Using the dashboards

The hub (index.html) is the page to keep open on your phone, laptop or tablet. It answers “is the house all right” from the top of the screen — who is home, the heating, the battery, a strip of live cameras — and then offers a way into everything else through two cards: Menu and Rooms. Those open the menu (menu.html), which is the only page that lists every page and every room, so a room added in Settings appears there without touching any HTML.

Every page has a Home button, and the tiles that look tappable are tappable.

Things that move

A screenshot cannot show any of this, which is rather the point of the list.

The power flow really flows. On the Energy page and on the hub’s power card, the sun, the battery, the house and the grid sit around the inverter and streams of dots run along the links between them, in the direction the energy is actually going. Reverse the battery from charging to discharging and the dots turn round. The figures behind it refresh every five seconds, and the battery ring sweeps to its new level rather than jumping.

The live dot tells you whether to believe the page. The hub, Energy, Cost, System, Mains and Meter pages carry a small green dot beside their “Updated” time that pulses while the data is arriving. If nothing has arrived for a while (half a minute on the hub and Energy, three missed polls on the others) it turns amber, stops pulsing, and the words beside it change to “out of date” (on Mains and Meter, “not updating for four minutes”). It runs on its own timer rather than on the poll, because a poll that has died cannot be trusted to report that it has died — and only a poll that actually returned data clears it. The pages that count down to their next refresh instead (rooms, Heating, Active, Weather, Wi-Fi) have no dot. Their Updated time simply stops moving.

Sensors pulse while they are seeing something. A motion or presence tile on a room page breathes gently for as long as the sensor is detecting, so a glance tells you the difference between “someone is in the kitchen” and “someone was”.

A door in motion sweeps. Press Open on a garage or a front door and the button takes itself over: it fills, says what it is doing, counts the seconds, and a light sweep runs across the tile for as long as the contacts say the door is actually moving. It holds until the sensors confirm the door really has moved, goes red if it failed, and goes amber and tells you to go and look if nothing confirmed it either way. It is reporting the door, not the fact that Indigo accepted the request. With the Garage Door plugin the tile reads Opening… or Closing… as soon as the door starts to move, even on a page you opened part-way through.

Cameras are live video, not stills. The camera’s own H.264, relayed over WebRTC with no re-encoding, on the Cameras page and on the hub’s camera strip, wherever the connection is fast enough to carry it (the pages time it). On a slower one they show stills that cross-fade. The room pages show stills, and a tap opens that camera on the Cameras page. On a slow link — away from home over Tailscale, on mobile data — everything slows right down and then stops altogether after ten minutes untouched, because somebody is paying for those bytes.

Charts redraw rather than reload. The energy, cost, carbon and history charts update in place as new figures arrive, and the Timeline’s replay control pulses while it is playing.

Cards animate in once. A card slides in on the first paint of a page and never again. Identical output writes nothing to the page at all, so text stays selectable and anything you have opened stays open.

And all of it stops if you ask it to. Every animation sits behind prefers-reduced-motion. Turn motion down in your operating system and the dots, the pulses, the sweeps and the card entrances all go, while everything keeps working.

Tap to go deeper

Tiles that open a page of their own:

On this page	Tapping this	Opens
Hub	a room tile	that room, end to end
Hub	a camera in the strip	that camera selected and enlarged on Cameras
Hub	the weather, energy or timeline card	that page
Mains	any meter tile	that meter’s own page — its live reading, its rank against every other meter, its seven-day offset and its history
Wi-Fi	any access-point tile	that AP’s own page — per-radio state and every client on it
Menu	any room	that room
Timeline	a device name on the moment card	that device in the Timeline’s Chart view
Energy	the money figures	the Cost page, and back again
Room	a camera	the Cameras page, with that camera enlarged

Tiles that open in place, without leaving the page:

On this page	Tapping this	Opens
Room	a light or socket	its own controls, and a full colour picker for anything colour-capable
Room	a blind	its position control
Weather	any sensor	that sensor’s reading and its recent history
Cameras	a picture	select and enlarge it, giving it an available live slot
Cameras	Full screen / Close full screen	fill the screen / return
Cameras	All cameras / Selected camera	change layout within the same stream limit
Cameras	Details	show or hide addresses and connection figures
Hub	a Favourite	the device’s controls, in the tile
Energy	a deadline chip in the When to run it card	replans that appliance on the spot
Meter, System, Settings	a fold	the detail underneath, which stays open while you are on the page

And two things that look like they should be tappable and deliberately are not. A meter that is not answering shows no position on the voltage scale, because a frozen reading cannot be placed on a scale of live ones. And an appliance that has not run enough times to be measured gets no deadline chips, because there is nothing yet to schedule.

Controls, confirmation and the PIN

A control button does not flash a tick because the command was accepted. dashboards-action.js runs the action, takes the button over, and watches the device states until the thing has really happened — a device whose communication is disabled, or whose plugin has stopped, swallows a command without an error, and the page would otherwise show a switch flipped for ever while nothing moved. It checks back a few seconds later and reverts with a warning if the device disagrees.

Devices on the PIN list (Settings → Security) ask for the control PIN once per session before any command. It is a speed bump for a shared tablet, not a lock.

A guest-paired browser sees every page and can control nothing. It holds no API key, so the restriction is not a matter of the interface politely hiding buttons. It can still read every device’s state and see the cameras, so treat a guest link as a view of the house, see Guest devices.

Alerts

The Alerts page is where you tell the plugin what to watch: pick a device or a variable, choose a condition (“turns on”, “turns off”, “changes at all”, a variable fires whenever its value changes), and choose how you want to be told. From 3.47.0 the plugin keeps the rules and watches them on the Indigo server itself, so they fire whether or not any dashboard is open, with a thirty-second per-rule cooldown so a chattering sensor cannot spam you. Each rule can go out by:

Pushover, to your phone, through the Pushover plugin (it must be installed, enabled and running) and the user key in IndigoSecrets.py (PUSHOVER_USER_TOKEN) or Configure,
email, through Indigo’s own mail settings, to the address on the rule, else the default address on the Alerts page, else DASHBOARDS_ALERT_EMAIL in IndigoSecrets.py,
browser, a notification on any device that has the hub, a room page, Energy or Alerts open. This one still needs a page open, and a secure (https://) address, see Notifications and install need HTTPS. With several of those pages open, one notification is raised, not one per tab.

The page says which channels are ready (“Pushover: ready”, “plugin not running”, “no user key”), has a Send test button that reports each channel’s result, and lists the plugin’s recent alerts with what each channel did. Plugins → Dashboards → Send Test Alert does the same test from the Indigo menu and writes the result to the log. A channel that fails is logged as a warning (at most once every half hour for the same reason) and never stops the others.

Before 3.47.0 the rules lived in each browser and only fired while a page was open there. A browser that still holds rules from then is offered a one-click Move these rules to the plugin the first time it opens the Alerts page, as long as the plugin has none yet. They are removed from the browser only once the plugin has them. The server-side error watch on the same page is a different thing: it is always on and sends its own notifications.

Standalone app

The dashboard ships a web-app manifest, so it can be pinned as a proper standalone app rather than a browser tab.

iPhone / iPad — open the hub in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
Mac (Safari) — File → Add to Dock… (macOS Sonoma and later).
Mac / Windows (Chrome or Edge) — the install icon in the address bar, then Install, but only on a secure address (https://, or localhost on the Indigo Mac). Over the usual http://…:8176 address Chrome and Edge do not offer it, see Notifications and install need HTTPS. Safari’s Add to Home Screen and Add to Dock work over plain http.

Links inside the standalone app stay inside it — tapping through to room pages, the camera grid and so on does not bounce out to the browser.

On screens up to 600 pixels wide, Favourites uses three columns for controls, readings and room shortcuts. Names wrap, and the camera layout is unchanged.