Many people will produce dashboards to provide both status updates on critical elements of their smart home alongside control of equally important elements of their life. I am curious of what parts of these two sides of the puzzle people find useful....
For me ,I find both of these feed one another... knowing the temperature and humidity feeds into my decision over my manual control of my air conditioner and/or dehumidifiers.... Equally, I am, at times, interested in my Solar Production and usage to guide my decisions in power usage across the house...
Specific use cases aside... I am also interested to understand people's choices to present their home visually... Are you interested in knowing power usage, general activities throughout the home, media being played along with some control, calendar alerts, general notifications...etc.
Also, how people choose to visualise their home is also interesting.... Beyond the usual switch / bulb status, the use of charts, gauges and other visual forms is also... interesting for some of us....
Obviously there is also the recent excitement about the graph-based visuals of the Z-networks... Those also contribute to the visual understanding of the smart-devices involved in our homes.... And are really cool
I mostly use the Inovelli dimmers/switches’ LEDs to keep me posted on a few key things - Mostly: Garage Door open, Air Exchanger on Turbo, Air Conditionner running and alarm is on. But also alerts including flood and intrusion.
I do have a dashboard mounted on the wall which has the weather on it and the temperature and humidity in the garage, but don’t look at it much. Also have a bunch of dashboards including one that is providing data on my small DYI solar array which I like looking at sometimes, but those are not mounted, just accessible from iPads/iPhones, etc.
I also have Echo notify me of key events, and lots of pushover notifications.
I really only use one dash for myself to monitor locks and thermostats. I made one for my wife that controls blinds and sets her scene for when she wants to take a bath. Beyond that for me everything is automation vs remote control..
I have things mostly automated, with a few rules triggered via voice. I have dashboards that I mostly use when something goes wrong. The main one has critical information that would help to pinpoint where the problem is, plus switches that I can use to override Alexa issues when it's offline. I have others that I can use to drill down in specific areas — windows/doors open, motion triggered, batteries, etc. But I rarely look at any of them.
Maybe it's just me, but I never saw the difference between turning a light on via a switch, turning a light on via a dashboard, and asking Alexa/Google/Home to turn a light on. I want the light to just come on when I need it.
I have a dashboard display in our Kitchen near the back door. This gives us an overview of what is happening in the home with lighting, climate control and security. But much of our smart home relies on automations, so the dash is really only there as a visual aid to display device states.
I do like my dash exit and window visual cue though. Its a shield icon that flashes orange if any windows or doors are left open and solid green if everything is closed. Its a very good reminder, if we are leaving the house, to just make sure its all properly secure, its easy to leave a window open in the summer by accident after all.
My perspective has changed over time. Partly from getting better at automation logic. Partly from the shear number of devices. I am due for a dashboard makeover.
When we moved into our latest house, the dashboard was a tool for me to visualize what should contribute to automations and whether they were behaving as expected. It has been over a year now, so we have pretty well tweaked all four seasons.
The music dashboard stays, but I really need to reconsider the rest.
How are you running this if you need that light to come on at random times? Obviously besides a motion sensor.
I personally run dashboards in my bedroom, living room and kitchen. Kitchen dashboard has a camera tile down at the gate with a tile button to open said gate if motion is set off and we see that the person that's down there actually needs to come up or if it's just a delivery or another random person mistaken my driveway for an extension of the road.
On that same kitchen panel I have my garage door controls than my garage, compressor control and all my sensor and door warnings.
In the living room, the dashboard is right next to the couch with all the different lighting scenes. Yes, the house is programmed to do certain things throughout the day but if I'm on the couch and I decide I want to watch a movie I can just click the button on the dashboard and the lights change. Also have the same camera feed and gate relay on this dashboard as well as the one in my bathroom so we don't have to get up and see what's going on.
I totally understand the whole "If you have to control your house it's not smart" but my life doesn't have a consistent schedule. Besides the house shutting down completely at 9:00 a.m. and certain things coming back online at 3:30 p.m. and then back off at midnight almost everything is done via voice and panels.
Ours is a bit simpler. If time is after 6:30 and channel changes on tv lights dim for movie/show watching. If it goes back and remains at the main menu of the tv for more than 5 mins, lights start to climb back up to 100% over the course of another 2 mins but if the channel is changed again it will then go back down to movie/tv levels.
For video at front door, if there is motion or doorbell it just pops up on our phones. I have a couple of dashes for at a glance status and 2 virtual switches to disable alarms if we purposely leave the doors open but that's really about it. The less I have to interact with my home the better.
Why "besides a motion sensor"? They work well. I use motion sensors combined with mode. Lights do different things when I'm asleep vs when it's daytime vs when it's after sunset.
I have no need to open my garage remotely, other than via the Homelink button in my car, so that isn't really a concern for me. I don't have a gate. For security reasons, I do not automate doors other than to lock the front door if it's left unlocked. If a window is left open while I'm home, I'll get a message on my phone that the HVAC settings have changed. If a contact sensor on a door or window is opened while I'm away, I'll get an alert on my phone that includes the sensor that was tripped. I'd probably look at the dashboard in the case to see if it's really an intruder.
I use a Logitech Harmony remote along with @ogiewon's Harmony Hub driver to automated some lighting. I can also tell Alexa or Siri "movie on" and "movie off" to have the lights change. I have a scene dashboard set up if I feel like pushing buttons.
I'm retired. I don't have any schedule at all. I do have to tell the house (via Alexa) that I'm awake and that I'm going to bed because those times are not consistent. But then things mostly just happen... based on motion, lux levels, before/after sunset, presence...
I'm glad that there's a variety of ways to do everything because households have different requirements. We each should do what works for us. This is what works for me. I want my house to be mostly hands-off.
Besides the basic home/away and night/day/morning there are always going to be things that can't be planned for. Sometimes when Im watching TV I want the immersion light and sometimes I don't. This is where the dashboard comes in as I rather reach 16" to the tablet than have to tell Alexa 3 times to do what I want.
I have a few screens around but in practice I haven’t used them as much as I thought I would. It also absorbs a lot of time which I never seem to have.
I have a page for each room and this is the view I don’t use as much as I expected. Mainly these are used for selecting an AV streaming source / album.
What I do use are pages per ‘category’ like security, heating, AV.
Each room for example can generate a request for heat which brings on the boiler/furnace. As we transition through spring less rooms request heat so being able to see on one page which room is still requesting heat is very useful. Also which rooms are taking much longer to heat up.
Same is reassuring for security knowing if rooms have windows or doors left open or locks not locked.
I kludge the category for each device currently as HE has rooms but not categories.
Not sure how others do it, but I am using (Sonos for music) + (SharpTools for dashboard). Overall, mine is a sloppy version of the Jukebox shown in this thread.
A button on the dashboard activates a rule. That rule send the PlayTrack command to Sonos with the path for my wife's favorite station.
A separate (standard) control is used for pause, skip, volume or mute. As @rlithgow1 mentioned, I also have the album art displayed. I emulated (stole) every idea from others on the Hubitat and SharpTools communitites.
I'm in the heating trade so I like to mess around with stuff. Currently converting my entire 1st floor to radiant. Converting from 2 first floor zones to 7 without running wires using 7 ecobee Tstats mounted and wired in the basement and wireless ecobee sensors for each of the 7 zones.
Beestat is a cool program to visualize things but didn't know you could import this into Hubitat. I've recently switched to HomeAssistant for dashboards so I'll have to see if maybe they have a Beestat integration. I know for sure you can track/histograph sensor data but having a dedicated page for all that info would be cool.
Edit: Apparently the Ecobee integration can be used to pull the data. This image is basically all I would want. Current and target temp with zone "run" time.
I am using Honeywell evohome, I’ve had it installed for many years and in general it has performed well. I actually integrate it via another HA system and then each room I expose to Hubitat for visibility and control. IIRC HE has an integration for evoHome too.
It’s become quite a crowded market nowadays and I’m hoping maybe a thread based system might appear soon as RF distances are right on the edge currently for me. I already use two controllers.
