Pre Announcement: HADasboard v2!

Third party integrations HADashboard
1

Hi all,

I wanted to tell you about where I am going with HADashboard.

When I first came to Home Assistant I was using Smart Things, and HADashboard was born as a community project to run in a Smart Things environment. When I moved to HA, I wanted to bring my dashboard with me as I had several wall mounted tablets designed for it. I ported it to Home Assistant as best I could and you have all seen the results.

Since I didn’t put the original together, there were a number of design and technology choices I would have made differently purely and simply because I prefer some technologies over others.This has also made it harder for me to maintain as in some cases I am not even sure what was going on, Add to that the fact that the Dashing platform it is built on has been abandoned, I don’t think HADashboard is in a good state to move forward.

Never being one to avoid a programming challenge, I made the insane decision to rebuild HADashboard from scratch, using my design, and my technologies throughout. The new version is integrated with AppDaemon wich allows for some interesting integrations (Dashboard widget access directly from Apps anyone??). It also decreases load on Home Assistant as AppDaemon caches HA’s state and can serve it on request when a dashboard loads.

Hosting the dashboards on AppDaemon also really helps with ease of install:

  • No Ruby!
  • No Separate HAPush
  • All python dependencies, in most cases pure python
  • Existing AppDaemon users will already have all they need!

There was a lot good about the original however so I have kept a lot of things:

  • Extendable widget model based on scss, html
  • Identical look & feel (but with many more customization options)

When this work is complete, it will have at least identical functionality to the current HADashboard but more importantly gives me a strong foundation to move forward with new features that we all want to see - something that has been getting harder and harder as we reached the limits of coffeescript (ug!)

I have also paid some attention to the configuration aspects, making it hopefully a lot easier for humans to configure dashboards while at the same time preparing the way for the ability to configure and arrange dashboard elements with a web interface rather than using config files later on when I get around to it.

Given this decision, I will no longer be developing the original HADashboard. My aim is to replace it with full functionality and also include fixes and features for all the current issues and PRs.

So the next question is when?

I currently have a fully working prototype, and I am in the process of building out widgets. I also need to start work on the docs. As soon as I have them I would probably like to start some kind of a Beta if folks are interested.

Many thanks to @ReneTode and @rpitera for their advice as I worked through some of the design aspects.

Just so you know it’s real, this is what v2 is currently looking like (just like v1 huh? That was the plan :slight_smile: ):

image.png995×745 49.1 KB

45 Likes
3

You know I’m down for the beta. Like you had to ask. LOL

Great news on the progress, Andrew!!

4

Don;t worry Rob, as a premium HADashboard user you get access to the private early beta!

1 Like
5

<puffs out chest> I have my Platinum AIMC members card at the ready.

2 Likes
6

Count on me for the beta… :wink:

7

Excellent!

My wants:

  • I want the same easy customization options when running in Docker as anyone else (not all files and folders are exposed now)
  • Option to auto update an iframe widget
8

I’ve added both to the list.

1 Like
9

o yeah, i can think of a few things.

  • appdaemon/dashboard persistent notifications, without the need of HA
  • a logging widget for different appdaemon apps or ha
  • better graph widgets then i have now, with memory for a settable amount of time
  • changable colors depending on time of day?
  • on/off buttons for apps without the need to create input booleans in HA
  • starting/restarting apps without the need to create input booleans in HA
  • changing values from variables in app without the need to create input sliders in HA
  • a widget that gives the option to directly input values into variables
  • sending notifications from 1 dashboard to another

do i need to go on with possible ideas?? :wink:

2 Likes
10

Some of these ideas are awesome!

1 Like
11

I regret that I have but one like to give :wink:

1 Like
12

I’ll take it - thanks :slight_smile:

1 Like
13

I would be interested as well! Haven’t updated my v1 in a while since I did some customizations to fit my needs (mostly cosmetic CSS type stuff).

14

The good news is that v2 will allow css skinning, so you could maybe contribute your changes back as a new skin :slight_smile:

1 Like
15

Have planned to test hadashboard out but I will hold out for this next version instead. Great to get it tightly integrated with appdaemon.

Question: is it possible to control icons in runtime for expressing information?

16

Can you give me a usecase? Do you mean directly from AppDaemon?

I’m sure I can get something working.

17

Isn’t this already the case in the binary_sensor widget? It looked like you had an icon for each state unless I read it wrong - of course that was in the beginning, it may have changed by now.

18

So excited for this - like Robban above, I’ve been intending to test HADashboard but I’ll wait for this, sounds like an amazing update.

19

It was mostly just a functionality question. But I’ve seen people requesting this for HASS gui so I thought progressive as you are that this already worked in the dashboard.
As an image can explain complex information quicker than text

20

So do you mean expressing a state on a binary_sensor, switch or boolean with a specific icon, one for the on/true state and one for the off/false state?

Or do you mean programmatically changing an icon, like different icons for different values in a range?