Dashboard strategy?

đź’¬ Lounge
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I'm a recent convert from Vera to HE and I'm loving it, no complaints. I am, however, looking for some help with my dashboard strategy.

One of the main reasons, other than the number of integrations and the power of RE, was the ability to stand up some dashboards for my wife. She's on-board with automation, but under Vera I just had schedules, and if we didnt like it when a light went on, we just turned it off etc...

One of the big selling points of the HE was all the examples of dashboards that I saw here on the community discussions. However now that i've had my HE for about a month, I'm just starting to get into dashboard creation and I'm reading that dashboards, the number of devices on them, etc.. is a burden on the HE. In fact, I can't quite prove it yet, but I noticed with my Ring integration that each time I installed it and it stopped working after about 48 hours, I had a Ring dashboard with ALL the ring devices on it, each with a tile, showing me status. This time, it's been working for almost 5 days but I didnt create a huge dashboard like I did in the past. I added 2 sensors and left it at that. Sort of a canary for my Ring integration coal mine.

As i think about it, I'm concerned that if that's the case, then am I going to be able to do all the cool things with dashboards that I had planned to do.

I know people say here that it's best to leave HE for automation, and avoid dashboards, but I can't get away from that as a requirement for the wife.

I'm not interested in tablets in specialized mounting brackets all over the house, but I'd sure like to expose a dashboard we can use on our phones and maybe 1 tablet in the master bedroom.

So ... long explanation aside, is there any way I can ensure that dashboards dont become a burden on the system? Can I buy another HE, mesh them and just deploy dashboards on the HE with no paired devices? (or does it even work that way).

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

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I have had a few dashboards of various size, ie one per room, security dashboard with every sensor in the house on and they work fine, recently I've mergered some of the smaller rooms into one and have noticed a slight improvement in having 1 dash with say 20 items on as opposed to 2 dash with 10 each.

Anyway I would suggest adding one device at a time and see If you can narrow down your problem, my experience is a properly setup dashboard should have very little effect on the hub.

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IMHO Hubitat dashboards leave a lot to be desired. I would suggest instead of adding an additional hub dedicated to dashboards that you invest in a raspberry pi and use a third party app for your dashboards.

I would recommend using Apple’s HomeKit, which can be integrated via HomeBridge, if you’re using iOS or Home Assistant if you’re an Android user. Either of these options can be set on a raspberry pi with minimal impact on your HE hub.

The WAF for either of these options will be significantly higher.

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4

I assume that I could just run a VM in docker on my QNAP NAS instead? I've got several Pi's but I'd prefer not to hang yet another dongle off my network if I can just run it on a *nix vm on my NAS...

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Yep, either option can run in a docker container..

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The number one check to make is that you are selecting devices for a specific dashboard and no more. Got 5 tiles on a dashboard, then you should have only 5 devices selected in the Dashboard configuration. It is quite tempting to select too much and then not display them. Or to display them on day 1 and by day 5, move some devices to a new dashboard and forget that the old dashboard has extra devices selected. Everytime the dashboard refreshes, it asks the hub for everything selected... and then 'half' of it gets discarded, for example.

As to another hub and using that for dashboard... yes, I've been doing that for a couple years.. that extra hub is also doing all my Internet facing devices too.

My mind says "build a dashboard" despite the fact that I pretty much never use them. I'd rather spend a couple hours automating something when I find myself reaching for a dashboard... to prevent reaching for a dashboard the next time. :slight_smile: After a couple years, I made it.. barely remember where my dashboard bookmarks are. :smiley: But I have a whole Hub pretty much dedicated to them. :frowning:

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7

Hubitat does a lot of things well, but I continue to use SharpTools for my dashboards and webCoRE for my rules. Personal preference for my very specific uses.

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to build on this, even if you want all devices, do not use the "all" checkbox, but instead check each device individually. yes it is tedious, but the dashboard functions a lot better

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9

To add to the discussion, it is better to have multiple dashboards with only a few things in them. One per room, one with all lights (that can be risky, but I have one and it runs smoothly), etc.

You can also have a “Landing Page” dashboard that points to others - buttons can be setup as links to other dashboards.

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