This is the illustrator: https://linktr.ee/owenyeconiel

It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!

Gotta admit, pretty cool! I'm just like.. My interest in smart home stuff is near zero; am I alone?

I think it's just an extension of my not caring to "tinker" with my professional workspace. I have all stock OS backgrounds, always preferred a GUI editor/IDE. Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements.. IDK. I'm not a "space" tinkerer; physical or digital.

I just like being able to control my lights and thermostat from my phone, I’ve never bothered with higher level automation outside of having a lamp turn on at dusk automatically lol

I have kids, and I have to leave the house quickly, so being able to set the house for "away" mode or make sure you shut off all the lights when you are all in bed is really nice.

Adding off-peak controls for electrical devices, water heaters, thermostats, EV charging, etc just makes sense so you don't have to think too hard about it.

I also really enjoy setting lighting for different moods - specifically when watching movies, and that's easy to do from the couch :)

How often does the away mode actually save you, though? With kids, I'd guess it breaks the one morning someone's phone is dead or the geofence misfires, and then you're debugging the house instead of leaving it.

I have a time of use electric plan and adjust load (grow lights, dehumidifier, AC, battery backups) at certain times to save money. Smart home can be pure tinkering but it can control some pretty practical things.

You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.

1. Hiring a human illustrator is the right thing to do, and I applaud this guy.

2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.

The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".

I spent last 2 months in construction stores. A good chunk of people drop a size in claude/chatgpt, and put tiles in their existing picture etc.

You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.

"When everyone leaves, all the air conditioners switch off."

That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.

I’m curious why you think that.

In general using a large setback will save more energy by not constantly cooling the home than it costs to return the house to a desired setpoint later.

depends on the duration and temperature differential

I logged my heat pump for a summer with a big setback and a 2pm return. The recovery run was long, but total kWh still came in under holding setpoint. Gotcha: resistance-heat or single-stage systems flip that.

This is a common advice I'm not sure I've ever seen properly explained and proven. It's mostly "we asked the experts!" kind of 3min tidbits with a guy in a corporate polo shirt talking assertively to the camera.

Most people actually measuring it come up with more savings when cutting the AC during the longer spans when nobody's there (usually during the hottest part of the day).

I did almost the same but it was completely AI , and started from renovation. it build me material list looked for discounts, saved me ~$2k.

Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?

The illustrator did beautiful work, it's amazing how much different your program became from the original dashboard to one simple home gui.

Very nice illustration, but when I hear the words "smart home" I reach for my, um, analog kitchen timer.

https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...

Great job and a cracking write up. The notes on making sure you get layers etc right so you can animate effectively is great advice.

Thank you.

I love that you hired an illustrator to make this!

where are you based, how much you paid for it ?

They posted a link here which has illustrator’s commission site.

this is so cool! i love it.

Perhaps “cool” is the wrong word. Did you notice the temperature recorded inside the house? 24degC (26 in the office). A little too warm for my taste.

Unless it was taken in the summer, in which case it's really cold.

Really well done, nice work!

appreciate you sharing the artist name!

This is beautiful. Reminds me floor796.

I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.

What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.

The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.

p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.

Cool, but if you can afford to hire an illustrator to make a custom dashboard for your lights and thermostat, you're clearly in the 1%.

$900 for digital art isn't exactly cheap, but you sure as hell don't need to be pull a $750K salary to afford it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1wyyrd6/comm...

I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.

You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.

Disposable income and being in the 1% are entirely different things.

Ever buy any pictures or posters for your wall? Same thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than…$30 a piece for posters vs $900 for this commission.

How much do you they think they paid? By home improvement standards, might not be out of line at all.

I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!

You say it like it’s a bad thing?

I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?

And?

Its $100 at most. Thats something majority of people can afford.

*$900, and no, the average person can’t afford $900 for bespoke art (or more likely, has no interest in paying $900 for one). Heck, I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of AI art online and not come to the conclusion the average person would much rather have the same for near free than paying hundreds of dollars. To me, that’s a pretty obvious revealed preference.

Price isn't really the issue. The dashboard is only worth it if you already own a smart home worth controlling. $900 on top of the hub, sensors, and bulbs is the part that puts it in 1% territory, not the art.

Pro tip you don’t even need an illustrator. While I do encourage hiring humans to do this work you can also use PolyCam with a phone that supports lidar, export it to Claude with Blender and voila.

Most people don't have lidar phones, and commissioning this art is about the same price as buying a lidar phone.

Damn that is a good tip. Thanks, dude.

We tried the scan route for our floorplan dashboard. Raw lidar meshes come out lumpy and hard to read at card size, so we ended up tracing the rooms by hand in Inkscape anyway. Illustration reads cleaner.

Pro tip the whole point is that it was made by an illustrator, and that's also the reason it's on the frontpage.

Floorplan UIs for home automation go back to X10 and HomeSeer in the late 90s. They look great until you move the couch or add a light, then someone has to redraw the art.

Whose attention are you trying to capture by making this post?