A dashboard designed to be used
A Home Assistant user has turned a commissioned illustration of his house into an interactive smart-home dashboard, replacing a conventional panel that other members of his household largely ignored. The project, described on October 7, combines hand-drawn day and night scenes with Home Assistant's standard picture-elements card.
The motivation was practical. Automations already switched off air conditioners when the house was empty and adjusted garden watering according to the weather, but some controls still required an app. Garden lights, for example, could be extended before an automatic timer expired, while irrigation was difficult to start from the hardware without getting wet. A more inviting shared interface was intended to make those functions accessible to everyone in the home.
The owner supplied an illustrator with an architectural plan, photographs, colour references and examples of other dashboards. The technical brief proved especially important: every device needed separate on and off artwork, day and night variants, transparent PNG files or animated WebP files, and a common canvas size so that layers would align. The garden ultimately used separate day, night and illuminated-night versions.
Layered controls, minimal custom code
Home Assistant's picture-elements card provides the foundation. The house illustration is the background, while appliances and readings sit above it as image, icon, state-label and conditional elements. Static artwork represents an inactive device; an animated WebP appears when the corresponding device is running. A helper changes the dashboard between daylight and night artwork at sunrise and sunset, with a manual switch available for testing.
Tapping equipment such as an air conditioner opens Home Assistant's built-in more-info control. The irrigation system required a custom pop-up because it consists of several valves and timers rather than one device. That interface was built with Browser Mod, an integration distributed through the Home Assistant Community Store.
The account underlines that the largest effort was not programming but planning and producing the artwork. Consistent dimensions and positions across every exported layer prevented substantial alignment work later. The result uses familiar Home Assistant capabilities while presenting household controls as a scene that visibly responds to the real home. It is a small example of interface design solving an adoption problem: automation only helps when the people living with it can understand and operate it. The illustrated view also preserves standard controls beneath its custom visual layer, limiting the amount of bespoke interface code that must be maintained.
