A hand-drawn house becomes a Home Assistant dashboard
An attractive, spatial interface can make smart-home controls usable for the whole household; technically, a layered illustration plus Home Assistant's built-in picture-elements card keeps the implementation simple.
Logged at IST: 2026-10-09 19:42 IST
What it is: Anton Frolov's account of commissioning an environment artist to draw his house and turning the artwork into an interactive Home Assistant dashboard.
Gist: The illustrated floor plan is the interface: Home Assistant's stock picture-elements card places device artwork and state labels over a background image. Transparent device layers share one full-size canvas so they align without manual positioning; each can switch between still “off” art and animated WebP “on” art. Conditional elements and a helper toggle day/night versions, with an automation switching at sunrise and sunset. The article also covers the detailed art brief: room photos, floor plans, style references, common canvas dimensions, individual device layers, transparent PNGs, and day/night states. The result gives the family a visual way to control items such as garden lights, air conditioning, and sprinklers.
Why it matters: The main effort is not custom dashboard code but commissioning and specifying the right artwork. A familiar, inviting interface can make a technically capable smart home practical for people who would otherwise avoid its app.
Implementation note: Keep device layers on a shared canvas and request the animation format directly; the author found aligning separately cropped assets tedious and converted sprite sheets to animated WebP afterward.