This 3D-Printable Home Assistant Wall Panel Features Presence Sensing

The beauty of Home Assistant is the heavy emphasis on automation, which eliminates the need for many explicit user commands. Instead of pushing a button to close your networked-connected garage door, you can tell Home Assistant to do that automatically when you turn your car off while it is parked in the garage. But automating everything isn’t usually realistic and buttons do still serve a purpose — as do displays that can provide information. With that in mind, Tobias designed this 3D-printable Home Assistant wall panel that features presence sensing.

This is a wall-mounted digital dashboard that Tobias designed specifically for use with Home Assistant. Like most devices of this type, it provides an interface that residents and guests can use to access Home Assistant functions and information. It is handy for setting scenes, activating and deactivating automations, and manually controlling devices. It can also display any information that Home Assistant can access, like a family calendar, currently playing media, weather forecasts, and much more.

Home Assistant dashboard devices aren’t uncommon, but this one has a nice feature set, including an attractive design that should suit many homes, a sturdy 3D-printable enclosure, presence sensing, support for a camera to enable video calling, a large touchscreen, touch buttons, and the ability to receive Power over Ethernet (PoE). That presence sensing feature is nice because it can be used to turn off the screen when nobody is nearby. It can also signal presence to Home Assistant, which is useful for all kinds of automations.

Some of the most important components required to build this device include a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, a 7” Waveshare touchscreen LCD panel, a TTP223 touch sensor, and a LD2410C-based human presence sensor.

That last component is pretty neat, because it solves many of the problems Home Assistant enthusiasts often run into when trying to detect humans. It uses millimeter wave radar technology and can reliably detect a person between 0.75 and 5 meters away, regardless of lighting conditions, temperature, movement, clothing, and other traditionally confounding variables.

As is the case for all Home Assistant dashboards, this is completely customizable. So, if you like the look of the enclosure, it should work well in your home.