Wall-mounted Home Assistant displays are cool, but you don’t need one
Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with dashboards and wall-mounted control panels in their smart homes? These displays can take the form of touchscreens with controls or E-Ink panels that only display information about your home. For most, the usefulness of such a project is very limited.
In a worst-case scenario, a smart home display could interfere with a truly functional smart home design.
Wall-mounted screens are very popular at the moment
I can’t be alone in noticing a massive influx of Home Assistant users posting about wall-mounted dashboards and smart home control panels on Reddit and the Home Assistant community forums. Even How-To Geek’s Adam Davidson turned his Echo Show into something similar (although in his defense, this project technically qualifies as upcycling).
I have a few theories about the sudden popularity of these devices, beyond the obvious “monkey see, monkey do” nature of amateur smart home owners. First, wall-mounted screens look cool. They let us add a dash of Star Trek in an otherwise boring hallway.
Wall displays are also fairly accessible projects. All you need is a display, a modern web browser, or the Android Home Assistant app. You can also use an iPad for this, paired with the iPadOS app. Hardware has never been more accessible. You probably have an old tablet that you barely use, or you could easily get your hands on one for cheap.
There’s also the DIY factor. Smart home enthusiasts eventually run out of things to automate, so moving on to a new project like a dashboard is one way to keep their hands busy. Small, inexpensive LCD touchscreens pair nicely with single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, meaning you can probably get in and out for less than $50 and an afternoon’s work.
E-Ink displays are also having a moment. Technology has never been more affordable and the arrival of color E-Ink takes things to the next level. These displays also make great projects, especially when paired with equally low-power microcontrollers like the ESP32.
Finally, there’s Home Assistant itself. You can spend hours, days, or more designing beautiful dashboards displaying all kinds of information. A mounted dashboard gives you a place to show off your hard work. You can add your most useful commands to a panel always in the same place, perfect for guests. Or you can turn Home Assistant into a primary tracker for your kids.
Your smart home shouldn’t depend on a wall panel
Despite the appeal, I’m not yet ready to jump into the world of wall-mounted control panels. This could be because there are so many other smart home tasks that I need to check off my list first. Maybe I’ll eventually get bored and give in too.
But it is also worth being aware of the potential pitfalls of relying on such a control panel. Microsoft’s 1999 vision of the smart home is suitably dated, involving a big Windows PC in every room and frequent visits to the wall-mounted control panel. But that’s not how a modern smart home should work.
A smart home that masters automations is much better than a home that trades physical buttons for digital buttons. We should all strive to design homes that make life easier, predict our next moves, and don’t sacrifice the basic functionality of a stupid house in the process.
Going to the control panel to turn on the lights or trigger a scene seems antithetical to how a smart home works. Asking your voice assistant a quick question or taking your phone out of your pocket to check the status of your home (which doors and windows are open, the temperature upstairs, if the humidity is too high) is the most convenient option.
Control panels have their uses
I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t valuable uses for mounted control panels and dashboards. Giving guests control of appliances like lighting and air conditioning without adding them to your home as permanent participants is a good idea. Others have much larger homes than me, where leaving your smartphone on the ground floor would more than justify a control panel nearby.
Maybe you’re trying to reduce your scrolling and put your smartphone away at night. Perhaps it is very useful to have security camera feeds always visible on a mounted tablet that you can view in a common place, such as the kitchen or living room wall, while you cook or watch TV.
Before you go so far as to get a tablet or build something for it, think about exactly how you’re going to use it beforehand and design something really useful (or maybe ditch it).
