+1 on some sort of tablet layout/mode. At this point I think I’ve tried just about every dashboard software that exists but keep coming back to Lovelace due to either a lack of support, features or ease of use.
The main issue right now is it’s really hard to get a good looking dynamic Lovelace tablet page. Most dashboards should fit on one page without needing to scroll.
In my opinion the major pain points currently for dashboards in Lovelace is that to my knowledge their is no easy way to get precise control over where cards are placed. Want something to be in the middle of the screen, not happening without a bunch of css tricks. Then if you do a bunch of css tricks they usually don’t translate well across systems. This could somewhat be solved by auto scaling a card to fit within a grid tile.
Drag and drop would be fantastic especially for new users.
Anyone who can install Home Assistant can also use it - how, depends on the time
invested and experience. (But also as power user, I’ve often wanted a tidier dashboard or simpler ways to create one.)
For everyone else, especially other members of the household, it is very difficult.
HA always needs to be prepared and set up to make it easily accessible to other,
inexperienced users.
A nice automatically generated menu and dashboard for normal users would be perfect.
Maybe hide logbook and history in a submenu. Domains like light, switch, climate
could be automatically grouped in the sidebar at first. The goal would be:
But also more options for normal users like basic automations that they can set up
and manage themselves.
There is of course an automatically generated lovelace panel that organises stuff in groups of rooms. It quickly gets untidy by including every damn entity.
That’s true. But i can’t really choose that when i add the integration.
I can deactivate the entity afterwards or take control over my dashboard. What i thought of was an autogenerated dashboard with a simple hide/show option for entities, for example.
that was hide_entity: ?
After some quick research i understand why this was removed and found this topic Lovelace and hiding entities - #24 by bcwhite. But i still think for better UX this option would be an improvement.
We have blueprints and we have integrations. Why don’t we combine them? Often you see on the documentation page of the integration how you can setup certain triggers automations etc. But why can’t a blueprint be attached to an integration? This makes setting up advanced automations for integrations a breeze.
So after integration config flow you would get an option to go over automation flow where you can set the fields for you automation to work with your setup.
This is an option because there are always other ways to setup automations. So for hardcore users this won’t break anything.
On the backside it uses a blueprint with version number. So when a new version of the integration appears your automation could also be updated. It sees the new version of the blueprint and it could update the automation.
Imo the value of blueprints is that they are integration and entity agnostic. It doesn’t matter what light, switch, lock, etc. that you are using, you can apply the same blueprint to it.
Blueprints are quite general I know. But the usefulness of them will be only extended if certain blueprints are in conjuncture with integration. For example if you have a water-heater it would be awesome when you install that integration that it detect you solar panel pulls solar forecast and make the water heat when the solar forecast is at the max prediction. Maybe we don’t need them coupled but a smart system that can suggest blueprints on the integrations you have.
So that is what I mean link them more together. Now you need to make a plan and gather/find them yourself.
Also I think you can make automation quite specific for an integration if the integration is quite specific;)
Place icons, text, values, toggles inside cards as I see fit
IMHO Home Assistant suffers from the same issues as Linux dists do; it’s great, but it’s not usable unless you invest time and effort into understanding how to use it by text/console/coding, and this hinders the boarder mainstream users.
2 (really) minor improvements I can think of at the moment:
An easier way to manipulate the data in the energy tab, without the need of learning SQL commands. For now even a reset / clear data button to clear number prior to some selectable datetime would help.
Hey that sounds a lot like something I custom built. Mine is exposing lights per room by default as these are the most common items I tend to need to interact with, but other stuff like scenes, cameras, curtains, etc are on the expanded state.
I’m a product designer and I’d honestly love to help ship something like this as default in HA, would do a world of difference to get people onboard (eg, get our partners to buy into home automation ) and make it more usable out of the box.
I took inspiration from Philips Hue and HomeKit to make it more app-like in terms of visual presentation and functionality.
Edit: including the same view as it appears on mobile.
(nevermind all the unavailable temperature sensors, I’ve been postponing giving them new batteries for a while)
I guess it should be possible. You just fill in fields and when blueprint updates you get for example en extra field.
So if the automation the blueprint created inherit the blueprint. (blueprint should be for example greyed out for deletion, otherwise it breaks the automation) If you update the blueprint the inherit code wil be updated and extra fields will be available in the automation.
But for this the blueprints should be more maintained like integrations. So that they are in main repository (HACS for outside the repository) so that there is easy tracking if a blueprint is updated.
The next thing is that we should have some AI that can suggest blueprints on the integrations you have. So if you have a room with lights and a sensor. It should suggest some blueprints that can setup routines. If you have solar panels and water heater. That is setup an heating automation based on solar forecast.
Just like you get now suggested integrations for the broadcast of devices you have in your network.
Sure, I’m using a mix of fold-entity-row, multiple-entity-row, card-mod, hui-element, and slider-entity-row (only used for curtains), all installed via HACS.
Here’s the code for one of the cards if you want to give it a shot. There are a few CSS vars sprinkled throughout which are colours I defined in themes.yaml so I only had to update them in one place if needed.
I use data analysis dashboarding tools at work a bit (PowerBi and Tableau).
I particularly like Tableau’s UX for building dashboards.
You see icons for the different cards on one side then drag and drop them onto the page. You can add vertical/horizontal stacks and cards can be fixed or full width.
I can see this workflow working well for Home Assistant dashboard builds.
) and make it more usable out of the box.
