenting with a third visual area in the card.
The doorbell can temporarily take it over with live video, RSS/news can show story images, and I recently got periodic live HLS news streams working as well. The idea isn’t to turn the tablet into a television — it might show 30 seconds of live news occasionally just to give some context about what’s happening outside the house.
Then if the doorbell rings, the house obviously wins and the camera takes over.
One thing I’ve learned building this is that I care less and less about showing every entity and more about showing events with useful context.
For example:
Front Door Closed · 4 min ago
Alarm Disarmed · 12 min ago
Dryer Complete · 18 min ago
The larger goal is still the same as when I started: make Home Assistant easier to understand from across the room, especially on wall tablets, without requiring somebody to become obsessed with dashboard building first.
There’s still plenty I’m changing as I actually live with it. A lot of the development has basically been: put it on the wall, notice what annoys me, fix it, repeat.
I’m interested in feedback especially from people running different appliances, sensors, alarm systems, cameras, etc., because I obviously can’t personally test every Home Assistant integration.
Project:
https://github.com/biggiebytes/home-status
YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/bCOtF_0QxAQ?si=VMg80zaiJTu7UIzv
If anyone tries it, I’d genuinely like to hear what information you would want a Home Assistant “Notification Center” to surface automatically — and what you absolutely would not want constantly popping up on the screen.