WTH is there no guest/visitor function?

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
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A constant frustration of mine is the easy ability to grant access to visitors and guests. We run an Airbnb in part of the house with lots of nice devices that could be controlled via HA. But, due to security concerns and my lack of time to build a separate interface, I have not tried to develop a method of access for them.

When I used SmartThings for home control, I used ActionTiles to create a secure dashboard on a kiosked iPad. That worked great and was super easy to set up. I would love to see this type of function in HA. Or maybe a partnership with ActionTiles? I honestly think HA dashboards could learn from the simplicity of ActionTiles.

Dashboard Setup

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Dashboard

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You can make a dashboard for guests and then set specific access for specific users (ie only let them see the guest dashboard)

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The problem I have found with that (unless I am doing something wrong) is that it exposes tonnes of other stuff that would not be necessary or desirable for an Airbnb guest. The example above is all they see. When they touch the lock button, the door locks or unlocks, binary lights turn on or off with a simple press, dimmable devices, and a simple scroll bar appears on the screen.

My frustration with HA Dashboards is that getting rid of all the extra stuff is hard. For example, History, Settings, Related. There is often extra stuff on the device Info tab, like Attributes. Then there is the HA navigation bar itself and the related components that may be accessible. A streamlined interface can be achieved in HA with lots of add-ons and tweaking, but it isn’t particularly easy to do. The second part is security concerns around what might still be accessible even if hidden.

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Understood!

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I agree totally with this request!
For the meantime you could try something like the HomeHabit app for locked down access…

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I managed to do something like this.
Although not entirely locked down, it’s good enough to hide the backend from a non-techy person.

On Android I did it with the Nova Launcher as it can hide a lot of the Android front interface.

In HA I use the following HACS:
Kiosk Mode: GitHub - NemesisRE/kiosk-mode: 🙈 Hides the Home Assistant header and/or sidebar
(optional) Swipe Navigation: GitHub - NemesisRE/lovelace-swipe-navigation: ↔️ Swipe through Lovelace views on mobile.

Then, as freekeys says, I created and pre logged in a guest user and removed all the side menu items.
Kiosk mode hides the side-bar, but if they did find it then there’s nothing to see other than the guest dashboard

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This idea is related to the following: Mobile application for guests (my post) and Logging with a QR code.

Login with QR code:

Mobile application for guests:

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You can disable all of these things by setting the action to none for objects on your guest dashboard.

- entity: sensor.some_sensor
  tap_action:
    action: none
1 Like