One feature of Home Assistant that I’ve only recently started using is Dashboard Badges. These are small widgets that appear at the top of your dashboard, and allow you to view information at a glance. There’s a screenshot above which shows the widgets that I currently have set up.
Badges have been part of Home Assistant for a long time, but they received a major overhaul last August in version 2024.8. In the (approximately) 18 months that I’ve been using Home Assistant, I’ve been gradually adding more and more data to my dashboard, to the point where I had to scroll through several screens worth of data to see what I needed. Which isn’t ideal. Badges are a potential solution, showing basic information at the top, where it’s most accessible.
Each badge widget can usually display the state of one entity. In the screenshot above, I’ve included:
- The temperature in our dining room, as recorded by our Nest thermostat
- The current weather (it was, in fact, not raining when I took this screenshot)
- The current power output of our solar panels
- How much charge our solar battery currently has
- The current status of our dishwasher
- The current status of the TV in the living room
- The current status of the sun
- The latest version of Home Assistant
There’s a moderate amount of customisation available. For example, as well as the status of the entity, you can include its name, and this text is also customisable to save space if needed. You can also tweak the colours and the icons.
Controlling visibility of badges
One great feature that badges have in Home Assistant is controlling when they’re visible. I actually have more badges than the eight mentioned above, but they’re not showing as I don’t currently need the information offered. For example, I have a badge that displays whether an update to Home Assistant is available. But I only want to see this when an update is available – if I’m running the latest version, I want the badge to be hidden. Here’s how I configured it:
Having selected the widget, I’ve gone to the ‘Visibility’ tab, selected the entity, and told Home Assistant to only display it when the ‘State is equal to’ and ‘Update available’.
I use this on some other badges too. For example, if there’s no power coming from the solar panels, that badge disappears. Similarly, if my solar battery is at 20% or below, which is its idle state, that’s hidden too. You can also control the visibility based on which user is currently logged in, or anything really – the state of one entity can control the visibility of the badge for another.
A useful badge is one that makes use of the custom Octopus Energy integration from HACS, and will display if I haven’t used my Octopus Wheel of Fortune spins that month. Last month, I won 800 Octopoints, which was nice, and it’s helpful to have a reminder to use them.
By using badges, and setting their visibility, I’ve reduced the number of cards on my dashboard significantly. It makes the dashboard less overwhelming, and prioritises the most important information that I need to see quickly.