#Pi or something else?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

cyan oracle
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Hello. I am new HA but I have now successfully had my exterior lighting automated by HA for the last month or so. I'm very excited to learn more.

If I would like a dashboard for my Home Assistant views displayed in my home with additional things like sunset/sunrise times, upcoming tasks/to-do items, weather, maybe a quote for the day etc how should I be looking to accomplish this?

Should I be planning on using a Pi for this? I have not used HA dashboards themselves yet (I've been using the overview).

What software is best for this?

remote hawk
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Not sure why you think hardware is required, unless you are looking to put a screen on a wall, then look at fully kiosk.
The dashboard building is part of Home Assistant program itself.

cyan oracle
tall torrent
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Consider a cheap tablet such as the Amazon Fire. (I have several. The Fire tablets are garbage for general purpose use but great for a single purpose such as running a dashboard.) The older Fire 7" & 8" are only $50 & $65, respectively. The 7" is almost too small; the 8" isn't too bad. I'd recommend going with the 10" at $120. Get it with Lockscreen Ads as it is cheaper. With a tablet, you can put it on a stand or mount it on a wall. If you use a Fire tablet, you'll need to look at running Fire Toolbox to remove bloat, lockscreen ads and install the Play Store (or just add .APKs manually).
Fully Kiosk Browser is useful; it is what I use. But, you could simply run the HA Companion App and it will work just fine. Either FKB or HA will be able to show dashboards and exposes options such as sensors for display and automation. (Note: FKB can be run for free but there is a paid-for version with more options. You can test these options without paying to see if it warrants paying. FKB puts a watermark on the screen during test but doesn't interfere with anything else. Don't buy the paid-for version just for the camera motion detector feature; it generally doesn't work well in the dark. A stand-alone motion detector would be more useful.)

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In regards to dashboard design, most of the stuff you want to show are already built into HA, but you're probably not going to want to run something auto-generated. You'll need to lay it out yourself. You could also consider adding some custom stuff via HACS. Some popular/useful choices: Mushroom card, Bubble card, custom:button-card, and card_mod.
Also, look into adding browser_mod and/or Kiosk Mode to hide dashboard elements not needed on a tablet dashboard such as the sidebar and header.

weak salmon