Home Solar

Home Assistant integration

A fully customisable home automation panel.

Home Solar is an optimisation panel for the home you already run in Home Assistant. Tick the switches, lights, and sensors you want on the board — lights, plugs, climate, power, or anything else it exposes — and they publish to a page of their own. You name the installation. That name is the address. You pick the look, and you pick who can see each control, locked with passkeys.

Not in the HACS default store yet. It will be. Until then, copy the integration in by hand, then add it from Settings → Devices & services.

How it works

You build the board from Home Assistant. Home Solar forwards only what you selected, about every 15 seconds, and sends switch and light presses back.

  1. 1

    Choose the entities

    Tick the switches, lights, sensors, and binary sensors that may leave the house.

  2. 2

    Name the installation

    Humanhouse becomes homesolar.percolate.one/humanhouse.

  3. 3

    Claim it

    Scan the QR, or type the five-character code. The signed-in account becomes the admin.

  4. 4

    Use the board

    Readings update live. A switch or light pressed on the page is sent back to Home Assistant.

Install

Soon

From HACS

  1. Open HACS, then Integrations.
  2. Search for Home Solar and download it.
  3. Restart Home Assistant.
  4. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration, and choose Home Solar.

Today

Copy the folder

  1. Place the integration at /config/custom_components/homesolar. The folder name has to stay homesolar.
  2. Restart Home Assistant.
  3. Add the Home Solar integration the same way as above.

The icon in Settings and in HACS comes from custom_components/homesolar/brand/icon.png on the Home Assistant machine.

Pair an installation

This system is designed to be extremely easy to pair with your HomeAssistant setup.

The contact email on the first screen is only a contact. The admin is whichever account is signed in on Home Solar when the code is accepted.

  1. Home Solar URL

    Leave the address as https://homesolar.percolate.one unless you run your own server.

  2. Choose what to send

    The list scrolls. Tick each switch, light, sensor, and binary sensor you want on the dashboard. Anything left unticked is not uploaded.

  3. Installation name

    Type the name and submit. It becomes the dashboard address: lower case, spaces and punctuation turned into hyphens. Home is reserved. If the name is already used, pick another.

  4. Scan or type the code

    A QR code and a five-character code appear. The code lasts 10 minutes and uses letters and digits that are hard to mix up, so it skips I, O, 0, and 1. Scanning opens the connect page with the code filled in. The account that finishes that page is this home’s admin.

Later, the question-mark button on the integration page opens a help page for that installation. Its QR opens the dashboard itself, not the pairing screen.

Choose what to expose

There are two lists. The first decides what Home Assistant uploads. The second decides who on the dashboard can see it.

In Home Assistant

Export list

Open the Home Solar integration and choose Configure. The same checklist from pairing is there, with the installation name and the admin email. Submit to change what is sent. New entities do not appear until you tick them.

On the dashboard admin page

Who can see it

After data has arrived, open Admin for that installation. Sensors can be Top (one of the eight boxes at the top), User (everyone), or Admin (you only). Switches and lights use User and Admin. Leave both off to hide an entity from the board.

Entity Top Admin User
Kitchen temperature
Shed plug
Hall light

Page users only see rows marked User. Add their email under Page users. They still need an approved Home Solar account. If someone opens the address without access, they can apply, and you allow or deny it on that same admin page.

Switch themes

On the admin page, under Display, pick one theme. The readings stay in the same places. Every dashboard already open for that installation changes with it.

Standard

Dark board, green readings, the default layout.

LCARS

Black frame and the coloured bars of a classic bridge console.

JARVIS

Blue diagnostics, circular dials, and taller charts.

Expanse

Heavy industrial panels, a hazard stripe, and amber figures.

Day to day