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A simple command and control dashboard

June 18, 2015 Frances Berriman
Home dashboard, showing interactive SmartThings modules, presence and Nest.

Home dashboard, showing interactive SmartThings modules, presence and Nest.

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.

In how-to, wodehouse Tags dashing, smartthings, nest, dashboard
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