So I’ve been using Smartthings for a couple of years now. Recently I’ve been checking out the competition to see if there was a better alternative. For me, Smartthings is great for controlling devices. I like that I can create my own handlers etc. My biggest gripe is with the UI.
So I looked at Openhab and Home-Assistant, and spent a few days on each trying to create something I was happy with… Home-Assistant was limited by some bad CSS, and Openhab didn’t support all of the devices I had. And I wasn’t in the mood to compile Java to try and fix it.
Anyway, I ended up back at Smartthings and decided to just create my own UI. I wanted a dashboard where I could quickly and easily see what’s going on. I wanted to control devices, but didn’t want to be bogged down in them. I also wanted to be able to control Apple TV, which I don’t think can be done within ST at the moment.
This is a work in progress, and only has a few sections at the moment. It’s also completely bespoke to me, but I’m happy to share code or answer questions if it’ll help anyone else out! It’s inspired by a theme I saw on openhab (matrix theme) and some other stuff on behance etc.
It’s a big step to make something like this nicely configurable for everyone rather than just for yourself, not just in doing it but the ongoing support. For me It would be useful as sample code to adapt if you didn’t want to invest that time.
Yea, it connects to a simple smart app that exposes everything ST can do as JSON. So it will work remotely. The appleTv stuff won’t - but probably could if I set up port forwarding on the router - but it would be fairly pointless.
It is very bespoke at the moment. I’m just working on a lighting section that displays all my rooms, on different floors. It’s hard coded, but with more work it could be set up to be generic. I’m taking a few shortcuts just to get it working at the moment (hard coding device names etc).
If you never looked into actiontiles, it’s a great dashboard add-on to ST that makes the UI much more useable and it’s pretty customizable. It costs extra since it’s made by a third party developer, but it’s well worth it in my opinion.
Yea, I’ve looked into ActionTiles. I’ve yet to see a design or example that I’ve liked. It’s very subjective obviously, but I really didn’t like the look of it.
It’s a shame ST seems to have placed a hold on approving 3rd party smart apps as I think it really stifles the competition with things like this.
It was a bit of a pain, because the responses come back in Hex and need to be decoded. It may be possible to make it into a Device Handler, but I’m not great at groovy!
Added a few more views.
The lighting control groups lights together (mainly IKEA Tradfri bulbs, but a few hues). I need to work on a dimmer/colour picker at some point.
The tide times are from another external API. It’d probably be really easy to make a smart app and virtual device out of it if anyones interested who lives near the sea!
Finally the heating control is a nice simple way for me to control the heating set point, and turn the hot water on/off if required.
This is great! I would love to build something similar? Do you have your code in github? Would you mind sharing as I would like to see if I can implement something similar on my end as well. You can email me at samikhan001@gmail
There’s a simple smart app that exposes all the devices as JSON data, and the UI is a native iOS app, so built on a Mac using Xcode. not really something you can document.
You could achieve the same sort of thing with a web app if you know what you’re doing.
There were also a few custom bits like apple-tv control that you can’t do in ST I don’t think
