He hired an illustrator to draw his house, then turned the drawing into his Home Assistant dashboard

Anton Frolov’s fireplace flickers, his garden lights glow and the bedroom air conditioner blows, in a hand-drawn picture of his house that doubles as his Home Assistant dashboard (Anton Frolov, on his Substack). The write-up hit 889 points (Hacker News).

He built it because nobody else in the family would open the Home Assistant app, so the garden lights and the sprinkler timer went unused (Adafruit). His garden lights blink before their timer shuts them off, so you can extend them in the app, which only helps if somebody opens it (Anton Frolov).

The brief to the artist was most of the job. He asked an environment artist for PNGs with transparency, a day and a night version of every floor, and every device on its own layer: a still for off and a short loop for on, where eight frames was plenty. Every file came back on one shared canvas, each piece where it sits in the real house, a rule that saves days of lining things up, “which I learned the hard way” (Anton Frolov).

The Home Assistant side is mostly one stock card. Adafruit’s Anne Barela summed it up: the illustration is the background of a picture-elements card, devices swap to an animated WebP when they turn on, and an automation lays the night art over the day art at sunrise and sunset. It runs on the TV over HDMI. The remote can’t control it, so on the TV it’s for looking (Anton Frolov).

If you’re the only one at home who uses the smart home, I’d borrow his brief before I’d borrow his art. Ask for transparent PNGs, WebP animations (he converted sprite sheets himself), day and night versions, one layer per device, one canvas.

Seeing it on the TV is what finally got his family to install the app or bookmark the dashboard, so they could tap the drawing themselves.