I don’t use personal assistants like Google or Alexa, and sadly, unlike yourself, I’m unable to predict the weather for the next few hours just by looking out of the window. And before you say “visit Buienradar”: why would I? I have a dashboard that presents me the information I want, without annoying ads.
Getting a notification the night before is a different thing than checking when they will be collected. Sometimes it’s just useful to know that, for instance, waste paper will be collected in a few days so I can start filling up the container with delivery boxes and whatnot. I wouldn’t want to get a notification the night before and have to go out and do all that because I forgot.
I want to know if it’s not too hot between the hours of 7 and 10am, that it won’t be raining (or at least not a lot) and that the relative humidity won’t be too high (asthma…). So I just have a binary sensor that tells me “yes” or “no”.
I look at my HA dashboard to see how much is left in the tank, don’t have to go to the car. Since I don’t drive every day, I don’t keep track of how much is in the tank every time. I just like to know that before I take a trip I have to factor in a visit to the petrol station.
Not here.
My letter box is 15m away from my front door, in a location where I can’t see it directly.
I also have nothing to hide, and my wife doesn’t either, but we do care when either one of us gets home again, or where they are and what they are doing. I guess you just have a different sort of relationship.
So apparently, a dashboard isn’t for you, which is fine, but it’s rather silly to see you going out of your way to dismiss how others use them to make their life easier and more pleasant.
This took an interesting turn. The information useful and relevant for people should be up to them. Perhaps the use cases above seem a bit weird to you, but for my case most of my flows now are to remedy problems i had and to make life easier on myself. Im sure that that holds for most people here.
Anyways, i hope homey dashboards will be conditional or even tie into flows so that in the use case of the car above the tire pressure only shows when there is an issue. And heck, if your dashboard can tell you that, wouldnt that be amazing?
As i see, there is a big arguing about taste
Yes, of course, from one side - why to use dashboard, if all the information is available from app anyway?
From another side - why scroll in app two minutes, to find out the interesting temperature… and after the two minute and app close remember… ooops, i do not look this thing, when all the ~5 relevant values can be only one-tap away.
Anyway, as here are so different opinions, seems, dashboard must be very flexible and also it’s not so relevant (not so good startup terms for a commercial project).
Just to share my own experience-points: Yes, i believe into big integrated dashboards and have on my workplace a RasPi with standard screen and a tabs with Radio-Clock-Calendar; Climate from Oregon+Netatmo; Flightradar24 tracking info; Yamaha receiver control; Weather forecast… Hope, You’re really un-followed now. But, actually for me and also my wife the most useful “dashboard” is a Fibaro implant with two arcade LED-buttons, showing the state of bathroom light (someone is in) and the mailbox status. Both buttons have also a switch effect (if forgot to turn off light; if just take new magazine from box).
What i want to say: May-be the real useful dashboard is just a few buttons/LED’s but in strategic position
I think dashboards are great for that. Sure, I get a notification when the water tank in my coffee machine is almost empty, but it’s easy to forget about it when you’re doing something else. So it also shows an alert on my dashboard.
Same as with tire pressure, I get a notification if it’s too low (and yes, admittedly, that doesn’t really happen, but OTOH, I sometimes forget to lock the car door and I also get a notification about that, with the question if HA should lock the car for me) but it also shows as an alert on my dashboard.
Sure, I can ask Siri/Google (no Alexa here) 20 questions about different things and get an answer for each, or I can just take a glance at my dashboard and have those 20 questions answered immediately. I prefer it that way.
I also believe in having visual feedback clues around the house (I use WLED extensively, where I use different light patterns to mean different things, and I have a Lametric TIME on my desk to display notifications).
Then maybe, just maybe, you should stop starting all these boring and useless discussions to try and get you right because you dislike Athom and Homey. You already made it clear that you don’t even use Homey anymore so why are you keeping up the (negative) appearances here… Try to stick with the positive and helpful additions, that’s a better idea.
Asked this earlier: Do you walk into the showroom of your former car brand every week to tell them that it was a stupid useless car and that there are far better and modern cars around now?
None of that warrants making offensive remarks. I don’t know if they were directed at me (even when it’s very easy to press a button to reply to someone’s posts directly), but I don’t really care: if all you can do is make remarks like that, you’re obviously not interested in joining the discussion and only looking to offend someone. At least I always try to be on-topic (even if you find it boring and useless).
Just to make one thing clear… I am not against dashboards at all… and yes…at Homey it is a week point. I know that a lot of people like to have a look at it and if you try to explain a third person what really is smart home…it is much easier with a dashboard. So I am strongly supporting that Homey starts a good dashboard.
My remark isn’t offensive at all. Constantly picking on Athom however is very, very annoying (and maybe even offensive) and not adding any useful contribution to whatever discussion at all in my opinion.
You’re entitled to your opinion. If your find my criticism actually offensive, please flag my posts for the moderators. If you find them annoying, just ignore me, I don’t mind.
See here, hence the reason for those remarks. Always wanting to have the last word, trying to push your point. That’s not discussion or venting opinion, that’s called pushing opinion. If you don’t like people to disagree with you, just ignore them. They really don’t mind.
This is where i’m going to draw the line, and lets keep discussing the possibility of a dashboard made by Athom.
Discussing if it is a mandatory thing is just an opinion and is different for everyone, that is with every (Added, or removed) feature.
But lets just keep it friendly, we are all here (I hope) to have a good time and help other people.
This is really clean and beautiful, Bas! May I ask what frameworks you are using to create this dashboard?
On-topic, I’d like to see something out of the box from Athom, but in the mean while I am happy to create a custom solution using Grafana, NodeRed, Prometheus or similar. I’d like to see relevant sensor data like inside / outside temp., el-price forcast, weather forcast, calendar, where the family members are, and be able to trigger a few flows.
I’ve managed to make pretty nice dashboards in HA. But actually I don’t look at it very often, as I noticed. The crafting is the most fun haha. I find it useful if I can quickly switch certain groups of lamps, curtains, etc. But all those statuses…
It’s really very personal, so a dash should be fairly flexible to arrange.
My modified Homeydash also still functions fine here.
haha… I’m noticing the exact same thing! I regularly have the camera feed of my baby-boy. That’s it (wall mounted tablet). Invested hours and hours to make it beautiful, but never look at it.
Thanks hehe. It runs on a second hand NUC (8 to 10 yrs old, 8GB dualcore), running linux Debian 11.
I installed VirtualBox and imported the HA image for it from the HA website.
It runs 2 instances, one instance is for testing and trying to break stuff.
The NUC was E50,-
