How My New Smart Home Dashboard is GENIUS

This extremely simple dashboard changed my life. It can basically read my mind and change the display so I can always see exactly what I need to. I'm gonna show you how I built a dashboard and I don't think anything like this has ever been made before. Something so easy to use that even my wife, Allie, who loathes learning how to use new tech, will have no choice but to like this. Well, I hope so anyways. But before I show you my new dashboard and everything it can do, first, I need to show you why I had to create it. I've made some smart home dashboards over the years and some of them have been okay and some pretty terrible. We're talking very low spouse approval scores here. With smart home dashboards, I always run into one big problem. What to include on the dashboards? Sounds simple, but hear me out. If you add too much, it's extremely cluttered and very slow to find what you need. Not good. If you don't put enough, you could be missing out on crucial controls that you need right then. Oh, I forgot to turn off the back patio lights. Oh, I can do that on the dashboard real quick. Let me find it real fast. I think I'm almost there. It's right... See the dilemma? It's frustrating. And up until recently, I was stuck. But then I did a smart home tour video of Dan Dixon's house, who has an amazing dashboard. I got some ideas that could solve all my problems. So I came up with two requirements that my dashboard has to follow. The first one is no scrolling. Well, okay, maybe a little scrolling, but it still has to say clutter-free. The second requirement is no thinking involved. If I look at my dashboard and I have to wonder, is that device supposed to be on or off? Fail. You know what, actually, I don't even want to see a device on my dashboard unless I need it at that exact moment, because this dashboard has to be idiot-proof. Not that the person using it is... Moving on. So my new dashboard meets all the criteria that I just mentioned because of one feature. Dynamic items. Basically showing and hiding devices on the dashboard. I got this idea from Dan Dixon, whose dashboard would change based on the time of day, and certain notifications would show up on the dashboard as well. This blew my mind on what's possible, and what I'm making is a little different. But what's surprising is showing and hiding items on the dashboard is not difficult using Home Assistant, which is what I'm using. Here's how it works. When you go to add a device or something to the dashboard, you have all these options available, but choose Conditional Card. It sounds scary, but it's very simple. If something is on, like a switch or a light, then the condition is met, and show the card or the dashboard item. But if it's off, then don't show it. Simple, right? Now let me show you how I'm using it and why it's extremely useful. My garage door is normally closed almost all day long, probably 99% of the day. So displaying that my garage door is closed on the dashboard is such a waste because it's taking up valuable space. Unacceptable. So I use a Conditional Card instead. If the garage door is open, then display the garage door card on the dashboard. Now if the garage door gets left open, it's right there on the dashboard. Easy to see, and it stands out because it's normally not there. Then if I click on it, I have the garage door controls to close it. After the garage door closes, it disappears from the dashboard since I don't need to worry about it anymore. It's gone. This is how my dashboard starts looking way better. I have over 20 different dashboard items that disappear if I don't need it, and it cleans up so much clutter. If I didn't hide them, look how much room it would take up. So messy. Okay, here's some more examples on how I'm using it to show you how useful it is. Thermostats. If someone manually changes the temperature to be really cold, the thermostat shows up on the dashboard. Then if it's clicked, the thermostat clears the temperature and resumes the schedule, saving energy. I also have a babysitter mode switch in my smart home that I can turn on, which will skip certain automations while Ali and I are away and the kids are still home. I've accidentally left this on, so now it shows up only when it's on. That way I can't miss it and I can quickly turn it off. Plus lots more controls, like if the robot vacuum is running, it shows up so I can quickly send it back to the dock if I wanted to. If the front door is unlocked, or if the alarm is armed, and there's even buttons that will show up based on what we're doing. Say the audio amplifier turns on in our theater room, then two buttons appear on the dashboard that I always need for watching movies. This is all really cool, but it's about to get way crazier. I take it up to a whole new level that you've never seen before. So up until now, I've shown how to hide and display little individual items on the dashboard. Essentially, really, really good notifications on the dashboard. But what about larger sections, like a full-on room? Oh yeah, we can do that too. Most dashboards are organized by rooms in your house. It makes sense, but it's not efficient. If I'm in my office, I don't wanna see controls for the kitchen. And if I only show one room, like some dashboards do, there's a problem. So many clicks navigating between all the rooms and it's not ideal. So I had this crazy idea, so crazy that it just might work. What if my dashboard could automatically display the room I'm in without me needing to click on anything or navigate? It would just know all on its own. Well, to do that, I would need room presence detection. And using these $5 microcontrollers, it can sense the Bluetooth of my phone and tell my smart home what room I'm in. I had already set this up and I made a whole video on it that I'll link down below if you wanna set up yourself, but I love using it for dashboards. To make this work, I created those conditional cards I mentioned earlier. And instead of placing one device in the card, I can add multiple devices by adding a vertical stack first and placing everything in it. Now I have one conditional card for each room that will show or hide based on what room I'm in. Check out how well this works. I walk into my bedroom and I wanna control these window shades. Well, I don't need to scroll and find the bedroom section. I'm already there. And if I'm in the kitchen, all the scenes for this area are the first thing that I see. Or if I'm not in a room because I'm outside on a bike ride, well, it shows me my garage door control so I can get back in. Seamless. Now it's not 100% perfect. There is a slight delay with the Bluetooth recognizing when I go into a new room. So I added a dropdown to manually show a room if needed. But if I want it to automatically change, I just keep it in auto. And don't worry, I have an article explaining how to do this all yourself. It's much easier than you would think. All right, this dashboard's looking really good. But what if Allie wants to use the dashboard and she's in a different room than I am? Well, time to take it up another notch. What's great about the room presence detection is that it can track multiple phones at once. So at all times throughout the day, it knows what room both of us are in. All I have to do is duplicate my dashboard and make some little tweaks to the second dashboard so that it uses Allie's phone and not mine. Now we have two dashboards that can be showing completely different rooms on them, all at the exact same time. It's amazing. What's cool about Home Assistant is you can set the default dashboard for each specific phone. So on my phone, I have it default to my dashboard. And on Allie's phone, it goes to her dashboard. Now, every time Allie opens up the Home Assistant app, it automatically opens to her personal dashboard. There's almost no way to mess it up. This dashboard is life-changing. It really does feel like it's reading my mind. It shows me exactly what I wanna see. I don't have to search for rooms or scan devices to see what shouldn't be on. It feels like the most intuitive smart home interface I've ever used. But what makes sense to me might not make sense to others. So the big question is, does Allie like using this? Hey, how do you like the new dashboard? Oh, I actually love it. It's really easy to use and always shows whatever I need to see. But, well... I absolutely love how simple this dashboard is. It feels like I've decluttered my life with this clean dashboard. And it's not just the dashboard on my phone, but the tablet dashboards are also way more simple since they can hide all the things I don't need to see. Plus, when I open Home Assistant on my iPad or my laptop, it always shows the right controls for the room I'm in, since my phone is usually in my pocket. It's the best. I'm glad I did this project. Again, if you want more info on how you can set this up yourself, I'll have an article linked below. Thanks for watching. Well, there is one thing, though. Let me guess, you're obsessed and now you can't live without it. Actually, no. What I was gonna say is it can't fully read my mind. I mean, it doesn't even show the controls for the room I'm about to walk into. Well, how am I supposed to automate that? I don't even know what you're thinking right now, let alone five minutes from now.