The "Frenck Rivalry"

1192410 · June 10, 2026, 6:08pm

Sorry Frenck, but I AM a Dashboard Person: My Complete Multi-Room Neon Ecosystem

Hey everyone,

I was reading through the recent 2026.6 release notes and saw Frenck immediately raise his hand to say:

" I am not a dashboard person. Not because I don't like them; I love seeing what you all build. But designing a beautiful one is a kind of visual creativity I just don't have."

Well... Frenck might not be a dashboard person, but I absolutely am! Over the last couple of days, I completely overhauled my entire setup (30-ish dashboards) into a unified, dark cyber-neon theme.

I built them all by taking my existing, old-fashioned dashboards and moving them entirely into the new Sections style. I finally got rid of the absolute headache of nesting cards grid in grid in grid and so on. With a bit of AI support to help crunch through the migration, I generated 50,000+ rows of code to bring this entire home ecosystem to life, adding a vibrant splash of color to the default dark-mode style. Honestly, after staring at that much neon yaml config, I feel like I've accidentally opened a portal to a parallel universe!

Instead of just one screen, I designed a cohesive, multi-dashboard network customized for wall tablets, deep-dive system energy monitoring, and everyday family utility. Below are some examples of the rooms, sensors, shopping lists, and custom remotes. I am incredibly happy to hear your feedback!

1. The Hubs & Room Tablets

Main Overview & Weather Station

What it is: The central landing dashboard for a birds-eye view of the entire house.
Key Features: A massive, stylized weather layout with an integrated live countdown for incoming rain ("Es regnet noch für..."). It features a highly organized sub-grid mapping out every single room in the house for instant navigation, quick status overviews, a dedicated physical letterbox status tracker, and live-streaming camera feeds for primary entrances.

Kitchen Central Command

What it is: A high-traffic landscape dashboard focused on climate tracking, multi-room audio, and morning routines.
Key Features: * Custom audio routing matrices allowing quick streaming handoffs between Alexa and Bose hardware.
- A colorful grid layout mapping popular radio stations (WDR2, 1Live, Barba Radio) and dynamic Spotify playlists using customized graphic cards.
- Deep-dive climate tracking using apexcharts-card to actively overlay sensor data from different hardware manufacturers (Hue vs. Tado) across a 24-hour cycle.

Living Room Media Tablet

What it is: A relaxed, dark-themed dashboard optimizing room comfort and high-end entertainment.
Key Features: Features a live camera preview, custom climate dials, dedicated shutter/blind columns, and an integrated Harmony Activities automation engine (TV an, TV aus) matching custom smart power-switch cards.

Dedicated Sport & Workout Room

What it is: A specialized view utilizing a striking red neon glow to match the room's energy.
Key Features: Live tracking metrics specifically tailored for a home gym environment. It monitors real-time power consumption in watts, maps out an automated target tracking graph for tablet/device battery drainage over a rolling 72-hour period, and includes quick macros for workout states (aufs Rad).

Terrace & Garden Dashboard

What it is: An outdoor-focused dashboard utilizing gold and blue accent themes.
Key Features: Houses a live snapshot of the outdoor space, manual roller-shutter controls, and a multi-tiered wind speed/weather safety warning bar chart to monitor awning conditions safely before heavy weather hits.

2. Specialized System & Utility Views

Motion Overview & Battery Matrix

What it is: The ultimate system administrator view tracking every sensor across the entire property.
Key Features: A stunning grid system that parses house levels (Erdgeschoss vs. Obergeschoss) into live timeline wave graphs mapping motion frequency over the last hour. Includes a master battery health column sorting all wireless hardware from lowest to highest percentage, and automated toggle controls for individual room tracking zones.

Apple TV & Denon Custom Remote

What it is: A custom-scaled virtual interface replacing physical hardware remotes.
Key Features: A gorgeous, clean D-pad controller layout flanked by individual navigation matrices mapping out core streaming apps (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+) and German media libraries (Mediatheken, Joyn, RTL+).

The Family Shopping Hub

What it is: A clean, multi-column inventory board keeping the household running smoothly.
Key Features: Separates shopping needs into dedicated, color-coded custom cards for the local Supermarkt, Drogerie, Getränke, and online order tracking. Includes an advanced budget/spending comparison tracker, change logs, and direct notification toggles for family members.

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Theme & Frontend Stack Used

To achieve this highly polished look across all dashboards, I heavily relied on the following integrations (mostly via HACS):

Styling & Borders: Heavy usage of card-mod to handle custom borders, drop shadows, and glow intensities.
Layout Structure: Pixel-perfect grids using grid-layout / type: grid to ensure columns scale symmetrically.
Graphs & Trends: apexcharts-card for multi-colored trend metrics and historical sensor logging.
Buttons: Custom button-card scripts to build the uniform grid remote and radio shortcuts.

I’m incredibly happy with how fluid this feels moving from room to room. I'm happy to share specific YAML templates, card configurations, or card-mod styling strings if anyone wants to duplicate a specific aesthetic.

Let me know what you think! Which room view is your favorite?# Sorry Frenck, but I AM a Dashboard Person: My Complete Multi-Room Neon Ecosystem

Hey everyone,

I was reading through the recent 2026.6 release notes and saw Frenck immediately raise his hand to say:

" I am not a dashboard person. Not because I don't like them; I love seeing what you all build. But designing a beautiful one is a kind of visual creativity I just don't have."

Well... Frenck might not be a dashboard person, but I absolutely am! Over the last couple of days, I completely overhauled my entire setup into a unified, dark cyber-neon theme.

Instead of just one screen, I designed a cohesive, multi-dashboard ecosystem customized for wall tablets, deep-dive system health monitoring, and family utility. Here is a tour of the setup!

Let me know what you think! Which room view is your favorite?

Thanks, Andreas

Sir_Goodenough · June 10, 2026, 6:11pm

How do you find ANYTHING?
I would delete HA before I had to look at all that noise.
Just my opinion...

ShadowFist · June 10, 2026, 6:42pm

I think your post is duplicated. There's 2 of every section

1192410 · June 10, 2026, 6:51pm

Fair point! It definitely looks busy if you're looking at it from a pure minimalist standpoint.

But I built this entirely for user acceptance—specifically to maximize the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). For years, my wife barely touched Home Assistant because she found the old, plain layouts uninspiring and unintuitive. I didn't need a heavy UI for myself, but standard dark mode just wasn't cutting it for the household.

Now, with the new colors, clean Sections, and distinct visual cues, she suddenly loves using it. The rest of the family actually interacts with the smart home now. Plus, I still have my old-fashioned, utilitarian dashboards tucked away in the background for quick backend tweaks.

Better colors and a high family acceptance rate mean it's an actual daily utility for us, rather than just a personal waste of time!

Nick4 · June 10, 2026, 7:20pm

The term 'smart home' used here is not what it is: it's just an app that centralizes all the devices that can be controlled remotely within 1 environment.
A smart home doesn't need interaction and definitely not with that many dashboards.

But TBF: design-wise / from an aesthetic point of view, they look nice.

NathanCu · June 10, 2026, 7:28pm

Agree, it's beautiful.

And for me…

Useless. If my UX cannot put the information in my face in a way where I get the information I need immediately or a clear path to the answer within three (easy to target) taps/clicks… nope. Like a car dashboard. Yes I CAN pull everything off the Canbus but I really only need to see the speed and hear the engine to know if that cop is about to be chasing me or not.

daywalker03 · June 10, 2026, 9:40pm

Agreed. It's partially why I want Jarvis or Bruticus to be able to provide me with any information I want with a simple voice request.

parautenbach · June 11, 2026, 4:45am

It looks quite nice and I have many dashboards myself, even though my primary objective is home automation. What I'm curious about is how you got to 50k lines to build this. The AI must've duplicated enormous amounts of code and my concern for you would be how maintainable this is.

1192410 · June 11, 2026, 7:32am

Totally fair point — and honestly, you're right. I couldn't maintain this by hand, not in a million years.

But here's the thing: AI completely changes the equation for me. It's not that I'm writing 50k lines — it's that I can finally transform an idea in my head into something I actually want to look at. For years I had visions of dashboards I never built, because the YAML overhead vs. the payoff just wasn't worth the evenings. Now I describe what I want, iterate a few times, and it's there.

And yes — the AI duplicates code shamelessly. I see it. A proper dev would refactor everything into reusable templates and decorators. But I'm not shipping this to production, I'm running it on a 32" screen on my wall. If something breaks in 6 months, I'll just regenerate it. That's the new maintenance model for me: not "edit the YAML" but "re-prompt the YAML." It feels weird at first, but it works.

The bigger picture: home automation is the primary goal, dashboards are the joy. I'd rather glance at beautiful glowing charts on a big screen than squint at sensor lists on my phone. Over the past 8 years I've collected around 120 GB of data in InfluxDB — temperatures, humidity, energy, motion, presence, you name it — and I want to actually see it, not just have it sitting there. The neon look is honestly just me having fun with all that data. It's a hobby, not a necessity.

And while we're talking about AI changing what's possible at home — the frontend is just one piece. The thing I'm most excited about right now is on the backend side: I've been building a fully automated grocery-tracking pipeline that ties Paperless-ngx, Node-RED, InfluxDB and Grafana together. Every REWE eBon (e-receipt) lands in Paperless via email, gets OCR'd, then a Node-RED flow parses out every line item — product name, quantity, unit price, VAT class, discounts, store ID, the lot — and writes it all into InfluxDB. Grafana then turns that into a real grocery analytics dashboard: spend over time, top products, price-per-kg trends for things like bananas or coffee, discount tracking, store comparisons. Each row links back to the original Paperless document, so I can click any data point and instantly see the actual receipt PDF. The whole thing is self-healing too — Node-RED checks InfluxDB for the highest doc ID it has already processed, compares against the latest one in HA, and only runs if there's something new. No duplicates, no missed receipts, survives reboots.

1192410 · June 11, 2026, 7:57am

Quick story on how this whole overhaul actually started — because it wasn't planned at all.

I just asked the AI for a new landing page for my phone with a bit of color — something nicer than the boring default. That was the entire brief. The result came back looking surprisingly good (see screenshots ), and it got me thinking: "what if every room icon matched the color theme of that room's actual page?" So I tried it. Then I added small status indicators on each tile — showing at a glance if a light is on, the blinds position, a window open, current power draw, humidity, the front door lock state, even the shopping list counts at the bottom.

And that's when it snowballed. One idea led to the next, a couple of evenings disappeared, and suddenly the whole house was color-coded across phones and tablets. The family absolutely loves it — my wife checks it before leaving the house ("is the Haustür locked? blinds down?"), the kids tap their own room tiles, and the shopping counters at the bottom mean nobody has an excuse anymore.

It turned the dashboard from "Dad's nerd project" into something everyone in the house actually opens and uses. That alone made the whole thing worth it.

So yeah — no grand plan, no architecture document, no roadmap. Just one small request for "a bit of color on my phone" that spiraled into a full redesign, because each step felt fun and the next idea was always "wait, what if I also…"

Chykan · June 11, 2026, 8:40am

The theme is not offensive. Despite some of the other comments as long as it suits you and your families needs that is all that counts.

AI is a good tool when used correctly.