When I got the ADT Pulse about 10 years ago, they had a pretty danged cool feature:
I was able to "draw" my house on a grid. Then, I was able to place devices onto that grid. They showed up only as small icons that were bright/dim depending upon whether or not they were on. You had the "main" level--then you could flip up or down for other levels (e.g., basement, upstairs, etc.).
Then, if you hovered over them, you could see the name, more status. Clicking on them would pop up a window that let you change the status (on/off/lock/unlock/dim/brighten/etc.).
Foir whatever reason, ADT got rid of that--but it was far and away the most effective way to "see" everything in the house at once. I could tell at a quick glance if all the lights were off, the doors were all locked, etc. And, it was up to me to put what I wanted where I wanted it--so i didn't have to clutter it up with things I didn't care about.
Certainly, fancy embellishments like this are long term projects--if they're feasible to pull off at all.
But, hey, i figured I'd mention it.
And, in the mean time, I sure wish the current dashboards were a bit spiffier/.more modern/easier to figure out how to customize. Again, they're functional now--so these are just ponderings for when someone goes out on a lark.
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If you ever REALLY REALLY want this feature: look into Home Assistant and the "Floorplan" add on.. it's a lot of work to get it up and going, but it is awesome when it's done
Interesting. Although, it sounds like driving Hubitat through HA is a bit of a kludge. Given the issues I have right now getting things to behave right, I am pretty sure I don't need more "points of failure" in the mix.
Although, hopefully, the soon (I hope) to be released update for the C-7 will hopefully be a huge help.
All in all, I'm getting some super sweet things done--the automations are way better than I'd ever imagined. Now, I just need to get things working reliably.
It's definitely possible to set this up with Hubitat but it is quite a lot of work if you want something really custom/cool.
The simplest way is just to use your 2D or 3D plans as a background image to your dashboard and then lay your devices over the top using a fine grid layout.
I went for a custom solution that allows full flexibility by creating an html page running on a Pi which is running Apache2 webserver so that tablets (wall mounted or otherwise) can display the dashboard.
My dashboard is now more or less complete although I'm still waiting to add the proper 3D plans for my property. But I have lights, motion sensors, banner image changing on mode, contact sensors, AC's, lux sensors, Temp/Pressure/Humidity sensors, Google Mini and hub/displays, webcams (hosted via tinyCam) and chime/siren all active on the dashboard where the graphics update dynamically according to device status. I've implemented pop-up menus for lights, AC's etc so that I can control them directly from the dashboard. It's really cool and perfect for a wall mounted display to wow visitors All achieved with the eventsocket and a stack of html/javascript/css. You will find various posts under my name on the subject.
I've also added a menu system and additional "pages" (actually divs in the one html page) for more detailed control over some devices just using standard HE dashboards running inside iFrames. It's really easy to set up and gives the best of both world - nice layout but not much coding necessary. I've added divs for things like weather, news (BBC, fox, sky etc), Spotify (which is really cool because you just click, up pops Spotify, and you can send the music wherever you want), a sketchpad (so you can leave a message for someone), local info, property info, emergency info, "contact your host" info (we plan to rent the place out after our renovation so the dashboard becomes a central control/info hub to the house for visitors), and some settings for preferences. By using a single html page and organising the content into divs, it all loads at one time at page load and you can switch across the content instantaneously.
On home assistant there's a third party hubitat integration that lets you leave all your devices on hubitat completely untouched and it inports the devices and their states into home assistant. It's no harder than adding a repository, pressing install, configuring with your makerapi info and restarting. From there you can start setting up your floorplan dashboard. As @Angus_M explained, there's definitely other options to accomplish this, but I'll side with @morningz and say the home assistant route for your dashboard would be the simplest right now.
I'm only using the Hubitat as a device manager for the most part, HA and it's Node-RED add on pretty much handle UI and rules and these in turn talk back and forth with my NVR setup
Sweethome 3D + Photoshop (or gimp) + Picture Entity lovelace card in HA = this (as i type this, i am kind of laughing at just how much time this took lol)
Anything that isn't Hue in the house is paired to the Hubitat and the most excellent HA/Hubitat HACS Add-On brings them into HA
My last thing to do is to make a central touchscreen for the house with the above on it. I've been eyeing using an extra RiP4 I have laying around but getting the official 7" touchscreen for it and figuring out how to mount it nicely on the wall
I think this is going to be my next project. I use "Dwain's Theme" as my main dashboard for mobile, but I'd like to design something to put up on the walls and I think this would have more "wow factor" than anything else.
Can you import an already made floor plan into Sweethome?
But, that's a LOT of work--for what could be a decent, built-in feature (at least a basic "stick" drawing for the house). The super fancy stuff could be left to add-ons.
And, still, when you're having to have third parties send/receive status, etc., it does add quite a bit more complexity--and requisite failure points.
i took my land survey, scanned it, then brought it into Sweethome as the background (which Sweethome doesn't export as part of the final picture). so it pretty much allows one to trace along the lines.
This can easily be done with the basic built-in features. Load up your stick drawing as a backgroud image to the dashboard and then align your dashboard tiles to where the device is in the house.
And the third parties sending/receiving status and commands actually improves the performance of the hub itself since it's not tying up resources doing those.
