Creation of home-

A couple months ago we setup homeassitant at our home, it’s been very nice and honestly I am surprised we didn’t do it earlier. Only annoyance I had was whenever I wanted to check a sensor or turn on/off a light quickly, I had to go to my browser if I even had it open at the time, then find the homeassitant page and finally click the button for the room / check the sensor. I really wanted to have it on my second monitor but I prefer my browser on my main monitor, figured I could just take the 1 tab out but my computer didn’t like that much.

Which lead to the creation of home-, a simple application for the pure ability to quickly and easily access homeassitant dashboard at all times. With just a press of a shortcut I can immidietly look at any sensor in my home or turn on a light.

Designing the app

Since the application was made partly out of boredom and mostly out of annoyance of it being so complicated to access my home dashboard. I decided to go with the things I knew for creating this, so I used electronjs for my app framework, since there would be so little website being created for now I’ve decided to just use pure html for the very little that is needed.

After having decided what tools to use, next up was creating it, I’ve learnt a lot about typescript so I really wanted to use it. After a while I found out about electron-forge which made the setup of the project including typescript as simple as one command: npx create-electron-app@latest cool-app.

With that out of the way I was ready to go ahead and start making the app. As the source code is available on github and it’s very short, I figure there’s not much need to go over it here. There for, in a shorter version after looking for homeassitant’s logos and their usage and hoping that I didn’t break any laws. All left to create was a index.html for getting the homeassitant url, and a bit of setup for a working tray icon. I’ve had a simple app that asked me for a url to my dashboard, after that and a quick login. I was in and able to use my dashboard with ease and without issues.

Conclusion

Home- is currently only supported on windows, with a linux port coming sometime in the future probably. The project was a great kick start to get back into programming as lately I’ve had no motivation and this app has sparked some more back. Including not having to anymore spend 20 seconds on a 2 second action.