Hey everyone,
I wanted to share a project I’ve been building for a kitchen/hallway info panel: InfoHub, a Home Assistant custom integration paired with a companion display client. The whole point was to avoid a browser-in-kiosk-mode Lovelace dashboard and instead have a lightweight native display whose layout itself is fully configured from Home Assistant — no redeploying code to change what’s on screen.
What it does
- A sidebar config panel (like Energy/Calendar) where you create named “Panels” — each one a full drag-and-drop grid layout you design visually, right in HA.
- Live push, not polling: the integration reads hass.states directly and pushes updates over a lightweight WebSocket protocol, plus Google Calendar (via HA’s own Calendar integration) and an external GTS (growing-degree-days, for gardeners) API on a timer.
- Widgets: clock, animated weather scene (day/night sky, sun/moon/clouds), power gauge, indoor climate, next waste collection, calendar month view — each with its own per-widget options (clock format, gauge max value, etc.).
- Multiple displays: each physical display identifies itself with a stable device ID and you assign it a specific panel from a dropdown — one shared data stream, per-device layout.
- DE/EN out of the box, both in the admin UI and on the display itself (per-panel language setting).
The display client
Built for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W + 10" HDMI touch display, running LVGL via a Linux-hosted MicroPython port (framebuffer + evdev touch, no X11/browser). It’s a single script with no hardcoded UI — everything it renders comes from the layout_update the integration sends. The wire protocol is plain JSON over WebSocket, so it’s not tied to this exact hardware if someone wants to build a different client for it (ESP32 support is on my radar, just don’t have hardware to test on yet).
How it’s different from openHASP / ESPHome dashboards
Closest comparisons I found were openHASP (MQTT + YAML files) and ESPHomeDesigner (compile-and-flash). InfoHub is closer to “live push from a native HA sidebar UI with real drag-and-drop,” no MQTT broker or flashing required to change the layout.
Status
Early release (v0.1), actively used on my own setup, not yet in the HACS default store — but it works today as a HACS custom repository:
Add it via HACS → Integrations → ⋮ → Custom repositories.
Feedback, bug reports, and “here’s a display I’d love this to support” requests all very welcome — happy to answer questions about the architecture too.