Dashboards and display

The 3.18 dashboard has five menu sections: Status, Irrigation, History, Equipment and Settings. They hold 21 menu pages. Six more pages have no menu entry: Today, Zone, the AI assistant page, Grows, Dryback drivers and Capabilities. This page goes through every page on a desktop and on a phone. It then covers the per-room display units and clock, and the wall, tablet and dosing-station dashboards that Crop Steering can write into Home Assistant for you.

Nothing on this page waters, opens a valve or changes a setpoint. Units, clock, theme, landing page and extra panels change only what the screen shows. A wall dashboard holds built-in Home Assistant cards and switches nothing when it is created.

Getting around

Desktop (wider than 720 px)

• Left sidebar. The live room tree: each room with its state, each zone under it with its phase and moisture, and the five menu sections. Click a room to open it in the section you are in, or click a zone to open that zone's page. The browser remembers which sections you left open. Between 721 and 960 px the sidebar is narrower and its brand block is a little smaller, but its contents are the same.
• Top bar.
  • A Home Assistant menu button, shown when the dashboard runs inside Home Assistant.
  • One chip per room, coloured by its state. Click a chip to switch rooms. You stay on the page you are on.
  • A Demo data pill in the demo.
  • The age of the selected room's latest controller report, or Offline, Connecting… or No controller data.
  • The AI assistant chip, which opens the AI assistant page.
  • The activity panel, which links to History › Explorer.
  • Refresh, then the selected room's name and its safety switches.
• Safety scope. The watering and stop controls in the top bar apply only to the selected room. Its name sits beside them so you can always see which room they act on.
• Banners.
  • A full-width band appears while the selected room's controller is not reporting. The numbers you see are then its last report, and the band links to Equipment › Probes & offsets.
  • A connection banner appears when Home Assistant is offline or needs attention, with a button to the connection settings.

Phone (720 px and narrower)

• The sidebar is hidden. The menu button at the top left opens the same room tree as a sheet.
• A bottom bar holds the five sections, within reach of your thumb. Each opens its first page: Status › All rooms, Irrigation › Timeline, History › Explorer, Equipment › Probes & offsets and Settings › Alert rules. A number on Irrigation counts the unsaved target drafts.
• Page tabs. In a section with more than one page, a row of tabs above the page lists that section's pages. Wider screens hide this row because the sidebar shows the same pages.
• When a page asks you to choose rooms or zones (for example Copy to room…), the room tree opens as a bottom sheet with checkboxes and Done/Cancel. On a desktop the same picker opens in the sidebar.

Old links still work

Bookmarks and notification links from before 3.18 open the page that now holds their content. For example, #/sensors opens #/equipment/probes, #/history/timeline opens History › Explorer, and the old ?view= links of the single-page dashboards open their new pages. The full table is in frontend/src/lib/routes.ts (LEGACY_PAGES, LEGACY_VIEWS).

Inside Home Assistant

When opened inside a compatible Home Assistant shell, Crop Steering temporarily collapses the HA sidebar. Use Home Assistant at the bottom of Crop Steering's navigation, or the house button in its top bar, to open the HA menu over the workspace. The top-bar button stays available on mobile.

Leaving Crop Steering restores the prior kiosk state. This does not change Home Assistant's saved sidebar preference. Standalone demos and unsupported or cross-origin embeddings retain their normal navigation.

Verified native panel behavior

Opening the native panel hides the Home Assistant sidebar, and the Home Assistant button brings it back. This was checked on a real installation; companion apps and third-party kiosk extensions may behave differently.

The workspace combines the former Manual setpoints and Grow plan entries into Irrigation › Current day and Irrigation › Grow plan & presets. Those are Crop Steering's own navigation views; they do not replace the Home Assistant menu button. Existing #/strategy and #/grow-plan bookmarks remain valid. Every page and its address is listed in Dashboards and display.

Crop Steering can also write wall, tablet and dosing-station dashboards into Home Assistant's own Settings › Dashboards, built from Home Assistant's built-in cards only. They are separate from this sidebar panel; see Wall, tablet and dosing-station dashboards. Shell behavior was verified in the native HA panel on 2.16.1; current navigation is covered by the compiled-demo browser checks.

Implementation references

The connector independently uses Home Assistant's temporary kiosk/menu interface, the mechanism used by Music Assistant. It does not copy the Music Assistant application or change HA's parent styles.

• Music Assistant's HA messaging integration: ingress subscription with kioskMode and home-assistant/toggle-menu.
• Home Assistant ingress handler: subscription cleanup restores temporary kiosk mode.
• Home Assistant sidebar state: temporary hass-kiosk-mode is separate from persisted sidebar docking.

Ingress uses the host messaging interface. The standard same-origin iframe panel uses HA's kiosk and menu events directly, because that panel does not implement ingress messages. It checks host capabilities before hiding anything. No cross-origin parent access is attempted beyond guarded capability discovery.

frontend/scripts/verify-ha-shell.mjs checks desktop/mobile menu recovery, restoring prior state when leaving, preserving preexisting kiosk mode, and standalone behavior against an isolated host fixture. Compatibility with every HA companion app and third-party kiosk extension is not implied.

The pages

Each page's address is shown after its name. ?zone=N keeps a zone in focus on Current day, Grow plan & presets and Explorer.

Status

Irrigation

History

Equipment

Settings

Settings › Dashboards & display

From top to bottom, the page holds:

1. Units: EC, temperature, volume and clock for the selected room.
2. Where the app opens: the landing page for this browser.
3. Wall and tablet dashboards: one card per template.
4. Keep this screen on while open: a checkbox shown only on browsers that support it. It keeps a wall tablet awake while the page is open.
5. More display options (collapsed):
   • Home Assistant connection
   • Appearance, with the water today display
   • Display
   • Pot and dripper units
   • In the demo only, Reset demo session…

Units and clock

The units are display only. Readings are stored, and every service and the MCP server answer, in mS/cm, °C and litres. Switch back and you see exactly the same numbers again.

• ppm. ppm500 is mS/cm × 500, and ppm700 is mS/cm × 700. Both are shown as whole ppm. For example, 1.8 mS/cm shows as 900 ppm on the 500 scale and 1260 ppm on the 700 scale. When you type an EC into the dashboard while it shows ppm, the number is read as ppm and converted back to mS/cm. Typing mS/cm or ppm after the number overrides that.
• Volume auto follows Home Assistant's unit system. Without one it uses this browser's last pot and dripper volume choice, and otherwise litres. US gallons are litres ÷ 3.785411784.
• Clock. 24-hour shows 14:02, and 12-hour shows 2:02 pm. Times always use Home Assistant's time zone.
• Per room. The settings belong to the room, so everyone who opens that room on any browser or phone sees the same units. Each row shows a live example taken from the room's own readings.
• Saving. Choosing an option saves it at once, then reads it back. When the read-back matches you see "Saved and read back HH:MM" with Undo. Undo puts the old value back only if nobody has changed it since. If somebody has, it tells you and leaves the value alone.
• Who can change them. Only a Home Assistant administrator. Anyone signed in can read them.
• Older integration. With an integration that has no unit options (3.17), the page saves the units in this browser only and says so.
• Upgrade. On the 3.18 upgrade, a room whose Home Assistant uses °F gets temp_unit: F, unless the room already had a temperature choice. The upgrade report also asks you to choose an EC scale, and on °F sites a clock style.

For automations and scripts:

action: crop_steering.display_get
data:
  room_id: "room:f2_"
response_variable: display

action: crop_steering.display_save
data:
  room_id: "room:f2_"
  expected_revision: 4        # the revision display_get returned
  options:
    ec_unit: ppm500
    clock: 12

display_save refuses a save when no option is given, when the options have changed since your read (stale revision), when a key is unknown, or when a value is not one of its choices (on/off options must be real booleans). It also refuses an unknown or ambiguous room_id, and a room whose stored options could not be loaded. When a signed-in user calls it, that user must be an administrator. An automation with no user can call it. The room's options are also published as sensor.crop_steering_<prefix>display: its state is the revision and each option is an attribute.

Where the app opens

This sets which page opens when you go to the dashboard without a page in the address. It is stored in this browser only, under crop-steering-landing-view. The choices are:

• Status · all rooms (the default)
• Status · selected room
• Irrigation · current day
• Irrigation · calendar
• History · explorer
• History · Water & flow
• Equipment · rooms and zones

A link to a page always opens that page. If the browser blocks storage, the app opens on Status · all rooms.

More display options

• Home Assistant connection. Shows Connected, Demo mode, Connection pending or Offline. You can use the current Home Assistant session, or enter a Home Assistant URL and a long-lived access token for this tab.
• Appearance. The theme can be Home Assistant or system, Light or Dark. It is stored in this browser.
• Water today display. Choose Zone total or For each plant. This writes the room's water_today_view select, so everyone sees the same choice and the controller's vitals notification follows it. Per plant is a zone's water today divided by its plant count from Equipment › Setup.
• Display. Extra panels for the room. Each is off until someone turns it on, and everyone who opens the room sees the same choice. A change opens a review first, and only an administrator can save it.

today_zone_layout is still stored, but it is not offered because the room page no longer has a zone table.

• Pot and dripper units. How pot volume and dripper flow are shown and typed, in this browser only.

Wall, tablet and dosing-station dashboards

Crop Steering can write a normal Home Assistant dashboard for a wall screen, a room tablet or a dosing station. It uses only Home Assistant's built-in cards (entities, gauge, tile and history graph), and only entities the chosen rooms actually have. A card with nothing to show is left out.

Making one

1. Open Settings › Dashboards & display, then Wall and tablet dashboards.
2. On a template's card, pick the rooms. The selected room is picked to start with, and a room tablet takes one room.
3. Press Create in Home Assistant. Only an administrator can do this.

What happens next:

• Crop Steering creates a storage dashboard in Home Assistant › Settings › Dashboards, shown in the sidebar with a sprout icon and open to all users.
• It saves the cards, then reads them back. If the read-back does not match, the half-made dashboard is removed again and you see an error.
• Its address is /crop-steering-<template>-<n>, where n is the lowest free number. For example, /crop-steering-facility_wall-1.
• The card then shows "Created day time for rooms as /address" with Open in Home Assistant.
• The creation is written to each room's journal as a settings change, so it appears on History › Changes.

Create again makes a new dashboard with the next number and leaves the old one as it was. Crop Steering never edits or deletes a dashboard after making it, and never touches dashboards you made yourself. Use Create again after you add hardware or zones, then delete the old dashboard in Home Assistant if you no longer want it. Edit the cards freely in Home Assistant's own dashboard editor.

Services

action: crop_steering.dashboard_create
data:
  template: room_tablet       # facility_wall | room_tablet | dosing_station
  rooms: ["room:f2_"]
  title: "Room A tablet"          # optional; default "Room tablet: Room A"

The service answers with url_path and title. It refuses a call in these cases:

• the template is unknown
• no room is given
• a room tablet is given more than one room
• the chosen rooms have none of the entities the template uses
• Home Assistant's dashboards have not finished loading
• the caller is a signed-in user who is not an administrator
• a room id is unknown or matches more than one room
• Crop Steering's dashboard store could not be loaded
• the Home Assistant version has no dashboards collection Crop Steering can find

crop_steering.dashboard_list takes no fields and needs no administrator. For each dashboard Crop Steering made, it returns url_path, title, template, rooms and created_at. exists is false once the dashboard has been deleted in Home Assistant. It also returns the template list. The list is kept in the store crop_steering.dashboards.

Related

• 3.18 upgrade report, line by line: the 3.18 upgrade and its report, including the units rows.
• Inside Home Assistant: adding the dashboard itself to Home Assistant's sidebar.
• User guide: daily use.