I’ve never understood the appeal of wall-mounted tablets for controlling a smart home. To me, dashboards have always felt like expensive replacements for physical switches. However, a recent project finally made me realize that wall-mounted control panels can have their place
A good smart home should work with minimal interaction
I’m a firm believer that the ideal smart home should be based around automation, not control. As much as possible, everything should happen as if by magic, without me having to lift a finger.
For example, when I walk into a dark room, my presence detector should kick in, and the lights should turn on, but when I walk into the same room during daylight hours, they should stay off. I shouldn’t need to touch a light switch or toggle a control on my phone or touch a smart home control panel. The automation should handle everything for me.
If I have to get my phone out to turn a light on—or worse, walk over to the wall-mounted dashboard to tap a button—then I’m doing something wrong. This isn’t making my home much smarter; it’s just replacing the physical light switch with a virtual switch.
I’ve never understood the obsession with smart home dashboards
That’s why I’ve never really understood the hype about smart home dashboards. Smart home forums are full of people showing off the dashboards they’ve created with amazing 3D models of their home that they can use to control their smart home devices. These dashboards look amazing, with tiny, rendered lights that you can tap to turn the devices on and off, and people are understandably proud of the results.
The trouble is, no matter how pretty your smart home dashboard is, it’s still a smart home dashboard. If you want to turn the lights off using your dashboard, then you still have to physically tap the right light on the screen.
Many people set up wall-mounted Android tablets to display these dashboards, so that they can control their entire smart home from a single location. The idea sounds good; you can use the dashboard to control devices anywhere in your home, even if you’re not in the same room.
The trouble is that to do so, you need to physically interact with the tablet. If you’re in a different room, you’re going to have to walk to the room where the tablet is to control a device, which is no easier than just walking to the room where the device is.
Even if you put wall-mounted tablets in every room, you still have to be within touching distance of the tablet to use it. If the tablet is on the wall, and you’re on the couch watching TV, you’re going to have to get up and walk across the room, which just doesn’t feel very smart to me.
Setting up a chore tracker changed my mind
Finally, however, I’ve begun to see the appeal of wall-mounted tablets. There are some occasions where they can be genuinely useful.
My mind was changed when I set up a chore tracker for my kids, using Home Assistant. They can earn stars by completing daily or weekly chores and can lose stars for bad behavior. When they earn enough stars, they can cash them in for rewards. So far, it’s been a great way to motivate my kids to help around the house.
When they’ve completed a chore, they need to mark it as complete so that my wife or I can verify it. They could do this on our phones or iPads, but it’s not ideal. I have a wall-mounted Amazon Echo Hub that I was sent to review, and although it can control smart home devices, I’ve never used it for that purpose. I wondered if it might be the solution.
I set it up to display the chore tracker dashboards for my kids in the native Silk browser. It’s not ideal as the browser closes automatically after a while, so the kids need to open the browser to see their dashboards, but it’s good enough for our needs. Now the kids can open the browser and claim their chores on their own dashboard. We can then approve the chores from our phones once we’ve verified that they’re complete.
As well as allowing the kids to mark chores as completed, the dashboards also show them their current stats, so they know how many more stars they need to earn their next reward, or what daily chores they still have outstanding. Having a central hub for the kids to do this from really works well.
Automation still beats control
For the first time, I’ve finally seen the appeal of wall-mounted control panels. Having a single location where the kids can log or track their chores makes everything simple and ensures they’re not always pestering us to borrow our phones so that they can access their dashboards. It’s not really an issue that the dashboard is only in a single location, as they can log the chores whenever they want, and as the Echo Hub is in the kitchen, they pass by it multiple times a day.
There are other times when a wall-mounted smart home dashboard can be useful. If you have guests come to stay, for example, it’s an easy way for them to be able to switch on the lights or turn up the heating without you having to leave a manual explaining how to do so.
I’m still strongly of the belief that in the ideal smart home, you’d never have to tap a button or flick a switch at all. However, the reality is that there are times when you do need manual control. A wall-mounted control panel can be useful under the right circumstances, but I’m still going to keep working on building a smart home where I never have to touch a button again.