[HOW TO] Fully custom dashboard for Homey Pro on iOS and iPadOS

I’ve seen there is a post about this on the German language Homey forum but for English speakers, I figured this would be useful for some. There is a relatively new (I think about a year old) app and companion desktop application for designing completely customised dashboard apps for iPhone and iPad called Viz Designer. It works on HomeKit only but of course with either the Homey experiment or using the excellent HomeKitty app from Robert Klep, it is easy to push all your Homey devices to HomeKit and so this effectively becomes a fully customisable Homey dashboard.

I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks now and it’s working well. There really is nothing I’ve imagined ever wanting to do with a dashboard that you can’t do with this thing, although I am still relatively early days in building out my design for now.

I should also say I have no affiliation or connection with the creators of Viz Designer; I just found it recently and had success making it work to build the dashboard I have long wanted for my Homey - so I figured I’d share it with the community in case others can find it useful.

Steps:

  1. Either enable the built-in Homey experiment for HomeKit or install and set up the HomeKitty app on your Homey Pro. Follow their instructions to add your Homey ‘hub’ to your HomeKit home.
  2. If using the HomeKitty app, use the ‘configure app’ page to determine which Homey devices you want to appear in HomeKit
  3. Install Viz Designer Mac or PC dekstop app from their website. Create an account to log in
  4. Install Viz Designer app on whichever iPhones / iPads you want to create dashboards for and log in using the account you created in the previous step
  5. From the Viz Designer app on the iDevice, export your HomeKit data to Viz Designer
  6. In the Viz Designer desktop application, sync your HomeKit data - this sets up all the menus and so on with your specific HomeKit devices
  7. Add some devices to your dashboard (called a ‘remote’ in Viz Designer) then upload it (they are shared via your iCloud account)
  8. On your iDevice, load the remotes from iCloud and then select your new. remote to open it on your iDevice
  9. Control your Homey devices from your new dashboard
  10. Iterate like crazy with all the new ideas you come up with for your dashboard, following the documentation and video tutorials
11 Likes

Can you show some pictures of your dashboard?
Thanks in advanced

3 Likes

I’d also need interested in this

Hi! It’s an older topic, but I hoped you could give me an advice.
This tool is great, it’s exactly what I want to be able to do the equivalent of Lovelace in Home Assistant!
I’m using the new Homey Pro 2023 and I tried to use the Experimental HomeKit integration, but it failed after a few hours (no more data coming from/to Homey). Besides, the warning saying it can disappear any time is not reassuring :sweat_smile:
So I tried with HomeKitty, and it seems to work better.
BUT, before I buy Viz Designer, I want to make sure it won’t fail or disconnect after a few days.

So, do you confirm it’s better to use HomeKitty? Has anyone built dashboards with this solution; what are their feedbacks?

Thanks a lot!

Ben

Hi yes I have been using homekitty on the pro 2023 with vizdesigner for a few months now with no issues.

For some things that can’t be published to HomeKit I also use the Local API app since with viz designer you can easily make an http request and parse json response to get data to and from Homey directly without going via HomeKit

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Thanks @Jonathan_Draper!

Using local API app is a really good idea indeed!

I’m trying SharpTools now, looks good, but I already noticed that it’s only browser based, and, on iOS, I have to reconnect regularly, which is really annoying because it’s using MFA, which takes me 30 seconds… when I just want to switch a light on or close a cover, it’s… annoying… :sweat_smile:

That’s curious regarding sharptools reconnecting. I also tried sharptools for a while and didn’t have that issue. It’s purely speculation but I wonder whether you maybe have some other perhaps network related issue that’s causing that and maybe also your HomeKit issue. (I’ve never had a problem with that disconnecting either, including when using the homey experiment rather than homekitty, albeit I’ve not used the experiment since moving to the 2023 Pro).

In the end for me I had two key reasons for sticking with viz designed for now:

  1. I don’t want my dashboard dependent on my internet connection either for latency or reliability reasons
  2. Viz designer gives complete freedom of layout. Despite sharptools having lots of configurability it’s still tile based and for me I prefer a completely free form design

By the way, if you do end up using viz designer with local api, it’s worth knowing that if you have multiple elements on a page using the same end point (with different json paths) then it is smart enough to make only a single api request on each refresh). The ability to build an API on honey for the dashboard further adds to the complete flexibility of that approach.

this is a great feedback @Jonathan_Draper ! thanks!
I’m curious, how do you get device information from Homey? I see I could do it using HomeyScript and call it from my flows, but maybe there is a more elegant way to do?

Cheers!

Right now using Local API app, I have a flow which starts with the Local API ‘A GET request received…’ card and then a Local API ‘Respond with JSON’ card - and in that card I just type the JSON directly, inserting Homey tags for the various values. So for example I just type

{"Device value name": "[[Homey tag with relevant value from device]]"}

directly into that card.

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Brillant! thanks a lot @Jonathan_Draper

Hi @Jonathan_Draper a couple of replies higher was a request to share the screen of the dashboard :slight_smile: could you please be so kind and show me as well (or DM :slight_smile: ) Thanks

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Hi All, I just started with a Homey Pro 2023, and having issues with the mentioned app (Homekitty) On my phone all devices show up in the Home app, however on the mac the devices show up in the Home app as unknown & unavailable. Anybody familiar with this issues?
Thanks in advance for any feedback,
Titus

Hi @Titus_Blom you’re probably better off posting in the topic for the HomeKitty app where there are people more likely to be able to help you