#Newby's shameless self promotion

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

rotund drum
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Hi, entered the world of Home Assistant just a few months ago, leaving my trusted HomeGenie system behind. At first I found Home Assistant a bit scary and the user interface a bit basic, but that was because I had to learn Home Assistants capabilities.

As a retired leader for digital technology, I have my preconceptions of how a user interface (UI) should be to achieve great user experience (UX). Against popular believe this does not involve wow factor and graphical showing off, it involves simplicity, uniformity in design, and consistency in use, expect the same look and behavior for similar objects.

My HA user interface is designed for phone and small tablet, as that's where it's being used. It does not have to look great on a PC, as that is the place for maintaining the system, not using the system.

My user interface is made of uniform looking elements with multiple dimensions telling the story of what is going on in the home. The multiple dimensions are achieved by background color, icon type and color, information text and color.

My whole Home Assistant is primarily written/configured in YAML, a new language for me which I had to learn, and uses a few key HACS components due to the lack of UI configuration options in the Home Assistant core program. I use Custom Button-Card, HA Card-Mod, and Streamline Card to achieve the look and feel I want.

I really believe that the HA team needs to spend less focus on flashy graphics and gadgets, and more effort on bringing these critical HACS components into the core program for usability and reliability.

I attached a small video of my setup. The video quality is low to keep the file size small. Recorded on old and slow device.

I started building my system on a RPi4, but quickly started running out of resources and suffering slow speed with over 2500 entities. I now run on a RPi5 8GB 1TB-NVMe with extreme low resource usage and running very fast and responsive.

Everyone, have fun with Home Assistant.

rotund drum
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Continued (as I ran out of letter space). The Pool Controller and Irrigation system are completely build on scripts and automations. I could have written a custom integration for this, but I really wanted to see the strength and capabilities of the core program, which are impressive.

The hardware for the pool controller was custom made/programmed by me, so it's kind of unique. No use sharing the HA code, automations, and scripts without providing the build specs, hardware, and firmware requirements for the pool controller.

The irrigation system is based on a ESPhome device I created and customized. Is you may have guessed, I like to build things myself.

sage zodiac
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looks great.

sage zodiac
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the power home assistant gives is incredible. Im more a linux guy do everyting with ssh shell scripts

odd trail
north igloo
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It looks amazing. Can’t say I’m a fan of cameras everywhere, but some of that has given me ideas for my setup. It must take a while keeping it all running. Curious about hardware choices, eg what networking is being used on the small sensors? Didn’t think I’d like the grid but it’s cool and very scrolling efficient. I’m forever scrolling the dash on my phone!