Home Assistant is world's biggest open-source home automation platform. It supports over 1000 devices and services, and it is used everywhere: homes, boats and museums.
Today I want to talk about our UI, what we're trying to solve and how we solve it. Before we dive into why, what and how, let's take a look at our user interface. This is an embedded version of our demo, which is fully interactive.
The embedded demo has been hidden because the screen is too small. Open the demo in a new screen.
When building a platform for the Internet of Things, there are many use cases that warrant a user interface. Note that for the sake of this blog post, we're focusing on graphical user interfaces on devices with screens the size of a phone, or bigger.
Security. Users that want to have a quick glance at their house when they are away from home. They quickly want to check if their garage door is closed or maybe they got notified of unexpected motion in the backyard or water below the sink and need to check out. These users will want to see a logbook with recent security related incidents, the current camera streams and the current state of the doors, windows, water- and motion sensors.
Control all the things. Users want to have a single place to control all their devices. Their goal of the user interface is to quickly see each part of the house at a glance and control lights, switches, thermostats and the music.
Control single room. Users that are building interfaces for devices in each room. These devices need to expose all controls of a single room, with optional extra information about the whole house and options to control other parts of the house.
Monitor. Users want to build their own dashboards to visualize all the current and historical data inside Home Assistant and other databases, like InfluxDB. They want to keep track of their energy usage, track their internet speeds or current commute time.
Administer and Automate. Users that want to have dashboards that contain their controls to administrate Home Assistant. It contains their automations, scripts and various input controls to allow configuring the parameters of their automations and scripts.
The odds are that if you are using Home Assistant right now, your UI is a hybrid of a couple of the mentioned use cases. Todays blog post is going to talk about what technologies we have used to built a UI that allows users to build UIs that fit all these use case.