A passive, furniture-grade day dashboard for a wall tablet, built as a Home Assistant add-on. It answers "what is my day?" — not "here are forty entity states." Three screens, switched automatically by time of day, designed to be read at a glance from across the kitchen:
- Morning — when do I need to leave, what do I wear, what's the rest of today
- Evening — what's tomorrow, what happens overnight, what did the house use today
- Night — a dimmed clock and nothing else, unless something is happening
Any screen can show an alert band (severe-weather warning, poor air quality, water leak) with a one-time chime when it appears. Nothing on screen is tappable; there is no interaction at all.
Live on a Fire HD 10 in Fully Kiosk Browser.
- Home Assistant OS or Supervised (anything with an add-on store)
- A weather integration that supports daily + hourly forecasts (Apple WeatherKit, Met.no, NWS, …)
- A calendar integration for your family calendar (CalDAV/iCloud, Google Calendar, Local Calendar)
Everything else is optional and degrades gracefully if absent: indoor temperature and AQI sensors, outdoor AQI (e.g. AirNow), daily energy/water meters, a cumulative gas meter, leak sensors, a bins/waste calendar, and an NWS alerts entity.
- In Home Assistant go to Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store.
- Open the ⋮ menu (top right) → Repositories, paste
https://github.com/drkpxl/sideboardand click Add. - Refresh the store page. Sideboard appears at the bottom under the new repository.
- Open it → Install. (The image builds locally; give it a minute.)
- Go to the add-on's Configuration tab and point the options at your entities — see the reference below. The defaults are one working household's setup and will not match yours.
- Start the add-on, then open
http://<your-ha-host>:8090in a browser. You should see the current screen with your data.
Authentication is handled through the Supervisor — the add-on never needs a token, and none of your credentials appear in its configuration.
| Option | What it is |
|---|---|
weather_entity |
Weather entity used for all forecasts (hourly rain, overnight low, tomorrow) |
outdoor_weather_entity |
Optional second weather entity (e.g. an NWS station) preferred for current outdoor temp/conditions; falls back to weather_entity |
indoor_temp_entity |
Indoor temperature sensor (pick one near the tablet) |
outdoor_aqi_entity / indoor_aqi_entity |
AQI sensors for the air-quality tile |
energy_today_entity |
A daily energy sensor that resets at midnight (a utility_meter helper works perfectly); drives the hourly bars and live kW |
water_today_entity |
Same idea for water |
gas_total_entity |
A cumulative gas meter; the day total is computed as the delta since midnight. ft³ meters are shown in therms, anything else in its own unit |
family_calendar |
The calendar for agenda, countdown, and "first up tomorrow" |
bins_source |
A calendar.* or todo.* entity holding waste-collection reminders. Event/item titles are matched for trash / garbage / recycling / compost keywords |
nws_alert_entity |
Optional sensor from the NWS Alerts HACS integration; if set it becomes the warning source |
leak_sensors |
List of binary sensors that trigger the water-leak alert band |
morning_start/end, evening_start/end |
Day-part boundaries (HH:MM). Night is everything else; midday shows the screen chosen by day_shows |
prep_buffer_min |
Minutes before the next event that the countdown targets ("out the door" time) |
aqi_alert_threshold |
Outdoor AQI at which the alert band fires |
rain_prob_threshold |
Precipitation probability (%) that counts as "bring an umbrella" |
language |
Leave empty to use Home Assistant's language (English and Spanish shipped; contributions welcome) |
time_format |
auto (from locale), 12, or 24 |
nws_alerts |
Built-in severe-weather polling of api.weather.gov (US only — turn off elsewhere, or set nws_alert_entity instead) |
nws_user_agent |
Contact string the NWS API asks for; put your email in it |
Units, locale, and timezone come from Home Assistant itself — a metric household in Spanish sees °C thresholds, es copy, and its own meter units with no extra setup.
Create a Local Calendar (or a Reminders/CalDAV calendar) in Home Assistant and add recurring events on the nights the bins go out, titled things like Take out Trash or Take out Trash and Recycling. Point bins_source at it. On collection night the morning footer shows "Bins out tonight — trash & recycling" and the evening prep block adds "Bins go out tonight." No events, no footer.
The server polls Home Assistant (states every 20 s; calendars and meter history every 5 min; forecasts every 15 min) and pushes a ready-to-render viewmodel to the screen over Server-Sent Events — the tablet never polls. The clock and countdown tick locally every 15 s, day-part switches crossfade, the layout shifts a few pixels each hour against burn-in, and the page reloads itself nightly at 04:10. If data stops flowing for 15 minutes a small "data N min old" note appears in the corner. Add-on updates arrive through the normal add-on Update button when the repository version changes.
Run Fully Kiosk Browser pointed at http://<ha-host>:8090 with:
- Autoplay audio: on — required for the alert chime (stock browsers block audio without a touch)
- Keep screen on while plugged in; screensaver off
- Use Fully's scheduled brightness to dim the panel at night — the night screen is dark by design, but the backlight is yours to manage
- Optional: motion-triggered screen wake, remote admin
# repo root
cp .env.example .env # put a long-lived access token in it
node sideboard/server.js # Node 22+, zero dependencies.env needs HA_LL_ACCESS_TOKEN=<token> and optionally HA_URL=http://homeassistant:8123. Dev configuration lives in local.config.json (same shape the add-on options produce). Force screens while testing with ?screen=morning|evening|night and ?alert=demo.