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Anton Frolov commissioned an illustrator to draw his house and used the artwork as an interactive Home Assistant dashboard. The project combines animated device states and controls with a floor-plan illustration, aiming to make the system easier for his family to use.
Anton Frolov has turned a custom illustration of his house into an interactive Home Assistant dashboard, placing animated device states and controls over drawings of the rooms and garden. In his account, Frolov says the picture-based interface is one his family enjoys using, addressing a problem with the app and dashboard he had built before.
Frolov says he had spent about a year automating his home with Home Assistant, the open-source smart-home platform. Many routines ran automatically: air conditioners switched off when the household left, while the garden sprinkler adjusted its run time to the weather. Some tasks still required a person to use an app, including extending a timer for the garden lights.
He says the previous dashboard was not appealing to other household members. A physical switch might have helped with the lights, but would not address every device or the timer, and some controls were more practical to use remotely. Frolov therefore chose an illustrated floor plan, commissioning an environment artist rather than drawing the artwork himself.
For the commission, he supplied a house plan, room photographs, visual references, examples of dashboards and a technical brief. He asked for day and night versions, transparent image files, and separate device layers with still images for off states and short animations for on states. Each image needed to share the same canvas dimensions and position, so the layers would line up when assembled.
A More Usable Smart-Home Interface
The project shows one way to make a smart-home interface feel more like the home it controls. Instead of relying mainly on a list of devices or a conventional control panel, the dashboard places status and controls on a house illustration. That can make the location of a device easier to recognize at a glance, while animated images signal when equipment is active.
Frolov’s account also highlights a practical limitation of home automation: routines do not remove every need for manual input. The garden lights still needed attention, and an interface that one person can operate is less useful if other household members avoid it. He presents the illustration as a usability choice, not evidence that custom artwork will work for every household or guarantee adoption.
The method has a trade-off. The dashboard may reduce the amount of conventional interface design needed, but it relies on custom art prepared to precise technical requirements. The time involved in commissioning and coordinating the illustrations may be a significant part of the work.
custom house illustration smart home dashboard
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From Automation to an Illustrated Floor Plan
Frolov describes using Home Assistant to automate routine actions, including switching off air conditioners when everyone leaves and adjusting sprinkler schedules according to weather. The remaining garden-light problem helped prompt the redesign: the lights were controlled through an app, and a timer automatically switched them off unless someone extended it.
He considered interactive floor plans after looking at other Home Assistant dashboards. In his account, many examples used a static 3D model with interactive icons layered on top; he also considered pixel art, which he felt would require drawing or arranging individual assets. He ultimately hired an artist whose existing portfolio focused on illustrated spaces.
For implementation, Frolov says he used Home Assistant’s built-in picture-elements card. The illustration serves as the background, while image, icon, state-label and conditional elements display devices and information at set positions. He describes using image states to show a still picture when a device is off and an animation when it is on. The source account also says he later converted sprite-sheet frames into animated WebP files.
“I thought: why not build a dashboard so cool that everyone would want to use it?”
— Anton Frolov
interactive home automation control panel
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Costs and Results Not Reported
The source account does not provide the illustrator’s name, commission cost or project timeline. It also does not give a measured comparison of how often family members use the new dashboard versus the old one; the claim that the family enjoys using it is Frolov’s own description.
The available account excerpt does not establish whether the setup has been tested across different household devices or how much ongoing maintenance the animations and images require. It also does not provide enough detail to independently verify the dashboard’s performance or whether the approach would suit other Home Assistant installations.
animated smart home device controls
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The Setup After Commissioning
Frolov’s report describes the work of commissioning and preparing the artwork, then building the interface with Home Assistant’s picture-elements card. It does not announce a forthcoming release, product or scheduled milestone. Readers seeking to reproduce the approach would need to adapt the artwork and element positions to their own floor plan and devices, while following the file and alignment requirements he describes.
The main next step in the account is putting the commissioned images to work: assigning the background, positioning controls and status readouts, and connecting device states to the relevant still images or animations. Whether the illustrated dashboard continues to meet the household’s needs over time is not reported.
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Key Questions
What is the dashboard?
It is a custom illustration of Frolov’s house used as the background for Home Assistant controls, device states and status readouts.
How did he build it in Home Assistant?
Frolov says he used the built-in picture-elements card, layering images, icons, labels and conditional elements over the illustrated floor plan.
What did he ask the illustrator to provide?
He requested day and night versions, transparent images, separate device layers and still or animated device states. He also required all files to share the same canvas size and alignment.
Why replace the old dashboard?
Frolov says other household members did not want to use his earlier dashboard or the Home Assistant app. Some tasks, such as extending the garden-light timer, still required manual control.
Did the project make the family use Home Assistant more?
Frolov says it is a dashboard the whole family enjoys using, but his report gives no usage figures or independent evaluation of the change.
Source: hn
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