According to Squarespace’s analytics, one of my most popular posts on S&S has been the command and control dashboard I made about a million years ago that allowed me to casually control my lighting etc. from an always-on android tablet. I started to build a version 2, intending to make something a little more charming and polished, but then something happened.

I bought a Google Home Hub.

This little tablet-screen format Google Home is pretty much exactly what I had wanted in the first place.

It’s a really attractive piece of physical and digital interface design. It sits merrily in my kitchen informing me of all sorts of things around the house. It tells me about my calendar, it shows me who is at my front-door (via the nest doorbell) and I can pull up the backyard camera to see what the squirrels are up to instantly. I can ask it to play me YouTube videos or make phone calls. It’s really good and well thought-out and I’m seriously tempted to get a second one for my home office.

Google Home Hub showing rooms and controls

It has most of the elements I wanted from a custom dashboard - I can pull down screens to show light switches in rooms and toggle them on and off or adjust dimmers and such, and see how things are currently set. My only real complaint is that I can’t set to be a dashboard-first i.e. show that as the default screen instead of my calendar and the weather. I also wish I could just install this Google Home Hub software on any small tablet or phone (even if that was restricted to Android models). I could imagine having mini dashboards in other rooms, that way.

Google Home Hub quick overview home control screen

Minor requests aside, if you’re googling around for a simple command and control dashboard for your SmartThings or similar Google Assistant-compatible smart home systems, check it out. It’s a lot less faff than installing some custom code I forked on github once, I promise.

I'm still plugging away on my very simple dashboard for the house. This is the current state.

It's a fork of a project created by Florian using Shopify's Dashing project, displaying the status of some of the things in the house, plus interactive buttons to control a few of them. It's a doddle to add new things to, and at some point I'd like it to look a bit nicer (it's very "designed by an engineer" looking right now). I host it on Heroku.

The nice thing about having a screen like this is it's a convenient way to give guests access to the smart features without having them download an app or create an account. It has a manifest, so it can be added to a home screen and opened as a tab-less web page directly, like an app but without the installing. Giving guest access to smart home features seems like a missing piece in a lot of the setups today - they really assume a finite, familiar set of users who all have direct access to the systems and give very little consideration to house guests who stay for more than a few hours or at your home alone.

The dashboard lives on an old Android tablet I have set up on the kitchen counter for the most part. The tablet screen comes on with a motion sensor as you walk in front of it, giving you immediate access to all those buttons and switches. A pretty simple but decent start, I think.