Home Assistant A-Z: D is for Dashboard

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200

You open Home Assistant and see… a chaotic mess of switches, sensors, and cryptic names? Or worse: you miss important warnings because everything looks grey and unremarkable? It doesn’t have to be this way! A well-designed dashboard makes the difference between frustration and joy in your daily smart home experience.

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What is it, anyway?

The dashboard is your central control panel in the smart home – the first screen you see when you open the app or web interface. This is where you control your devices, monitor sensors, and keep an overview of your smart home.

A dashboard is made up of cards – small widgets that display different information. You can add light switches, temperature readouts, camera streams, or complex charts. Think of it like the home screen of your smartphone, but for your home.

The default dashboard automatically shows all your devices, but that gets cluttered fast. That’s why you can create your own dashboards – one for the living room, one for security, or one for energy monitoring. Anything is possible.

Why does this matter for your smart home?

Let’s be honest: the best smart home is useless if you can’t find your way around it. A well-thought-out dashboard saves you time and frustration every day. Instead of scrolling through endless lists, you see the most important information at a glance.

A practical example: in the morning, quickly check whether all windows are closed, the heating is set correctly, and whether the coffee maker is already running. With a personalized “Good Morning” dashboard, that takes 5 seconds instead of 2 minutes.

But even more importantly: a good dashboard warns you about problems! Imagine your fridge is too warm, your plants need water, or a door has been left open. With color-coded warnings, you’ll never miss something like that again. Red cards for critical errors, orange for warnings, blue for notices – you can see at a glance where action is needed.

How does it work in Home Assistant?

Let’s look at this practically: go to your dashboard and click the pencil icon in the top right. Now you can add, move, or delete cards. It’s all very intuitive.

For starters, I recommend: create a new dashboard via “Settings” → “Dashboards” → “Add Dashboard”. Then add the entities that matter most to you. Over time, you’ll notice what you use frequently and what you don’t. Take a critical look at your dashboard once a week and refine it step by step. Dashboards are as individual as each user – it just needs to work for you, and you know that best yourself.

One tip: make use of the ability to only show entities when relevant. You can do this with an Entity Filter card, or via the visibility conditions in the card settings. This keeps your overview clean.

A concrete example: add an Entities card for an open window, but only show it when the window is actually open.

Tip: With card-mod from the Home Assistant Community Store, you can make warnings color-coded: red backgrounds for critical errors, orange for warnings. You’ll never overlook anything important again. Curious? I’ve linked a video above and in the video description.

The most common pitfalls

The first pitfall: overloading your dashboard with everything that’s possible. Just because you have 50 sensors doesn’t mean they all need to be on the home screen. The result: nobody can find anything, and important warnings get lost in the noise. My tip: only show what you genuinely need every day.

Second pitfall: no differentiation. When everything looks the same, you can’t tell what’s urgent. Use a system: red for critical errors like “fridge too warm”, orange for warnings like “battery low”, blue for notices like “take out the trash”. That way you immediately see what matters.

Third pitfall: only testing on the desktop. Many people design their dashboard on a computer and then wonder why it looks off on their phone. Always test your dashboard on mobile too – especially warning cards need to be clearly visible on the go. Home Assistant makes this easy: as soon as you change a dashboard, any phone with the app open in parallel will prompt you to reload. So you can test your changes live right away.

What creative or useful things can you do with it?

Dashboards can do much more than just display switches. My favorite: a “Warnings Dashboard” using Entity Filter cards that only appear when there’s a problem – red cards for critical errors, orange for warnings, blue for notices. Forgotten plants, open doors, or weak batteries will never slip past you again.

I’ve put together more tips and tricks in this video – I’ve also linked it in the video description.

Next up is “E” is for Entities, or check out the overview of all A-Z posts.

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― Joachim

Warnings on Smart Home? Sure — But Secure!

Home Assistant A-Z: D is for Dashboard

What is it, anyway?

Why does this matter for your smart home?

How does it work in Home Assistant?

The most common pitfalls

What creative or useful things can you do with it?