I Built a Simple Smart Home Dashboard Because Home Assistant's UI Made Me Cry

#webdev #javascript #opensource #iot

The breaking point

I love Home Assistant. I really do. It's incredibly powerful, endlessly customizable, and the community is amazing.

But can we talk about the dashboard situation for a second?

All I wanted was a simple wall-mounted tablet showing my home temps and which lights are on. That's it. Instead, I spent an entire weekend fighting with YAML, custom cards, card-mod CSS overrides, and Lovelace layouts that broke every time I sneezed.

At some point around 2 AM, staring at a dashboard that still didn't look right on my tablet, I thought: "I'm a web developer. I can build what I actually want in less time than I've spent trying to configure this."

So I did.

Meet HomeDash

🌐 Live Demo · 📦 GitHub

HomeDash is a glanceable smart home dashboard. Big numbers, clean design, zero clutter. It's what I wished HA's dashboard was out of the box.

Here's what it does:

🌡️ Sensor widgets — Temperature, humidity, lights, motion. Big readable numbers designed for across-the-room glancing
🏡 Room-based layout — Living Room, Bedroom, Kitchen. Your home, organized the way you think about it
📊 24h sparkline charts — Tiny inline charts showing temperature trends. No setup, they just work
🌗 Dark & light themes — Auto-switches or manual toggle. Looks great day and night
📱 Fully responsive — Phone, tablet, desktop, wall display. Works everywhere
🔗 Home Assistant integration — Connect with your HA URL + long-lived access token. Or skip HA entirely and add widgets manually

The part I'm most proud of

Zero dependencies. ~30KB total.

No React. No Vue. No build step. No node_modules folder the size of a small country.

It's three files: index.html, style.css, app.js. Open it in a browser. That's the whole deployment.

I'm not anti-framework — I use them at work every day. But for a dashboard that needs to load instantly on a cheap tablet and just stay there showing data, vanilla JS felt right.

How it works

The app connects to Home Assistant's REST API using a long-lived access token. It polls your entities, groups them by room (using HA's area assignments), and renders them as clean widget cards.

The sparkline charts are drawn with plain <canvas> — about 40 lines of code. They store 24 hours of readings in localStorage and draw a simple line. No charting library needed.

If you don't use Home Assistant, you can configure widgets manually in the settings panel. It stores everything in localStorage, so there's genuinely no server component.

Who is this for?

You use Home Assistant but want a simpler dashboard for wall tablets
You want a quick overview of your home without opening the HA app
You're tired of fighting Lovelace and just want something that looks nice by default
You're a developer who appreciates the beauty of shipping three files