Dwelling Assistant’s default dashboard bought a significant glow-up

Dwelling Assistant retains getting higher and higher, and a latest replace brings one other key enchancment to the self-hosted, open-source sensible house platform: a revamped “overview” dashboard that’s far simpler to scan and use. 

The redesigned Overview dashboard takes over because the default Dwelling Assistant house display screen, changing the previous, clunky, and bloated overview from years previous. 

Now as an alternative of a jumble of sensible house interface playing cards and controls, you get a clear, minimalist management panel with three sections: Favorites, Areas, and Summaries. 

The Favorites part teams eight of your most-used sensible house gadgets, permitting you fast entry to their controls with a single faucet. The Summaries part subsequent to it aggregates your sensible gadgets by sort, together with Lights, Local weather, Safety, and Media gamers, with a Climate widget simply beneath. 

A spotlight of the Summaries part is the “Gadgets found” button, which supplies you a fast rundown of all of the gadgets that Dwelling Assistant has found however hasn’t but configured. Faucet the button, and you’ll leap to a “What do you wish to add?” interface with a listing of all of your found gadgets; faucet a tool, and Dwelling Assistant will step you thru a configuration wizard. 

Good, however my favourite new part is Areas—effectively, not the part itself, which is only a grid of buttons for every space in your sensible house, however what’s behind every button: a well designed and arranged dashboard with controls for the lights, scenes, and different sensible gadgets in every room.  

Ben Patterson/Foundry

This being Dwelling Assistant, you’ll be able to tinker with the brand new default dashboard to your coronary heart’s content material, and you may nonetheless create your personal dashboards, both by a graphical interface or through uncooked YAML recordsdata. And if you’re a fan of the previous Overview dashboard, you’ll be able to simply dig into the Dashboard settings and resurrect it. 

However what I really like concerning the new Overview dashboard is that it’s terrific as-is, with no additional configuration required. It’s additionally a answer to one of many greatest ache factors of Dwelling Assistant—constructing and customizing its dashboards, which is such a frightening prospect that many Dwelling Assistant customers (myself included) have resorted to vibe-coding them. 

The brand new Overview dashboard so good that I would possibly lastly make the change—for actual this time—to Dwelling Assistant, a wise house platform that’s a) free, b) impervious to cost hikes, and c) utterly underneath my management.  

I’ve toyed with the thought up to now however in the end drifted again to Alexa, Google Assistant, and different established ecosystems which might be extra forgiving to on a regular basis sensible house customers.  

In fact, there are nonetheless vital boundaries to creating the Dwelling Assistant change; specifically, in relation to sensible audio system. Sure, there’s Dwelling Assistant Voice, the speaker made by Dwelling Assistant backer Nabu Casa, however it doesn’t provide the plug-and-play expertise that Alexa and Google Dwelling customers would possibly anticipate. 

Nonetheless, Dwelling Assistant’s beautiful new Overview dashboard is an enormous step in the correct route. 

This story is a part of TechHive’s in-depth protection of the most effective sensible house methods.