Phones are great for alerts and terrible for glancing. The kitchen is where the household passes through most often, so an old tablet now lives on the wall by the pantry showing the few things worth knowing at a glance: the weather, what's on the calendar, and whether anything in the house needs attention.

The tablet

It's a ten-inch Android tablet that had been sitting in a drawer, mounted on a slim wall bracket with the charging cable run behind the drywall to an outlet in the pantry. A kiosk browser app keeps the dashboard full-screen, reloads it if the connection drops, and dims the screen overnight. It signs in as its own Home Assistant user, with no admin rights, so a curious guest can't wander into the settings.

The dashboard

The layout uses Home Assistant's sections view, which arranges cards into columns that reflow on smaller screens. There are three: today, the house, and the evening. 

views:
  - title: Kitchen
    type: sections
    max_columns: 3
    sections:
      - type: grid
        cards:
          - type: heading
            heading: Today
          - type: weather-forecast
            entity: weather.home
            forecast_type: daily
          - type: calendar
            entities:
              - calendar.family
            initial_view: listWeek

      - type: grid
        cards:
          - type: heading
            heading: House
          - type: tile
            entity: binary_sensor.any_leak
            name: Leaks
          - type: tile
            entity: valve.main_water
            name: Main water
          - type: tile
            entity: input_boolean.washer_running
            name: Washer
          - type: tile
            entity: cover.garage_door
            name: Garage

      - type: grid
        cards:
          - type: heading
            heading: Evening
          - type: tile
            entity: light.porch
          - type: tile
            entity: script.goodnight
            name: Goodnight

Most of these entities come from other projects: the leak sensors and water valve, the washer helper and the porch light. The rule for adding a card is that it has to answer a question someone actually asks while standing in the kitchen.

A Mallow theme for Home Assistant

Home Assistant's default dark theme is fine, but the tablet is on a wall people see every day, and the rest of the network already has a look. Like the linkding theme, Home Assistant themes are mostly a list of CSS variables, written in YAML: 

mallow:
  primary-color: "#d9c68f"
  accent-color: "#a9c5ad"
  primary-background-color: "#15221d"
  secondary-background-color: "#1a2923"
  primary-text-color: "#fffdf7"
  secondary-text-color: "rgba(255, 253, 247, 0.68)"

  ha-card-background: "rgba(26, 41, 35, 0.92)"
  ha-card-border-color: "rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.12)"
  ha-card-border-radius: "14px"
  ha-card-header-font-family: "Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif"

  sidebar-background-color: "#0f1915"
  sidebar-selected-text-color: "#e7d6a5"
  state-active-color: "#edaf52"
  # ...the full file has a few more

To install it:

  1. Make sure configuration.yaml loads themes from a folder: 
    frontend:
  themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes
  2. Download mallow-home-assistant-theme-v1.yaml into /config/themes/.
  3. Restart Home Assistant, or run the frontend.reload_themes action.
  4. Choose mallow under your user profile's theme setting. For a wall tablet, sign in as the tablet's user and set it there.

"Active" states, like a light that's on or a door that's open, use the warm summit gold from the Mallow mark, which stands out against the green without shouting.