Finally, A Smart Home Dashboard That ACTUALLY Makes Sense! (Home Assistant/Homey)

Most smart home dashboards have a number of big issues. Clunky custom software, hacking holes in your walls, custom mounts, sketchy wiring, and in the end, it could mean you're dealing with a swollen battery. Amazon and Google make their own smart displays, but those are so locked down that you just can't operate them the way you want to live. Because of this, a true smart home dashboard has been just out of reach. Now today, I'm gonna show you a solution that I think works for 99% of us, the Shelly Wall Display XL, and I'll show you how you can put it in your home, how difficult that process is. Spoiler alert, it's not difficult. And I'll, of course, tell you about those limitations you need to know. Let's give her. The Shelly Wall Display XL is a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen running on Android. That screen is nice, and it's big, and it feels luxurious. If you need it, though, Shelly does sell smaller versions. Now, it's connected to my home using Wi-Fi 6, and you set it up using the Shelly app. Then, if you'd like, you can integrate the entire display into Home Assistant and or Homey, and then a specialized lineup of sensors that can be integrated with the wall display or that are already on it can be used in those apps as well. As I said earlier, a lot of the dashboards available today don't necessarily live how you live. Now, what's different about the Display XL is that it actually replaces a wall switch. That means it's mounted directly into a standard electrical box, and it wires directly into your home's main power. There's no custom hardware, and there's no 3D printing or mounting components. In my case, I've actually replaced two wall switches, and you could replace from one to four switches with this device. There's an integrated 5-amp relay in the back, and that's how I'm controlling my light switch with the tap of the screen. Later on, you'll see how we can deal with up to four different light switches with these four physical buttons. Now, you might be noticing that it's sitting on my desk. There is a secondary power option, USB-C, but it's on the bottom of the display, so it makes it a little difficult to use in this manner. The most exciting thing about the XL is what it can integrate with. It can integrate with all of Shelly's devices directly. It's actually a Bluetooth control center for the whole system with Shelly, so if you have some of their blue sensors or blue devices, the display actually becomes a hub for those. With other Shelly devices, you can fully control them, and you can build customized dashboards for that control. The most impressive integration is for those of you who use Home Assistant. In fact, this is much better than a simple dashboard for that. This is actually a window into the entire Home Assistant app, which means not only can you control your home, as Home Assistant can integrate with just about any device on the planet, but you can see things like graphs and cameras around your home, and you can manage your entire Home Assistant setup, everything from settings to the yaml code some of you use today. And because this is Android, you do get a full on-screen keyboard. You're not gonna wanna stand in front of a light switch and code or nothing like that, okay? But it is like having a second tablet or phone around your home without the exploding battery. The third integration is pretty wild too, and it's actually the first time I've seen its kind on a custom solution like this. Shelly has managed to integrate the Homey app. So for those of you using what I would call the second best hub out there today, you can also control that entire system and their fantastic world-class dashboard system. I have to be clear about a couple of limitations here. The first one is that you can't stick Home Assistant stuff on the same page as the Homey stuff. You can't have those two dashboards living together on the same screen. You also can't integrate the Homey or Home Assistant pages into the Shelly pages. So all three kind of live on their own. That honestly doesn't matter with Home Assistant, but it's a little bit longer to go between Shelly's pages and then Homey. The good news is when you wake up the display, it'll come up to the same page that it was on previously. So if you're basically gonna use this as a single dashboard, it's gonna easily work for that. The other limitation is that Homey is pretty slow. If you use it like I was. Now I had a lot of stuff on my dashboard before and what I found is that it was fairly sluggish to control my home and to move through the pages. After I broke up my dashboards a little bit and I did take a few of the controls off, I did find that the entire system moved fast enough for it to feel reasonable. And on that note, I want you to understand that this isn't the newest iPad. This is not $1,000 Galaxy tablet sitting on your wall. It does have far less power and so you will find the control is not always immediate. Most of the time it is immediate, but there are small delays depending on how you're moving through the screens and how much you're doing. That's honestly the biggest limitation of this product, but the pricing reflects that. And I've seen other people on YouTube or other platforms talk about 700, $800 setups. You can't put that around your home a bunch. This is priced in a way that you could do a couple over the next couple of years. Take your whole home control to another level. And speaking of another level, there are a couple of really great features I wanna show you now. So I just started what is called Gritty Rock Radio. This is one of the radio stations. We're on the home page here and you have volume control. It's a two watt speaker. So it's not exactly a crazy speaker and you can favorite other channels. You can go by country and you can go in and you can see it loaded them all. You can do searches, things like that. But there's actually a second thing that you can do, which is upload music and other tracks to this. So I just started a track that I had uploaded. The best way to do that is actually to go to the IP address for this, which you can find under network, find it right there. And you just go to that on a web browser on your network and you'll be able to easily upload files. Now, if that's not enough, we have Sonos. So here's Sonos. It's already playing some content from before. Again, I have a volume slider. You can go into the different speakers that you have. You can go into your favorites. You can start playing. Now, if you wanna play from here, but you're not loving how things sound, you can go into settings and look, Bluetooth is turned on. If you go back to the main settings page, you hit audio, you can actually pair a Bluetooth speaker. So it would disable what's called the Bluetooth gateway. We'll talk about that in a little bit here. Once you've paired your speakers, you can always re-pair them. So this is to my LG television. It's just turned on there. And now when I hit this after it's paired, that's playing on a much better speaker, isn't it? So that's actually really neat to have a player here on the display that you can always play music from. And if that wasn't enough music, you can go into home assistant. And if you have music assistant installed, it's especially easy to play your music over your network. So you can see, we can select our music player right here, and we can select our music, whatever we wanna listen to and start that up. You can even see a more detailed page here. We can start and stop music. We can go forward. Music assistant is a really comprehensive player. It lets you bring together all kinds of other players. So I'm just gonna set the screen timeout here to 20 seconds. And now I'm gonna back away. So you can see it just turned to a gallery. And again, I uploaded these through the web portal. Now, as I walk towards this, you can see it saw me. And that's because there's an onboard presence sensor here. That presence sensor can actually be turned on or off. To do that, you see this? Wake up on movement right here. Right here are two buttons. So one and two. And these are controlling the front display, the first switch, the one that I installed this into. And you can see I have a control on the page right there. I also have a secondary set of buttons up at the top. So I'll just turn on the light so you can see that. So that's turning on the other relay, the other one that I've installed behind here. And that's actually for my front porch. So I still have control of my front porch light and the light right here. And I can do that from these buttons on the side. Now, what's really interesting about this is you don't have to actually use it that way. So if I wanted, I could change the control button just to a toggle. So that's button one. And I can add all kinds of things. So any of my favorites, I can now control those. What I've set up is I toggle relay one with button one. Button two is toggle the state of the front porch relay. Toggle three is play music. Toggle four is play music. You can see how we can turn on and off all of these different things very easily. We can start and stop music. And here we go now. We've got that music too. On top of that, there's this really interesting option. I absolutely love this one, screen gestures. Now, with two fingers, we can toggle the relay state. So there, see that? Two fingers, three fingers. I've set it for the same thing. But you can go ahead and change the multi-touch and the swipe up and swipe down to all kinds of different things. The great news with all of this is that it's local control. Shelly, Home Assistant, and Homey all work when the internet isn't available. So most of their apps and their features will work on this when your internet goes out. However, what happens when the Wi-Fi turns off? Now, I'm not gonna be able to play that. I am able to control that, but I can't control the other relay, unfortunately, because they're both on Wi-Fi. So while I can control the one that's in the back of this, that's basically all I'm getting for control there. I'm not going to be able to control my entertainment system. And you can see I can't control my other Shelly devices. Now, what about Home Assistant? No, because we've lost our Wi-Fi connection. So when Wi-Fi goes down, this panel is kind of toast, but it's physical buttons, and that does continue to work, okay? So you are losing control of that other switch back here. So that is something to think about. The Shelly Wall Display XL comes with the display, its mount, which includes that five amp relay, as well as three tiny and two mid-size screws. There's a little instruction manual, and that's about it. Before you get into your installation, you'll want to remove the display from the back of the mount. Now, what I chose for my home was to place this at the front. Whenever I come in, I can have a security panel right there. I'm constantly going past this part of my home. I wanted to maximize how often I was going to see and use this display. So for me, I decided to place this horizontally over top of what was a two-gang light switch setup. Now, what I did, because I'm not super familiar with all the different wiring situations, is I turned off the power to my home, removed my faceplate, and then pulled out my two switches. From there, I turned the power back on and used the voltage tester to find out where my live and my load wires were. It's a little trick I use to always make sure I know which conductor is which, because the live is always on no matter what way the switch is. Now, a little note here. I was using single-pole switches, and if you're in a three-way or a four-way situation, it's a little trickier than this. Anyways, then I pulled all the wires off my existing light switches, and I did that for both of the switches in the wall. Now I grab my Shelly gear, and I had a Shelly 1PM relay sitting around doing nothing in my home. You'd probably use a newer generation, but this one has power monitoring, and it does give me full control of the light switch. Since the Shelly wall display comes with its own five-amp relay, just make sure whatever switch you're wiring into is only gonna use that much power. You should be fine with most LED lighting today. From here, I removed the screen from my mount, grabbed my second relay, and started to connect the different wires. It was easiest to wire in the Shelly relay first because the mounting for the wall display is quite large. Now, my biggest problem came with my neutrals because I had four different neutral wires in the box. Basically, I had to wire all of the four together and then distribute two additional neutrals to the two Shelly devices. If you're struggling to understand what I just said here, here's a diagram of what I did. I've also put a link in the description to a tutorial that shows you how to use relays and wire in these kinds of things. That video has a bunch of wiring diagrams. It'll help you understand the basics of these devices. And finally, if you're not feeling confident about any of this, please check with an electrician. But after I was done wiring those both in, I basically pushed everything back into the two-gang box and I put the two longer screws into where my previous light switch was mounted. Then I placed the actual wall display onto its mount and used two of the tiny screws in the bottom to affix those two parts together. Then it was a matter of turning on the power and setting up the two devices. For the Shelly relay that I had in my wallet was as simple as following the instructions in the Shelly app. For the wall display, there is a small power button on the side. So if it doesn't power up right away or you ever need to restart it, you can hold that button. But at that point, the wall display basically sets up on its own. I connected it to my Wi-Fi network using the on-screen prompts. And then I did go into the Shelly app and set it up there. At that point, both devices are ready to be configured for how I wanna use them. You're now able to configure the device, build it out the way you want it. But there are a few more things that will help you build this out right. To build this display is quite simple. So you can either long hold on these. You can see there's all kinds of buttons. So if I wanna kinda shove this one up to the top, I can do that. If I wanna shrink it, I can do that. I have the ability to move this button around and I can edit what it is, change the device. Now, I can also hit plus up here. I can choose top or bottom. So those are kinda your two rows. And then I can choose a device, a scene, a group, even virtual components that you can kinda set up in the app. And you can just add these components to the screen. So I'm gonna hit device. I'm gonna hit my flood sensor. And you can see, you can set a single or a double size. And then you can use the device layout, the default layout, or choose another layout. And there, I've gone ahead and I've added that. Now, if I'd like, I can create second screens. So also you can just swipe down and you can choose an icon for each of the screens. If you wanna remove a dashboard, if you don't like it, in the end, you can do that. So, and of course, if you wanna add a whole dashboard, there it is down there. You can just continue to add pages until you're happy. Now, adding Home Assistant was kind of a different exercise. There's a couple of methods for doing that. This is one of the methods right here where we can just configure the HA instances and you can manually add them or you can just hit refresh and it's gonna scan for those servers on your network. Once it's found them, what you're actually adding is this bottom bar. So now you can see I've hidden the bottom bar for Home Assistant, but it's right there. Now, there's actually a second method through apps. And I asked Shelly about this. They said they wanted to maintain both of these methods. They have their reasons. And so you can open the app entirely separately and you can see there's a return to home. So you've seen how to build a basic display, but what about a Home Assistant display? What about something like this where you can see cameras, you can see your thermostat, you can see smart locks, even control your Sonos system, all of these different things. How do you do that? Well, up here in this version here where we're kind of on the main page, we can actually go right in and start editing. Now, I'm not gonna give you a full tutorial here on building displays, but you can add new sections. You can search by the entity in your Home Assistant. So if I was gonna add my thermostat again, I could add it there or I could look in the cards. So one of the better ones I think for that is probably the gauge and I can tap on that and then I can choose what I'm putting in there. So what's the entity that I wanna use in there and I just configure that I have added, let's say the humidity, okay? We can hit save and now that is added into the page. Then when I'm done, I hit done up at the top and now that's an additional component on my page, Homey. So again, Homey is inside of the apps section. You can go into Homey and the first time you go in and you hit open app, you're going to have to log in. Now, because Homey is an app, you have to swipe from the right to get that up on your display and that's how you can go back to the main page. On my dashboard and you can totally customize this, there's a customize button right there. We do have all the moods and the flows and all these things and we can just turn on, turn off. If you long hold on things, you bring up the detailed options for it. So I can go and I can go into the colors. Because this is the full app, I can go in to the settings for each device if I'd like. So we can see all that, I can scroll down. If I had more on the page, I'd be getting lots of information and of course I can go into my dashboards. Now within this, you might want to build a new dashboard. You can hit that with the plus up there. Once you have something composed the way you'd like, you can actually leave this page up. So again, we have a lot of the same controls, a lot of the same options. I have Sonos, I have lighting. You can see I just turned that one on. Now with these, you can swipe to the right even further. There's more things to load in. This is kind of what you want to watch out for with Homey right now. It's just gonna take a lot of time for everything to load the first time. So once you get things loaded up, it actually behaves pretty good. So it helps to have these little buttons down here. So this will take me to my entertainment page and that'll just get me over to that page without having to exit, go back to the main dashboards. You can create these buttons for every dashboard page you have. So what if you wanted to get your Shelly display, which is right here, actually loaded into Home Assistant? And there's a number of things that you get with the Shelly display. Well, it's actually really easy to bring it into Home Assistant. You can do it right from this display. So just went into settings. I went into devices and services and you just add an integration. So there's Shelly and honestly, most of the time it's gonna discover that. Once it's in here, what you'll notice is the wall display has its own full device page and we have basic media controls. This is just for like the radio player. The sensors that we've connected to the display through blue, whatever, here they are. So I'm gonna show you right now how we can add additional things. One of the things you can do is add sensors to this display. So this is the Shelly H&T, but it's the blue sensor. And because this is a blue gateway or a Bluetooth gateway, we can actually connect these kinds of devices to the panel. So I'm just gonna pull this and boot it up. So it just hit the button in the back here one time and it went into setup mode. And now right here inside of the app, I can go to add a new device and just add via Bluetooth and then it's gonna find it. Okay, there it is. We're gonna hit next and we're adding the device. Now it says, please press the device button. And there we go. So now I've named it. I've got it with an image. And then what we've gotta do is we've got to select one of our device to act as the Bluetooth gateway. So here's my display. I'm just gonna select that. And now I can put it wherever I want in my home, in any of the rooms. And now it's associated the device. So inside of the panel, what we have to do now is we go edit. So I swiped down, I went to edit and now I'm gonna choose sensor. It's in the front entry. So I've got the blue H&T and it's getting the status from that sensor. And now what it's done is it's added that right here. 21.1 degrees, 58% there. When I added the wall display, what happened is it became one of our proxies. Now I didn't have to do this. You might have to add it in here, but here's the Shelly wall display. Now, because of that, what happens is now that it's been connected here, using Bluetooth and it's within range of this essentially home assistant proxy for Bluetooth, I can now add that sensor into home assistant. So there's the H&T and I'm just gonna place it in my front entry room and I'm gonna hit submit. And now I can see that this is through the display, humidity, the temperature. And yeah, those things are lining up with the actual device. And now I have the battery level in home assistant too. So we have quite a bit. Now for homey, it's really the same process. So what you're going to do is add in any Shelly Bluetooth device, okay? And what they're gonna say to you here is, hey, you've gotta have a Bluetooth proxy on one of our other devices for this to work. So this can be your proxy and that's what's happening here in both of these hubs. It took a few tries to get this to show up but there's the Shelly Blue H&T. I can choose to use a custom icon if I'd like. I'm just gonna continue through setup. And again, I'm gonna set this in at the front door. Wow, there's quite a bit that I can do with that little sensor. It's really, really impressive actually. So we're gonna go in there. Yes, we've got a beacon. There's our signal strength which is a nice diagnostic to have. And then we'll see when this fills in. Honestly, from here, the rest of this device is extremely easy to figure out. And the rest is customizing your dashboards to how you'd like them to appear and how you'd like them to work. That's the easy part because now you can turn all of your dashboards into something that you and your family love. Now I've shown you just about everything you can do with this. You might be wondering, what is missing? What would a tablet give us over this? Well, the biggest reason that people use tablets is the speed, which we've already talked about. The fact is that they can use multiple apps on an iPad or a tablet. Now there's no app store here really and I would love to see Shelly continue to build out the different platforms that you can connect to. I'd like to see lightweight versions of apps like Homie so that the slower speed of this never becomes a real problem. There's also no battery. So when the power does go out, this turns off too. You could solve that with a whole home battery, but obviously that's a bigger investment. Now we've already talked about the fact that you can't really control things when your Wi-Fi goes out. And I think that's a bit of a miss with the little switches on the side here. I at least feel like Shelly could solve that for the relay inside of their wall display and with Bluetooth connectivity to their relays and some other devices. Now the other thing that I haven't really talked about is that there is a set of microphones on this tablet and you can't access that for home assistant voice control, nor can you access the speaker as a home assistant media option. It is something that the team at Shelly is looking at. They told me that directly, but that doesn't mean it will ever come. This isn't missing anything major that a tablet gives you, at least when you consider the experience for a smart home dashboard. Listen, if you're looking for a toy or something to open up a number of different apps, get a tablet, put it in a good location. But this has all of the elements of a smart home dashboard and it does it with a reasonable price tag and reasonable install and setup process. I think everyone can do that or close to everyone. It's not so difficult and not so over everyone's head that we're talking about all these custom solutions that may or may not work a year from now. This is from a company that has been friendly to open source, local control, and they're not all about stealing your information. This is a company that has continued to support their first generation devices like you saw I used today. And so I think they stepped up and built a great product for a lot of people. If you have Shelly Gear, if you have Home Assistant, and even if you have Homey, this is a wonderful solution for a smart home dashboard. I'm gonna be getting a few of these to put around my home and I think that's the other point of this. The price isn't gonna limit you over the next couple of years. It's not gonna be for everyone, but when you factor in the replacement of light switches, now you're turning them into a couple of smart light switches, it starts to become something that makes sense to me. Check out the links below to Shelly's lineup of wall display products. I think the Wall Display XL is the way to go for a lot of people, but you might wanna look at one of their others. Otherwise, you can check out my Smart Home 101 series of guides that shows you how to build a proper smart home. That playlist is on screen now. It'll take you through everything from the basics to hubs and how to build great automations. Otherwise, guys, thanks for watching today and of course, live smart.