HouseView is made for a screen that stays on a wall or a counter: one card per screen, large touch targets, swipeable pages. This page collects what to set up for that.
Put the carousel in a panel view (type: panel on the view). HouseView sizes itself from the browser window, so it needs
a view that gives its one card the whole width. In a masonry or sections view the carousel cannot fill the screen. (Single
widget cards work in any view type.) See tablet-kiosk.yaml for a complete page.
Home Assistant keeps its sidebar and header around every dashboard. For a wall display, add tablet=1 to the address:
http://homeassistant.example:8123/dashboard-wall/home?tablet=1
With that parameter HouseView hides the sidebar and the header and uses the whole window. Remove the parameter, or navigate
away, and Home Assistant looks normal again; HouseView puts back everything it hid. You can also turn on Tablet mode
in the carousel card editor, or set tablet_mode: true in the card configuration, to fill touch displays without the
parameter. On a desktop with a mouse, this saved setting
leaves Home Assistant’s header and sidebar visible, so its dashboard menu and Edit dashboard remain available.
This uses the primary input type, not the window size: a small desktop window is still editable and a large touch
display can still fill its screen. The explicit ?tablet=1 parameter remains available for a desktop kiosk.
Dashboard editing and card editor previews always restore normal positioning and Home Assistant’s controls, even
with ?tablet=1. The preview stays inside the editor dialog.
Unsupported Home Assistant internals. Hiding the sidebar and header means reaching into elements of the Home Assistant frontend that are not a public API. HouseView detects what it needs, does nothing if something is not where it expects, and undoes its changes on failure, but a future Home Assistant release may stop tablet mode from working. Nothing else in HouseView depends on this. If it breaks, use a kiosk approach instead: a browser in kiosk or fullscreen mode (for example Fully Kiosk Browser), or the Kiosk Mode HACS plugin, pointed at a panel view. Please report it with your Home Assistant version.
Use the address of the tablet's own Home Assistant session (for example the same host name you logged in with) so that it keeps its login.
The layout follows the window: a landscape screen uses 3 columns (a page's columns option sets 2 to 5), a portrait
tablet or phone-sized window uses 2. 1280 x 800 landscape and 800 x 1280 portrait are the sizes it is tuned for.
A square NSPanel Pro (480 × 480) also uses 2 columns and fits four controls on a page. Wallpapers cover every edge.
See page layout and NSPanel Pro.
- Swipe left and right between pages, press the page dots or the arrows, or press the left and right arrow keys.
- There is no automatic rotation between pages. Use a screensaver for an idle display: the photo frame, the weather scene or the month calendar.
- A running timer keeps counting on the Home Assistant server when you change pages, and the timer display takes the whole screen while it runs.
Set bedtime: true for night styling and a Dim button on every page. Dim lowers the brightness of the card until you press
Brighter. See theming.
The timer widget's presets start a Home Assistant timer helper (create one under Settings > Devices & services > Helpers,
and turn on Restore so that it survives restarts). When a timer finishes while the dashboard is open and connected, a
banner appears and a short chime plays. Browsers only allow sound after the first touch on the page, so touch the tablet once
after loading. A sleeping or backgrounded tablet gets no chime: for that, build a Home Assistant automation that sends a
notification. The tablet's time zone should match yours, because the clock and date use the device clock.
A camera widget shows a snapshot that refreshes every 30 seconds while its page is visible. The camera grid refreshes about every five seconds while open and releases its connections when closed. See cameras.
HouseView renders one page at a time, uses CSS and Home Assistant's own icons, and loads no external fonts or images. Overview scenes are painted with CSS only and stay within a small layer budget; while one is up, the card underneath is hidden and does no work.
On a weak tablet (about 2 GB of RAM or less, a 4-core SoC, an old Android WebView) HouseView switches to the lite look by
itself: opaque tinted glass instead of blurred glass, no page glide and no decorative animation. Force it with
performance: lite (or keep the full look with performance: full). See performance.
To temporarily show Home Assistant’s dashboard editing controls on a dashboard configured with tablet_mode: true, open its address with ?tablet=0. The saved full-screen setting stays enabled for the wall panel.