The BEST Dashboard I’ve EVER Seen! Smart Home Tour

[Music] hey what's up I'm here in Seattle Washington at Dan Dixon's house the creator of Universe Sandbox and he has taken all of his design and programming background and put it into his smart home to create an insane dashboard and automations around his house that I can't wait to show you so one of the main things I'm going to focus on is the Smart Home dashboard Dan built it's by far the best dashboard I've ever seen in my entire life it seriously blows my dashboard out of the water for all the crazy Advanced features but not only that it's easy to use yeah so one of the one of the real focuses uh in designing the dashboard was to make everything as easy as possible so that everything is just like one button push away so if you're having to like scroll or switch menus like that's just too much right I want to be able to walk up to the dashboard press a button everything happens Dan's home is awesome because he didn't just add a couple of dashboards around the house he added 10 yes 10 dashboards all over the house so Dan has his dashboards placed in the most ideal locations like one right here at the top of his stairs as he's walking up but if he goes and sits at his desk look he has another dashboard right there and then when he's going to bed you guessed it another dashboard right next to his bed so no matter where he's at he has quick access to control his smart home later in the video we'll get into everything the dashboard can do but this is just a little taste of how intense and Decked Out Dan's smart home is like his smart lights he has 95 Philips Hue Lights around his house literally every light is a smart bulb that can change color even the shower light because why not and the desk lights that most people would settle for basic white lights or something Dan takes it up a notch yeah I wanted to be able to change all the lights in my house to different colors and I couldn't find a good work light so I ended up using a hue outdoor flood lamp with attached to a monitor arm yeah so here their color and then with a press of a button they go bright and ready for assembling Legos or working on projects yes that's a Lego typewriter on his desk and when he says assembling Legos he means business he has tons of Lego models all over the house and lots of massive projects that are fun to check out of course the dashboard can control lights and you would think with all the lights would be messy and complicated to control them but it's the opposite all the lighting controls open up a little section there on the dashboard so no jumping to another page and going back and forth everything opens up right there and it's super easy to use all the favorite scenes are shown with the ability to customize it underneath like the brightness speed of the lights changing lighting effects or just changed to a specific color but a really nice touch is the colors used in the scene are displayed at the top left in little circle color palettes I love the look of this and Dan wrote the custom CSS and JavaScript code to display this which is just incredible and I want this for my dashboard he's using those color combinations pulled from the Hue scenes to change the colors of the twinkly lights in the stairwell that way the lights match and let me tell you it seems easy on the surface but there's some complex coating for this to happen the twinkly lights are really cool looking since you can see them on any of the three levels in the house I'm a sucker for RGB lights and I was always in awe walking up and down the stairs so when it comes to music Dan had speakers all over the house even in the bathroom and when showering the humidity sensor triggers an automation to turn up the volume so it can be heard over the running water so smart but with the dashboard Dan created a really easy way to control the Music Volume yeah so I felt like I was spending like a quarter of my life adjusting the volume on devices and and music in my house so I came up with the way of just having kind of uh preset low medium high low is kind of conversational high is the loudest I ever listened to it and that way the volume is always what I expected to be this is really useful when there are multiple audio players with their own volume numbers so these low medium and high buttons handle all of that I feel like every dashboard needs these volume presets just makes sense also there's a button to open up all the Spotify playlists in a little section on the dashboard and Dan found a way to make playing music as frictionless as possible so when I first got started with home assistant I was like very pleasantly surprised to discover that it also controlled had support for controlling music and I absolutely love music and I want music playing all the time but I was using uh Google Chrome cost audios all through the house for whole house music and the voice commands would like only work sometimes or you'd have to P your phone it was just such a pain so I set up a a series of scripts so that I have a single button that will start the music every time I love it no messing with scripts turning all the speakers on or any of that just one simple button and it takes care of it all what's crazy is that there's seven aara fp2 sensors scattered throughout the entire house so no matter where you're standing the smart home knows exactly where you are for example if you're walking down this little hallway area and if Dan is like in between stuff his smart home will see that and it will encourage him to do a quick exercise like some push-up because he knows he's like in between tasks right then so there's tons of automations he's using depending on where he is in the house as you can see on the dashboard each level of Dan's house is sectioned off in zones and it can tell if someone's standing in that zone that way if he hasn't taken his pills yet and he's in the kitchen area Dan smart home can remind him to do that task take pill and these types of automations were all over the house so one of the problems I was having was I would forget to weigh myself in the morning and so I set up an automation that when I actually go into the bathroom it actually gives me an audible notification based on the motion sensors to in and then when I weigh myself when I actually stand on the scale communicates to home assistant and will then weigh incomplete but the automations don't stop there walking through the house of course turns on all the lights using the 15 different motion sensors scattered throughout so no need to worry about using any light switches around here and when Dan walks up to things like the washing machine it just turns on for him because the motion sensor is tucked away so it can only see him in that area this might seem a little bit over the top but sometimes making the Automation and seeing it in action is just plain old fun so I set up an automation that when I come down the stairs first thing in the morning the curtains automatically open once I'm on the stairs so that way I can get to like kind of witness the automation occurring in front of me I agree it's fun to see the smart home working in action there are so many things in Dan's smart home that I want to implement for myself but one of them especially is the chime with the voice notification dishwasher finished when I hear voice notifications at my house sometimes I don't hear the full message I'm not paying attention but when I hear that chime first it's easy to pay attention and hear what's being said so I'm not hearing the last few words it's a custom MP3 sound for the chime and I think it elevates the whole automation makes it sound kind of futuristic dve finished back to the dashboard since it gets even more impressive with the notifications in the top left there are notification cards that appear as kind of a smart home Todo list there are dozens of different types of these actionable notifications that can pop up all throughout the day like if the plants haven't been watered or if there's mail in the mailbox since it has a contact sensor if it's time to work out on the rowing machine or take out the trash and sometimes the notifications will go away once the smart home recognizes it's been done like if the mailbox is open just after the front door is opened then the smart home knows that Dan's getting his mail or if the notification gets clicked it just goes away I think this is extremely useful because the cards are always visible in the top left so they don't get forgotten about and it just looks nice on the bottom right of the dashboard it's a similar feature but it's displaying things currently happening in the smart home like if the washer dryer running so with a quick glance at the dashboard Dan can always see what's happening and what needs to be done around the house the amount of customization that has been put into this dashboard is just bananas take the weather station for example Dan lives in Seattle which gets more rain in one week then I probably SE Arizona all year so there's a rain animation Dan created on the dashboard that moves fast if it's raining hard or movees slowly if it's sprinkling I mean how cool is that there's also an offline mode so if a dashboard gets disconnected it will light up red to let Dan know it needs to be reconnected and if home assistant is being rebooted all the dashboards display that that so no one accidentally tries to use the dashboard when it's not working seriously all this is just next level like if the dashboard was scrolled down to control something and the person just walked away guess what happens the dashboard automatically Scrolls back up 30 seconds later that way it's always in the correct position when walking up to the dashboard what also if a section is opened up like music or light controls that section will automatically close but you can also pin it to stay open the ux design in this is impressive with all these thought out details Dan is just using inexpensive Samsung tablets for the dashboard and also made some custom mounts for a nice clean look and not only that but each dashboard is either in light or dark mode depending on where it's mounted light color wall light mode dark color wall dark mode these are the little details that really take it up a notch so one of the things that has really stood out to me about this dashboard that Dan's done is made it extremely easy to use it's so intuitive anybody could walk up to it and control the smart home and just automatically changes with the time of day so you just walk up to it it shows you exactly what you need to see and you don't even have to think about it that's right the dashboard changes what's displayed depending on what time of day and other things going on around the house this just makes so much sense to have different controls for daytime versus going to bed that way the dashboard can have even more buttons while staying Less close cluttered this is just pure genius and the dashboard in my own house is feeling really dumb right now Dan also has some cool automations with things like his 3D printer he built an exhaust fan system that automatically starts running when he starts a 3D print he had a cool smoke machine to test the exhaust and the smoke just looks awesome on the desk of course there's a notification on the dashboard and on the speakers when the 3D printer is finished 3D print complete there's also a button in the living room that would switch the TV mode it changes all the lights and sets the volume to the perfect level for watching a movie also shows how much longer the movie has and some really simple buttons to control the audio amplifier volume in a much more userfriendly way the Philips Hue Lights in the back are using the Hue sink to match the colors on the TV this looked incredible with the Universe Sandbox game that Dan and his team made yeah if you haven't played this game it's so much fun you send meteors to hit the Earth blow up worlds and all this crazy stuff so if you want to be like Darth Vader and blow up a world with a laser like the Death Star you can the physics simulation on this thing is impressive so I would definitely check it out if you haven't played it I'll link it below it's on Steam with extremely high ratings kind of makes sense why Dan's dashboard in smart home is so Advanced to make a game like that you have to be really smart my journey with home automation started like 15 years ago and I was doing some like crazy X10 stuff and it barely worked and then I didn't do anything with it for years and then two years ago uh the producer I work with on Universe Sandbox recommended home assistant and I kind of started looking into that and just totally fallen in love and it is allowed me to solve all kinds of different problems that I was having like the ability to link them all together the dashboard itself extreme customization hundreds and hundreds of hours setting the dashboard up and all the different scripts and automations uh so I don't recommend it to anyone uh but also when it works it feels like magic it definitely feels like magic seeing everything work together firsthand and Dan smart home is very inspiring to see what's possible and I know I got so many ideas for my own smart home all right that about does it for the tour thank you so much Dan for inviting me out here I had so much fun yeah you're smart home is just mind-blowing how cool the automations are and that dashboard oh man that thing is intense thanks everyone for watching and the icing on the cake for this room is another one of those remotes that Dave built it's all custom and what's really amazing is

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 123,435

Keywords: smart home tour, home assistant, home assistant dashboard, smart home dashboard, smart home ideas, home automation ideas, smart home solver, smart home, home automation, smart home tour 2024, best dashboard 2024

Id: EBT1mnLMPmI

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024