That’s Tileboard not hadashaboard. Either way you are right that you dont need it with Lovelace UI. The thing that interests me with Tileboard is its all written in Angular. With an extensive background in Angular development I can fork it and do quite literally whatever I want. I wouldn’t suggest using it for the main HA interface. My plans, if/when time allows, is to setup Tileboard for a wall mounted tablet. I realize the same could probably be achieved with lovelace for device or user specific UI components but so far it doesnt seem exactly easy to do. And with Tileboard there is no learning curve for me. Pull source make it do what i want and push to /www/tileboard directory and done.
HA could do these things if someone wanted to write the code for it. However I prefer the separation of concerns approach that HA currently has. Your example of load a movie from a media library is cool but im not sure how well that’s going to work with my 6TB (and growing) of media content.
I dont personally know any of the HA devs so i cant say for certain but from using HA for a couple years now it seems the overall aim of the project is to be an automation hub. It integrates with a ton of services but doesnt try to do everything those services can. For example Emby is my media server / player for all the content I have. HA knows when something is playing via the integration and i get a nice card in the UI with the current content on it. I can have HA act on that by dimming the lights or what not if its a movie. But why would HA try to duplicate all of the countless man hours to do what Emby already can? Emby has an API that could be leveraged to do all of those things in HA but then anytime a breaking change is published in Emby someone on the HA dev team has to issue a patch.
This is where i think the separation of concerns idea comes in to play. Let the end user chose which services they like best and allow HA to receive status updates so it can act on them. I’d be surprised if HA tries to do anything like Control4 does anytime soon. Open Source usually doesnt have the resources in time or money to spend trying to incorporate all of those features into a single platform.
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I see a site that has a linked in button that goes to their facebook page. And they want me to trust them to screw around with my technology? Also, they need to learn to hold a camera straight!
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I actually switched to Home Assistant from Control4 because there were too many things I couldn’t control. It takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. I had no coding experience and didn’t even know what a DNS server was when I started, now it’s become a hobby.
I have a 4200 sq ft house with a couple receivers, several TV’s, projectors, whole house audio, smart thermostats, smart bulbs, smart switches, location detection devices and more that I’ve configured to work. I was even able to get control4’s proprietery 8 zone and 4 zone amps (both with 4 inputs) to work with Home Assistant thanks to the awesome community.
Control4 worked well for what it did, but I couldn’t do anything myself and it was expensive. Now I can add or change things whenever I want. I’m also not stuck to Control4’s proprietery brands and partners.
I would argue Home Assistant is better and more diverse, you just have to be willing to put in the effort, and it’s not as hard as it looks, especially with the community. The community is by far the friendliest and most helpful internet message board I’ve ever been a part of.
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Eventually. Might be a while though, but I’m sure home assistant, being open source, does a lot more stuff then control4 if you really look into it.
100x this. And mostly imagination.
If you want hass to have an interface like that you’ll have to get a 3rd party product like RTI or something. Hass is great as a hub but not as flexible with the gui.
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You can make the GUI however you want with hass. I started off trying to emulate the control4 GUI and was able, but then found more efficient ways to create my GUI. I’m not sure which part you can’t recreate with hass. Can you mention the specific part? Thanks
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Sounds like quite an install you have there! Congrats to how far you’ve come.
I try to understand this a bit better before going to my installer hopefully for the last time. I’m running C4 OS2.6 so have to upgrade to 3.0 if I want the integration to work. Given this is chargeable service - like everything C4 
- I’d like to understand whether it’s worth it.
I started my home automation journey with Control4 back in 2012 and we loved it for what it does. However the fact you have to approach a dealer for changes other than what you can do in Composer really doesn’t sit well with me especially now with systems like Home Assistant and the growing world of IoT. Early this year I have started to build a new system around Home Assistant, Node-RED, AWS and recently stumbled upon the Control4 integration when I built a HA instance on a Linux VM.
My ideal target model is to retain Control4 (given the investment) but - eventually - control everything through Home Assistant/MQTT. On Control4 I’m running dimmer lights though out the house, the lounge (AVR/TV), sound through the house (via a HC800 audio matrix and multi-node Logitech Media Server) and integration to an ElkM1 Gold security system which I just saw being supported as well in HA. This is not about feeding status data to HA controlled from Control4 but rather control the Control4 components via HA with Control4 feeding back status of say the garage door sensor connected to Control4 being activated.
Is this possible with the components/bits available today? Don’t expect it to be plug-and-play and I have no issue in putting in the time and effort (fascinating field) but would be nice to get a feel of whether this is doable before rolling up my sleeves and start with spending some Control4 money
The docs only refer to lights at this stage, but perhaps there is more to come? This integration was only introduced in 0.114, which is the latest version at this time.
Documentation as in https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/control4/?
There are various discussions on the HA community on deeper integration. Does this mean these are individual projects rather than a formal integration supported by the development team?
How deep they integrate is down to the developer of the integration or one with access to the control4 hardware .
This is the initial PR that introduced it and the developer
Ok txs. Well I might start with the lights to get a feel…
yes indeed that is what I meant.
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