Dashboard Assistant — Home Assistant integration

A first-party Home Assistant integration for Dashboard Assistant OS kiosks. It talks to the on-device daemon over an authenticated LAN API (HTTP + Server-Sent Events), so there is no MQTT broker to run — the device is discovered over mDNS and controlled directly.

What you get

The kiosk appears in Home Assistant as a single device with:

• Light — the display: on/off (DPMS) plus brightness (backlight).
• Select — jump to any configured page.
• Buttons — next/previous page, reboot, shut down, take screenshot.
• Text — ten editable "Page N" slots (Name | URL) to manage the page list.
• Number — browser zoom (25–400 %).
• Switch — dark mode.
• Update — OS release, with an Install button on images that can self-update.
• Image — the latest screenshot.
• Sensors — seconds since last touch, memory, storage, generations, CPU, uptime, IP, hostname, model, serial, and (where present) battery and temperature.

State updates arrive instantly over the SSE push stream, with a periodic poll as a fallback (local_push).

Installation (HACS)

This integration isn't in the default HACS store, so it's added as a custom repository. You only do this once; updates then show up in HACS like any other.

Prerequisites

• A running Home Assistant instance you can reach in a browser.
• HACS installed and set up. If you don't have it yet, follow the official HACS installation guide.

1. Add the custom repository

1. In Home Assistant, open HACS from the sidebar.

2. Click the ⋮ menu in the top-right corner and choose Custom repositories.

3. In the Repository field, paste:

   https://github.com/ajfriesen/dashboard-assistant-integration
   

4. Set Type (or Category) to Integration.

5. Click Add, then close the dialog.

2. Install the integration

1. Back in HACS, search for Dashboard Assistant.
2. Open it and click Download (choose the latest version).
3. Restart Home Assistant when prompted (Settings → System → Restart). HACS only copies the files; Home Assistant loads the integration on restart.

3. Add the device

After the restart, Home Assistant should auto-discover the kiosk over mDNS — you'll see a "Dashboard Assistant" discovered card under Settings → Devices & services. If it doesn't appear, add it manually:

1. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration.
2. Search for Dashboard Assistant and select it.
3. Enter the connection details:
   • API token — shown on the device's Config → Info screen.
   • Host / port (manual setup only) — the device's IP or hostname; the API defaults to port 8081.
4. Submit. The kiosk appears as a single device with all its entities.

Updating

When a new release is published, HACS shows an update on the Dashboard Assistant card. Click Update, then restart Home Assistant.

Manual installation

If you'd rather not use HACS, copy the integration in by hand:

1. Copy the custom_components/dashboard_assistant folder from this repository into your Home Assistant config/custom_components/ directory (create the custom_components folder if it doesn't exist).
2. Restart Home Assistant.
3. Add the device as described in step 3 above.

How it connects

The daemon exposes http://<device>:8081/api/ha/*, guarded by a bearer token. The token is generated on the device on first boot (or seeded/imported) and shown on the on-screen Config panel. See the OS repo (daemon/ha.go, modules/core/ha-api.nix) for the device side.

Releasing

Versioning, the changelog and GitHub Releases are automated with release-please driven by Conventional Commits. You never edit the changelog or bump the version by hand — you write good commit messages.

Day to day: commit with a Conventional Commit message — either straight to main or on a branch you merge; release-please reads the commit history, so both count. Examples: feat: add rotation select, fix: handle missing battery, docs: expand HACS steps. The type decides the version bump:

• feat: → minor (0.1.0 → 0.2.0)
• fix: / docs: / chore: / refactor: / … → patch (0.1.0 → 0.1.1)
• a ! (e.g. feat!:) or a BREAKING CHANGE: footer → major (0.1.0 → 1.0.0)

To cut a release: release-please keeps a single release PR open (titled e.g. chore(main): release 0.2.0) that bumps custom_components/dashboard_assistant/manifest.json and updates CHANGELOG.md from the commits since the last release. Review it and merge — that tags v0.2.0, publishes the GitHub Release, and (because the manifest was bumped in the same commit the tag points at) HACS installs the matching version. There is no tag to push or version to edit yourself.

Prefix a commit with chore:/build: etc. or add a BREAKING CHANGE: footer to steer the bump; see the Conventional Commits spec. A CI check validates each PR's title as a Conventional Commit (the squash-merge message release-please reads), so a malformed title is caught before it lands.

Create pre-release

1. Create empty commit:

git commit --allow-empty -m "chore: release 0.1.0-rc.3" -m "Release-As: 0.1.0-rc.3"

2. Push
3. Merge on GitHub