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.