I’m a designer and art director by day who has been using home assistant for a few years. I really want to improve a single dashboard for my office setup but even though i’m proficient with HTML/CSS, I don’t have the time nor the inclination to tackle this project on my own so I’d love to hire someone to help me get up and running so I can focus my time on other projects.
As such, I’ve scaled back my ambitions and put my original design on hold and whipped up something really basic based on the HA-Fusion layout I think is clean and simple.
Persistent sidebar with some basic info + navigation, and then a simple content area with some basic scene controls on top, buttons to control the most commonly used room entities and then a couple of camera views (via Scrypted since the Unifi cameras in the normal camera cards are super laggy). Would love to use custom typeface and icons as shown if possible.
I don’t think one excludes the other → it would be great if HA was mature enough to become a market for people buying/selling HA related services (like creating custom designs, developing custom integrations, etc.).
why? imagine my house having some security system that’s not available in HA → I may wanna hire someone to integrate that into HA instead of changing the security system.
I may wanna skip that for my security system → but open source other type of integration.
Look, I get your point guys, I love open source, I contribute myself (already made small PRs to HA/Z2M), but that does not make paid services/applications something wrong → open source and money can coexist → I will even say: you MUST find ways to make money around open source so that the open source project can evolve successfully.
I will say no more, I don’t want to hijack this thread → a moderator may wanna split this discussion to another thread.
If your security system can be hacked as a result of a professional developer putting an ha integration on GitHub, then you either need a new developer, or a new security system. So, back to the original problem
You’re suggesting that keeping the integration as closed source would be security through obscurity.
I agree, it should be secure, even with the source being open. But… the world is not perfect, no software is without bugs, if it is a custom one, does not have a big community looking after it, being closed source becomes just another layer of extra security (and security should have multiple layers).
I will even add: it may be closed source so that the developer can sell it to other people as well! Great: someone making money thanks to HA → more people able to use HA thanks to a rich(er) HA ecosystem
I don’t think it would be technically possible with HACS – as far as I know (and I know just from using it, although I will publish a HACS integration in the near future) the integration’s repository has to be public (hence: open source).
One can always distribute just a zip file with the custom integration anyway.
What’s the issue with someone like myself, who appreciates the HA platform, pays for a Nabu Casa subscription, and who has on occasion donated to various o/s HA-related projects from hiring someone to integrate a dashboard design for me?
Do I want a customized dashboard? Yup. Could I figure this out on my own? Sure. Do I want to spend the time to figure out which integrations are required, dive into the docs, spend countless hours tinkering and asking the community for support? No, I’d rather spend my time elsewhere.
Should this philosophy preclude me from using HA? Should I be limited to commercial platforms? That’s simply crazy. Unlike many folks in this community, I have no interest in making Home Assistant (or home automation in general) my hobby. I have enough of them as is. And to be clear, I’m not looking for to “close source” anything. If I were to hire someone to integrate this dashboard design for me, I have zero issue with making it available to everyone. In fact, I’d prefer it as I’d likely benefit from it down the road.
I totally understand your thinking, I’d love to see some people do work on paid projects for HA.
I think, open-source and paying for services doesn’t exclude each other. There are numerous projects out there, where people get paid for services. I really can’t see the harm in this, actually I’m working on a side project where I’ll offer some services for HA myself.
With hardware we’re already there, eg. the ready-to-use and preflashed ESPHome dongles for the Midea A/Cs.
But, for dashboards and design things, I wouldn’t know of any offerings.
So, to come back to the original question: I think, you’re a bit to early. If HA moves with the same pace as the last two years, you’ll likely see these services popping up in the next year.
If you really, really, really want to give out some money right now, you might find someone on platforms like Fiver. But be aware, these are not always valid and good solutions you get there, so take your time to find someone who is willing to talk the project through, before you sign any contract.
If you ask for my opinion: do it yourself for now, this will be the fastest way, and there are a lot of people here to help you with this. As it is nothing fancy, you should be able to achive this yourself in an afternoon, maybe with extending it to the evening.
An issue not touched on is maintenance: Even if you find someone to build this, they’ll likely need to use many (or perhaps a few) custom components – and these will break every now and then with HA updates – unless you simplify your design to the point where you use only built-in options (in which case it’s probably achievable by yourself).
