Advanced Smart Home Dashboards Made EASY

hey what's up this is reid smart home dashboards have been something i've always wanted but they've always seemed like too much work to set up until recently when i finally got mine up and running i know there are some out of the box solutions that work good especially for starting out but they leave me wanting more i'm going to show you some advanced diy dashboards that are actually more family friendly because you can customize them and they're easy to set up but at the end i'm going to circle back to the out of the box solutions because it may be a better fit for you also i'm going to share some different examples and mounting options throughout the video so if you skip around then you may miss out on some helpful tips starting off first is a wall-mounted dashboard from jimmy hawkins if you don't know who jimmy is he's basically a legend in the smart home community heroes get remembered but legends never die he has a pretty awesome setup and he was nice enough to share his footage with me he has two wall mounted tablets one is an old ipad air and the other is an amazon fire tablet the ipad is in a 3d printed case bought on etsy and it sits on top of a recessed outlet that gives enough room for the core to fit and still have the ipad nearly flush against the wall and i think it looks great he added the recess outlet right above another outlet so it was easy to wire up and electricians can usually do this quickly and inexpensively downstairs he was able to add a low voltage box before finishing drywall it has cat6 connected to a power over ethernet switch on one end on the other it's a poe splitter to data and usb he connects his tablet to the usb for power which is pretty cool for software he is using dac board for a screen saver on his fire tablet to display weather and calendar events as you walk up to it then if the camera on the tablet sees motion it will switch over to the sharp tools dashboard sharp tools is a third party service that you can connect with smartthings or hubitat to control your devices from a dashboard view it's really easy to use you can change the size place tiles and see the status of sensors it runs in a browser window so it's not an app if you're using an ipad open it in safari and then drag up the top bar to make it full screen but on the fire tablet it's better to use an app to display the dashboard and you get some extra options like being able to use the camera to hide the screen saver that was shown earlier on jimmy's fire tablet he's using the fully kiosk browser app which costs a little bit of money and you have to sideload it to install it on the fire tablet i'll explain more about that and show a free alternative in a minute jimmy's dashboard is great though because he can quickly see the status of everything in his home like if the front door is unlocked or the garage door is not closed then he can quickly lock the door or control the lights he can also control a security system with a passcode of course and has a shortcut button to view his ring and why security cameras that open in their apps his ikea window shades are connected and there's a harmony activity he can start that will lower those shades dim the lights start his projector and change the receiver input to his roku this is awesome and i really want this in my house jimmy is a power user when it comes to smartthings i think he has commented on every single smartthings community post that i've ever come across he's also really helpful on twitter and has great automation ideas on tick tock so even if you don't have smart things he's definitely worth following and i'll link all his info down below if you want to use the sharp tools dashboard they have a free or a monthly subscription plan there's also another dashboard called action tiles and this is just a one-time payment it doesn't look as good as sharp tools but the one-time payment is nice if you're a homekit user you might already have an old ipad laying around that could be used as a dashboard no no or not apple's home app is not a bad option since the devices are separated into rooms and the buttons for the devices are easy to click on there are also third-party apps available to use as dashboards a highly rated one is home plus 5 which allows you to customize the icons and make the room full screen it also groups together all of your lights sensors switches and devices with a low battery it's a good app but honestly i don't know if it's worth 15 if you're thinking about doing a mounted ipad for home kit then i highly recommend checking out shane's youtube channel he has made several great videos explaining what he did plus lots of other really good content on homekit next up home assistant as many of you know i recently started using home assistant more and their dashboards were one of the main reasons for that it's included so you do not have to pay for third-party apps it's extremely customizable and it's surprisingly easy to use i did not expect this because usually you hear people talk about home assistant and it sounds scary and difficult to use but it's not that bad let me walk you through my setup starting with the tablet i'm using a fire hd 8 plus on a wireless charging stand having a tablet not mounted obviously takes up more counter space but it's easier to set up to use home assistant as a dashboard on my fire tablet i'm using an app called wall panel originally i had a side loaded which means you have to use a silk browser to download the apk file to install it but now you can just use the amazon app store and it's way easier you enter in the url of your home assistant dashboard of course you can definitely use this for other dashboards like sharp tools or action tiles so this is a free alternative to the fully kiosk browser that i mentioned earlier there are some other options that gives you like a screen saver that can dim the brightness and show a clock when you're not using it this works well and i just tap the screen to open up the dashboard there's also an option to prevent the screen from sleeping or turning off instead of turning that on i use the tablet settings just click on the serial number multiple times to enable developer options then go into developer options where you can turn on a setting so the screen will stay awake while charging now for home assistant you'll want to create a custom dashboard the default view that gets automatically populated is great for getting started but you'll want to customize it for the room that the dashboard is in look at my default one it's disgusting i don't even know what happened in configuration click on lovelace dashboards and create a dashboard give it a generic name because we're going to be adding multiple views i'll show you a basic example of this with my dashboard setup the first view or tab up top is a bird's eye view of my smart home i can see the ring doorbell battery temperature sensors memory on my raspberry pi phone battery percentage and storage which lights are on and other sensors and it's a lot and i don't need to always see all this information now if i click the office view it changes to only display devices that i want on my dashboard in the office that way i make sure everything fits nicely on the screen and i don't have to scroll when i was just getting started i would see all of these decked out dashboards that looked amazing and it was a little overwhelming on trying to figure everything out until i came across this really helpful page from home assistant this is a demo of many different lovelace dashboard examples it's great for inspiration but you can also click edit and view exactly what they did to set it up just click on next demo to cycle through the examples and don't forget about the different views because there are some really cool things to implement once i did that i realized i could add columns in a row to organize everything and you can do most of it with a ui editor so it's really easy i seriously get way too much enjoyment out of customizing a dashboard yes whoa finally yeah hey what game are you watching did somebody just score actually i figured out how to display the sensor graph on the dashboard it looks awesome oh wow that's that's so awesome if you're looking for an easy way to mount a fire tablet on a wall there's an inexpensive mount that can connect to an outlet i'm planning on trying something like this out in my house when i move in soon and i'll link to that plus everything else in this video down below before wrapping things up i want to quickly go over out of the box solutions if you want something more simple brilliant is an amazing device that replaces your light switch and has a touch screen to control your smart home it is expensive but also really easy to use and can do more than you would expect a less expensive option is an amazon tablet with their built-in dashboard it's good because you can customize what devices are displayed as long as they're connected to amazon but you cannot change the size or customize much else the google nest hub displays are kind of like dashboards because you can quickly control the devices in the room with the touch screen google has made these more intuitive to use but i would say that dedicated dashboards are more family friendly as long as you're willing to set them up soon i'll be putting up dashboards in my house since it's almost finished being built so don't forget to subscribe thanks for watching we'll see you next time hey do you see i set up the kids ipad for a smart home dashboard looks like i won that battle actually you probably should go take a look wait what do you mean yeah i think coco melon won this one

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 820,201

Keywords: Smart home dashboard, smart home dashboard tablet, smart home dashboard alexa, smart home dashboard app, smart home dashboard smartthings, smartthings dashboard, homekit dashboard, home assistant dashboard, smart home tablet, wall mount ipad, wall mount tablet, home assistant wall panel, smart home

Id: Gz7ShWaojGc

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021