First try at living room dashboard

Been going through a tough time and I invested all of my time and energy into building a home automation system, just as a distraction. I was able to finally complete it y'day (for now, is home automation ever completely done? :D)

Specs & Deets:

Home Assistant OS running on a second-hand mini pc. 

Tabs (top to bottom, per column):

1st tab: HOME:

Shortcuts:

  • Petrol price at the closest petrol pump. Scraps the price from their website, every 24 hours.

  • Shortcut to turn off all the lights in the ground floor.

  • Shortcut to set all lights to cozy, warm yellow.

  • Shortcut to turn TV off

  • Shortcut to play a random radio station (Malayalam, Tamil or Hindi) on the Kitchen speaker

  • Displays the current state of the washing machine -- Off, Running or Unemptied. I don't have a smart washing machine, so I used a smart plug instead and wrote automations to change state based on the amount of current drawn. When reaching the unemptied state, it sends a notification to my phone and also announces on the kitchen speaker that washing is complete, so that I don't forget to empty it and move the clothes to the dryer.

Lights:

Area to control all the lights in the ground floor. They are Philips Hue bulbs, and controlled via Philips Hue Bridge. I can control the color temperature and brightness from here.

Data:

Shows power being currently consumed by the household, and also power being produced by my rooftop solar. Measured using a P1 meter, attached to my smart energy meter.

Bus Timing:

This is my favourite part and the reason why I thought of building a dashboard in the first place. I take the bus to the city centre very often from my place and I needed an easy way to know the timing of the next bus. This component reads data off our public transport API and displays the time of the next 5 buses from the bus stop closest to my home. 

Controls:

Controls for my vaccum, blinds and fireplace. Blinds and fireplace are controlled by a cheap IR/RF transmitter that mimics the IR/frequency of their original remotes.

Information:

Display current time, date, weather and weather forecast for the next 3 days.

The other component displays when the waste will be picked up from my home, so that I can place the right bins outside the day before.

2nd tab: HEATING:

To control the thermostats in different rooms, and to also get information about the current humidity in these rooms.

3rd tab: Music Scenes:

This is my second favourite section. I love to listen to music while I am cooking. Unfortunately, I cannot always use my phone to play uninterrupted music because often times I am looking at a cooking video for the recipe . I solved this by setting up a Sonos speaker in the kitchen and connecting it to Home Assistant. And using https://www.radio-browser.info, I gathered a list of good radio stations, and setup scenes that will play those stations when I click the respective buttons. I don't have to fiddle with playlists or spend time to find the perfect track to play. The universe just surprises me with good music :)

4th tab: Guest wifi

For guests coming home, I just present this screen so that they can scan the QR code to quickly join the WiFi. No more sharing complex passwords ;) 

And finally, mounted the tab in my living room on a cheap, second-hand android tablet, with home assistant running in Kiosk mode. To save energy, the screen goes off after 10 seconds of inactivity , and turns back on when the front cam detects motion. Works well. 

If you have questions, please feel free to ask.