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I turned an old phone into a Home Assistant dashboard for my desk
Home Assistant is the driving force behind my smart home, allowing me to centrally manage all kinds of devices that I've connected through various different protocols. Many of these are Zigbee devices, but I also have many different Wi-Fi-based devices and integrations with other services for data collection, too. While I have a simple smart switch on my desk for turning on and off my light, I wanted to see about making my own dashboard that I could control from my desk.
The only difficulty is that I don't have any convenient displays for using with this, though I do have a number of old Android phones that I could make use of. I eventually settled on the OnePlus 6, which is small enough not to take up too much space on my desk while still having a long enough battery life to suffice for the day. I don't need much either; a simple calendar view and some basic controls are all that's necessary, and that can easily fit on the screen of the OnePlus 6.
To set this up, you'll need the Home Assistant Community Store, also known as HACS. We'll be using the Wallpanel integration, which adds additional features to dashboards so that they can be better suited to a device dedicated to controlling Home Assistant. While I'm using it for a phone, you can also use it for any kind of permanent dashboard.
Choosing a phone for an always-on dashboard
A big screen, but not too big
The OnePlus 6 that I broke out of retirement is running LineageOS without any Google apps, though the software doesn't really matter so long as it can run any kind of modern Android version and install the Home Assistant app. If you want to incorporate notifications as a part of your setup, you'll need to set up an integration like HTML5 Push Notifications. I haven't set this up yet, nor do I need it, but it's the best way to do it on a device without support for Firebase Cloud Messaging.
The bare necessities were that it had a big enough screen to actually function as a dashboard that I could quickly glance at, while still not being too big that it took up too much space on my desk. A bright screen helps, but it also doesn't need to be super bright either, as it'll be used indoors at all times. Most older Android flagships will easily suffice for this, as will a lot of mid-range Android phones, too. Home Assistant isn't a particularly heavy piece of software, and I'm not running anything else on the phone either. Plus, there are options out there, like Fully Kiosk Browser, to make this even better, but everything Home Assistant and HACS offer is more than enough.
Once you've chosen your device and installed Home Assistant on it, we can get started!
Setting up our dashboard
Keep size constraints in mind
Once you've got your phone picked out with Home Assistant installed, most of the setup is actually going to be done from a desktop. First, make sure to install the Wallpanel integration from HACS, which you can find instructions for on GitHub. If you already have HACS installed, you can install it directly from there. Wallpanel is necessary for making Home Assistant run in full-screen mode and hiding the sidebar and toolbar, which helps turn it into a true always-on dashboard. Once it's installed, leave it alone for now, as we won't need to use it yet.
Next, create a dashboard. Do this by going to Settings, Dashboards, and clicking Add dashboard in the bottom right. Name it whatever you want, then click Open beside it. This will bring you to an empty dashboard that we need to modify. Keep in mind the size constraints of your phone's screen; while UI elements will scale to fit, you'll still need to engage in a lot of trial and error to ensure that there's no scrolling up and down. In my case, I can only fit 24 across when my phone is in landscape, and six down. I recommend removing the pre-made category headers to save some space.
These figures will be highly dependent on your screen's size, but should generally work for most devices. You can use the image at the start of this section for reference, but I kept the same section sizes so that everything scaled neatly on the screen. What I recommend doing is keeping this particular dashboard open on your phone as you make changes; it will detect when you save an offer to refresh the dashboard so you can see the immediate results of your changes. Once you're happy with how it looks, we'll move to the next step, where we introduce Wallpanel.
Wallpanel has a lot of options that we can use, but we're going to keep things basic. In your dashboard editor, click the overflow menu at the top right and click Raw configuration editor. In here, add the following lines to the very top of your configuration:
wallpanel:
enabled: true
hide_toolbar: true
hide_sidebar: true
fullscreen: false
idle_time: 0
This enables Wallpanel, hides the toolbar, sidebar, disables fullscreen, and turns off the automatic screensaver with idle_time 0. If you want a screensaver, you can change idle_time to be a time in seconds that you want it to switch over to a simple weather and image display, though I've turned it off. The same goes for full screen; you can turn it on if you'd like, and it's merely personal preference that I haven't.
While I also haven't configured it for this particular dashboard yet, you can consider setting up a pop-up card for notifications through the Browser Mod integration. This adds a ton of features that can be implemented into a dashboard, and I use it on a Huawei tablet that has now replaced my Google Home Hub. Plus, you could add additional views to this dashboard and install the Swipe Navigation frontend component that will enable you to swipe between them with the toolbar hidden. In my case, I could add GoXLR controls to a second screen, or even system info pulled from my PC using HASS Agent.
It only took me a few minutes to get this all set up, and my phone is already a great help to have on my desk thanks to it. I'll almost certainly chop and change some of it as I use it more over time, but it's really useful to have. Just make sure to increase the screen timeout; I have mine on five minutes, and I can just double-tap the screen to wake up my phone and be right back in Home Assistant again.