[APP][Pro] Dashboard Studio - A completely free-form dashboard designer

[Satoer]

@SergeP

I’ve been using your Dashboard for several months now, and I’m delighted that you created such a useful tool. I especially appreciate the passion and dedication you continue to put into maintaining it. I’m a Homey developer myself, so I know how much work that takes.

Thanks!

@SergeP

I’m actually on v2.0.9 and I’ve encountered an issue til initial V2: on a chart with a Baseline Value, the color consistently disappears. This doesn’t happen on otherwise identical charts without a Baseline Value (see screenshot).

Hmm, I cannot seem to reproduce this issue. It seems to work fine on my end:

I also tested it on an iPad running iOS 26. As I understand it, this worked fine in V1? Does the gauge on the demopage in the top left with the custom baseline value work as expected?

Could you share a snippet of the problematic widget in the chat using a code block? You can create a snippet by selecting the widget and then using the export snippet button from the editor tools:

I have not tested this on V2.0.9 though. I just did a quick check on my current V2.0.10 work in progress build, so I might have already resolved it while fixing a related bug.

@SergeP

I also wanted to ask whether it’s possible to make text blink in a text widget. The idea is to draw attention to something, such as a birthday displayed for the current day.

Not currently possible. But sounds like a great feature, I shall add this to the list

@Bert_Onraedt

Since version 2.x.x (don’t remember exactly which one) you can now ‘save to Homey’ with the ‘enter’ on you keyboard. Might be usefull if the “saved sucessfully” message afterwards could also be accepted with a ‘enter’

Ah, yes. I appreciate these little feature improvements. I should make the whole UI more keyboard friendly. I am just such a lazy user, I love sitting comfy in my chair laying back and just control everything with the mouse.

@Bert_Onraedt

I was moving a lot (+/-20) of widgets together, a few pixels to the right. The start & stop points of the (shaped) arrow widgets suddenly moved some 2000 (!!) pixels to the right. The rest of the shape moved correctly.

Thanks, I shall do more testing with the arrows. That widget has given me headaches before. It is also one of the widgets still not compatible with the new responsive mode. (but until now nobody has commented on that )

@Bert_Onraedt

(Feature request)
Would it be possible/a lot of work (= then don’t considder) to filter layers in the editor?
I have a small smartphone-dashboard which makes containers+widgets visible (f.i. a container with all the light when the light-bulb is pressed) Each container+widgets is residing on 2 layers. Works verry smoothly but editing the thing is a pain in the ***. If I could filter just the layer i want to edit… would be great
If there already is an option for this, or another solution for this kind of use… please slap it in my face

So as I understand correctly: These “Layers” are actually diverend Z-indexes of widgets on the same page. And you are dynamically change the Z-index to put the widget on the foreground to show? That would be indeed a pain to edit. But why are you not create a multi page dashboard and dynamically jump to the page that is needed to show? It is easy to edit pages right? You can have one main page, with main widgets and set those widgets to show over multiple pages (so do not copy widgets on other pages, if the same widget needs to show on the other pages as well. Just set a range in the page(s) setting. On the other pages design the dialogs on top of it.

OR…

you can “teleport” groups to the current main page. Just design your dialog or overlay etc. On a free seperate page. Group everyting and make the “override pages(s)” dynamic.

Lets say page 1 is the main page, you can send 1 to that topic and the whole group wil show on top of that page (you can even make it modal and blur the background if you wish). When you do not want to show the group anymore just send the pagenumber it came from to it.
You can see it in the demo on the main page: Press the “Core Telemetry” button. This will show a dialog. This dialog is actually a group on page 3 that teleports to the main page.

@Hiep_Hoang Thanks for the feedback. I understand the sentiment. I also totally get the contradiction of dashboard software that claims you can create whatever you want while lacking a web snippet feature. I am not entirely against it but for now it is just one of the last things on the list due to the reasons I mentioned earlier. Dashboard Studio is still in heavy development. I think it is better to focus on producing base widgets that can show and manipulate data. If a user wants to show something specific, I prefer trying to create base widgets that allow that data to be displayed rather than creating a widget that just cuts out a piece of a website and pastes it onto the dashboard. I try to encourage users to create a uniform looking dashboard with only the data they actually need.

@Hiep_Hoang

1. As a comparison, it took me about five minutes to build a prototype dashboard in Homey that covers roughly 80% of what I need. I’ve now spent several days trying to build a fairly rudimentary dashboard here, and I’m still not quite there.

I certainly agree that a Homey dashboard is much easier to set up. I even mentioned this clearly in my very first post:

@Satoer

I should be honest right from the start. If you are looking for a dashboard that automatically generates itself in five minutes, this app is probably not for you. But if you are someone who likes to tweak every little detail and wants absolute freedom, you will feel right at home.

@Hiep_Hoang

2. For example, even with something as simple as a switch, I found it surprisingly difficult to reproduce the look and feel of the standard Homey button. It took me at least a day to figure out how to get reasonably close.

All widgets have a massive amount of things you can adjust regarding their appearance and behavior. You can open a dashboard page, run a Homey flow or device, send a custom on or off value, open a website in the same tab or a new one, and even do several of those things at the very same time. It can be a push button or a pill switch that stays on. You can show a confirmation dialog before it runs or require a press and hold so a quick tap does nothing. You can set your own text, font, size, and colors for both on and off states. You can put the label inside or outside the button and use a built in icon, your own image, or a website favicon. Each of those can be different for the on and off states. It can play a sound when you press it, release it, or when it turns on or off. It can follow the real device state and change its text, color, or icon based on live data. You can also group “radio” buttons so only one stays on or hide a button as an invisible tap area over a picture. Well yeah, all these settings and options come at the cost of being complex. But in the past seven months since I released the first version, most users seem to request even more configurability rather than less. (Also removing functionality breaks existing dashboards)

But I agree it is harder to set up and understand. Although I think once you grasp the methods, Dashboard Studio becomes quite easy to use. Compared to the first version, a lot of changes were already implemented to make it less overwhelming. For example I hid all the settings that are unused in certain configurations. I also made a massive change in V2 to make things simpler for users. The Basic Mode essentially strips all the fluff and leaves it really bare bones with only the settings you actually need. You can style the widgets purely with presets and hide all the styling and advanced configuration options. I do not think it is a very popular mode though since I have not seen any questions about it during this V2 test period.

Anyhow, adding a button to the canvas and styling it the way you like really should not take a whole day. Just add a switch or button widget and choose one of the presets along with a sub preset:

That takes two clicks. Then just adjust the behavior you want:

If you want it to switch a light on or off, you just need to set it to a toggle switch and fill in the output topic for the light. That is a total of four steps, assuming you have already enabled the of/off light topic in your Homey configuration.

Yes, if you want to change the look of the switch further, then you will definitely need the advanced options. You only have to do it once though. You can easily duplicate the styled switch using CTRL + D or create a custom preset of your own switch style. Alternatively you can change the master default settings of the switch so every new one you place adopts that default styling automatically.

@Hiep_Hoang

1. It would be really useful to have higher-level widgets for things like speakers, lights, climate, etc. These abstractions make a huge difference in terms of usability.

There is actually one higher level widget, which is the light grid. With this widget you can easily change individual lights or groups of lights. You can control their power state, color, dim mode, temperature, and more. I included it because most users want to control all their lights right away with their first dashboard. Personally I think it is a bit useless and bad for dashboard UX design. I am not criticizing anyone who does this of course. With my very first dashboard way before Dashboard Studio, I could also control all my lights. That is totally fine if you only have four lights to manage. In my own usage experience though (more than 25 hue lights ), I just never used it. It is so much more convenient to create themes and activate those directly from a dashboard button instead.

@Hiep_Hoang

1. speakers, lights, climate,

So what would a high level speaker or climate widget contribute to the dashboard? The whole point is to create whatever you want (as long as you do not add ugly pieces of web snippets ). I have seen users create a full Sonos music player with volume control, radio stations, and even displayed lyrics using just the basic widgets. It would be overwhelming and limiting at the same time if I created a widget just to do that. And what would you actually want in a climate widget? Isn’t connecting a couple of basic sliders, switches, and gauges more than enough to display and control all your climate needs?

@Hiep_Hoang

3. Live graphics and URL (including rtsp for live webcam)

   I’m also missing a proper LIVE/real-time graphics function.

Yes, this is a recurring request from multiple users. The problem is that showing an RTSP or ONVIF stream in a web browser is incredibly difficult without specialized plugins. Interestingly, Homey recently developed a solution that transcodes camera streams in real time to WebRTC, which would make streaming this to a web page like Dashboard Studio a lot easier. Sadly, as far as I know, this is not yet opened up to third party developers. If I add a widget to stream WebRTC streams, users should actually be able to use it by easily connecting it to a Homey WebRTC stream. So in the meantime, users have to rely on streaming snapshots from the camera.

@Hiep_Hoang

3. I can technically create a snapshot and push an updated image every second, but that becomes quite a lot of work for something that feels like it should be a built-in capability.

That is really not a lot of work at all and already built-in. Just add an image widget:

Then add the source of the snapshot and set an refresh interval. An interval of 0.5s (or even 0.2s) works completely fine in my testing.