Dashboard software

I've been resisting installing home assistant - I don't particularly feel the need to control anything around the home. However, I am a bit jealous of some of the dashboard displays I've seen posted, and I am getting a bit fed up of having to open so many different apps to see the status of things, plus there's a few scripts spitting out text files. So I was wondering what tools people use to build dashboard displays.

There's some based around node-red : that's actually something one of the teams at my work uses, so there is a small additional incentive to learn that a bit better. (But they use it more for flow programming than for a UI display, so...)

Python dash seems an option - I'm reasonably fluent in python now, so that's a benefit.

Prefer not to use java - nothing against the language, but the VM tends to be a horrible memory hog.

DD As I think you know I went down the HA route, principally because I wanted to automate the charging of my battery, initially on Octopus Flux and then afterwards on Agile where automation is a must.

Over the year of having HA I have still not really added lots of home automation, turn the tumble dryer off when the cheap rate finishes, automatic fans for my inverters and a temperature controlled heater for my wife’s horse shed.
There are people with far far more automation than me, but it’s personal choice as to what you do with the tool.
Having an energy monitor on my solar FIT array has been very useful as well.

I guess the question you need to ask is what information are you looking to bring together in a single dashboard and is it read only or read/write. That might guide your choice. HA has a lot of pre-integrated components so has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

If your just looking for passive display without controlling then you'll probably be fine with just Web based libraries I guess? It's basically what my Terravolt home display thing does (although it is now 4yo so not as impressive as once was) which is mostly JS (and uses AMcharts library, but ApexCharts is another contender I also use elsewhere)

I'd probably go Plotly type route if wanting something to work reasonably well on smaller screens I guess.

Couple of other things to check out

• If you like Python then have a look at HADashboard (part of Appdaemon).
• You might want to take a look at what is available using Grafana (esp with Influxdb being fed from HA).

geoffreycoan is it read only or read/write

Read (display) only - no need for anything to respond to any changes.
Did ocurr to me that if it was JavaScript it could run entirely in the browser without needing anything server side (other than something like an MQTT broker, perhaps).

DD Straight onto giv tcp works well. The container comes with Mosquitto bundled in, it’s easy to subscribe to what you want in python or whatever.