Home Assistant, on the wall, done properly.

Capable hardware, let down by its software

Android wall panels are genuinely good hardware wrapped in genuinely bad software. The dashboard lags, taps vanish, the vendor’s own app elbows its way onto the screen, and every vendor demands a different app and a different ritual to set it up. Most people simply endure it, because a panel with no buttons and no dependable reset is an expensive thing to break.

Panel Assistant is the free and open-source cure. It does one job: run your Home Assistant dashboards on the wall, quickly and without fuss. Every panel you own is set up and managed the same way, from Home Assistant, with nothing to nurse, tune or tweak by hand.

Performance you can feel

Your existing dashboards, fed only the data they actually use, so the panel answers the moment you touch it.

Set up from Home Assistant

Add a panel the way you add any other device: from Settings, in your browser, without a command line in sight.

Safe to install

Checked before anything changes, refuses to overwrite what it should not, and picks up where it left off if interrupted.

The panel's hardware, in Home Assistant

Screen, LEDs, buttons, relays, light and proximity sensors appear as entities automatically, driven directly with no vendor libraries in the way.

Panel and house, working together

Dims with the room and wakes as you approach. Where the panel lacks a sensor, Home Assistant drives the screen instead.

Every panel, one system

Different makes and models look and behave identically in Home Assistant. Another panel joins the same setup, not a second app.

Made for the wall

Built for dedicated, mains-powered panels that behave like part of the house, not a tablet that needs charging and minding.

Know before you buy

The hardware pages say what works on each model, how far, and what to expect, before you spend the money or the evenings.

Only the entities your dashboard uses

10–100×less Home Assistant state traffic reaching the panel, measured in real homes

A dashboard on a wall panel normally receives every state change in the house, whether it shows that entity or not. On a large installation a low-powered panel spends its time decoding thousands of entities it never displays, and that is usually why it lags.

Panel Assistant’s entity filter learns which entities your dashboard really depends on, by reading its configuration and by watching the dashboard while it runs, then asks Home Assistant to send only those. Home Assistant does the filtering before anything is sent, so the rest never reaches the panel.

It is the difference between a panel that lags and one that answers the moment you touch it. See how it works and how to turn it on.

Getting a panel up, whatever shape its firmware is in

Most panels arrive from an overseas marketplace with a thin manual and no promise that anything beyond the vendor’s own app will ever run on them. You discover whether it works only after the money and the evenings are spent. Panel Assistant is meant to take that uncertainty away: check your model before you buy, and know that once it arrives there is a tested, repeatable way to get it running.

The hard part of any panel is the first hour. Panel Assistant does that hour for you, from inside Home Assistant. If the panel is already on your network, give the integration its address and it does the rest. If it is still in the box, plug it into your laptop with a USB cable and install straight from your browser, before it ever goes on the wall. If the panel asks you to authorise debugging, accept the prompt on its screen, then watch the installation through.

Panel not on the list? Describe it, and it is

Hardware support in Panel Assistant is data, not code. Every model is described by a profile: how to recognise the panel, what hardware it carries, and which routes are safe for driving its screen, LEDs, relays and sensors. Profiles are plain text, edited and validated in your browser, with no development tools and no rebuild. A panel the project has never seen still gets the essentials from the conservative Generic profile, and you can teach it the rest and share the result.

Performance you can measure

Cheap panels are slow for reasons, and Panel Assistant shows you the reasons. The panel’s status page measures tap latency, time to interactive, main-thread blocking, unexpected reloads, state updates per second and the three entities responsible for most of them, alongside CPU, memory and temperature. A likely-cause row reads all of that and tells you what is holding the panel back.

Fit it, forget it

A wall panel should behave like a light switch: always there, never needing you. Panel Assistant learns the normal light in the room and dims with it, uses calibrated proximity so the selected hand gesture wakes the screen, releases memory overnight while the screen is off, and reopens the last good dashboard by itself after a restart.

Talk to it

A panel with a microphone can act as a Home Assistant Assist satellite on the device it already has, with no separate device to add. Turn it on from the panel’s Configure page. It listens for Okay Nabu, Hey Jarvis, Hey Mycroft or Alexa on the panel itself, sends your command to Home Assistant only after it hears one, and speaks the answer through the panel’s speaker. Each wake word can use its own Assist pipeline, you can train a wake word of your own, and any Home Assistant text-to-speech voice can make announcements through the speaker. Set up the voice assistant.

Vendor software, tamed

Panel Assistant takes over the home screen and gives a button-less panel an on-screen way to get around. It keeps a vendor’s control widget from drawing over your dashboard, while refusing by design to touch anything the panel needs to stay alive.

New, and moving fast

Panel Assistant is new and evolving quickly. Three panel families have full hardware support today, owners have confirmed three more, one Shelly Wall Display X2i has been tested, and the rest of the Shelly Wall Display family is documented. Getting every Android wall panel worth mounting onto that list takes real hardware in real houses, which is where you come in.

Star the project on GitHubThe simplest way to tell other Home Assistant users this exists.Report your panelModel name and what worked, or share the profile you taught it.Chat on DiscordQuestions, panels in the wild, and what to build next.

Go deeper

Getting startedFour steps from a bare panel to your dashboard on the wall.How it worksWhat goes on the panel, and what stays in Home Assistant.HardwareEvery documented panel, its firmware and its quirks.Install the integrationAdd Panel Assistant through HACS.Install over USBA new panel, a cable, and your browser.TroubleshootingWhat usually goes wrong, and where to look first.

Free, open, and yours

Everything here is free and open-source software under permissive licences, with no account, no cloud service and no subscription. It is built by a Home Assistant user who wanted wall panels to work the way the hardware always promised, and it is shared so that yours can too.

It is meant to belong to the community that uses and improves it. Contributions are merged under their authors’ names and credited to them.

The icon includes the Home Assistant mark, which remains the property of the Home Assistant project and is not covered by this project’s licence. Panel Assistant is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Home Assistant or the Open Home Foundation. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.