Smart Home Automation | Home Assistant Dashboards

The problem

My house had devices across Apple HomeKit, Google Home, standalone sensors, smart plugs, and a Rachio irrigation controller. Managing all of that meant jumping between six different apps. When the garage door alert went off at 2 AM, I had no single place to check what was going on. Fragmented smart home ecosystems are the norm, and they are frustrating.

What I built

A unified home automation system running Home Assistant as the central hub, tying together every device in the house under one interface. Seven custom dashboards give me at-a-glance control: living room media (Sony TV + Sonos), presence tracking with maps, energy monitoring with SMUD billing data and grid carbon metrics, garden irrigation with Rachio SVG zone maps, and per-device dashboards showing location, battery, and network status for every mobile device.

How it works

• 7 custom YAML dashboards covering media, presence, energy, garden, and device monitoring
• Automated alerts for the garage door left open, lights or TV on when nobody is home, and air quality triggering the purifier
• Energy monitoring through Shelly smart plugs with SMUD utility data integration
• Rachio irrigation dashboard with SVG zone visualizations
• Persistent message logging automation with 7-day rolling history
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration for AI-assisted configuration
• Multi-person presence tracking via Life360 and device trackers
• Device inventory documentation with maintenance schedules

Where it stands

The system runs 24/7 on the local network, managing 50+ devices and 7 active automations.

Energy monitoring has given me real visibility into electricity costs. The automated alerts have caught the garage door left open more times than I want to admit. The garden dashboard simplified irrigation scheduling across multiple zones. I keep adding devices and automations as new needs come up.