I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard

nharziro | a day ago

this is so cool! i love it.

phs318u | 2 hours ago

Perhaps “cool” is the wrong word. Did you notice the temperature recorded inside the house? 24degC (26 in the office). A little too warm for my taste.

stavros | 54 minutes ago

Unless it was taken in the summer, in which case it's really cold.

dzhiurgis | a day ago

This is beautiful. Reminds me floor796.

I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.

What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.

The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.

p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.

zerolunier | a day ago

where are you based, how much you paid for it ?

melody_calling | a day ago

Really well done, nice work!

_virtu | 2 hours ago

Pro tip you don’t even need an illustrator. While I do encourage hiring humans to do this work you can also use PolyCam with a phone that supports lidar, export it to Claude with Blender and voila.

tiagod | an hour ago

Pro tip the whole point is that it was made by an illustrator, and that's also the reason it's on the frontpage.

vntok | an hour ago

Maybe the reason is simply that it's a cool idea?

This is typically the kind of hacking project that is preposterously non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers, let alone regular folks. Now, for the first time ever, AI is making it actually palatable for everyone who wants it done to have it done... and certainly much cheaper too at an equivalent quality level.

orphea | 51 minutes ago

I'm sorry, I have a hard time understanding you. Correct me if I'm wrong, are you saying that

1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and

2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?

KZerda | 24 minutes ago

Commissioning art like this is at most a few hundred dollars. As was posted elsewhere, there are lots of young artists that need to pad out their portfolios, as well as artists in places where the cost of living is significantly cheaper. This isn't a multi-thousand-dollar thing that only the 1% could afford.

scubbo | 54 minutes ago

It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.

hatthew | 57 minutes ago

Most people don't have lidar phones, and commissioning this art is about the same price as buying a lidar phone.

happyopossum | 47 minutes ago

> Most people don't have lidar phones

the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...

dwnw | 26 minutes ago

Most people don't have lidar phones. The statement is still very true, even if you said US only. What are you trying to say?

Tellusion | 2 hours ago

I love that you hired an illustrator to make this!

minasrc | 2 hours ago

appreciate you sharing the artist name!

Legend2440 | an hour ago

Cool, but if you can afford to hire an illustrator to make a custom dashboard for your lights and thermostat, you're clearly in the 1%.

sho_hn | an hour ago

I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.

You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.

krisbolton | an hour ago

Disposable income and being in the 1% are entirely different things.

fragmede | an hour ago

I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?

kenferry | an hour ago

How much do you they think they paid? By home improvement standards, might not be out of line at all.

I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!

loloquwowndueo | 49 minutes ago

You say it like it’s a bad thing?

aussiethebob | 20 minutes ago

And?

AuthAuth | 18 minutes ago

Its $100 at most. Thats something majority of people can afford.

ideasphere | an hour ago

This is the illustrator: https://linktr.ee/owenyeconiel

It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!

stronglikedan | an hour ago

The illustrator probably didn't want to pay for more prominent credit than the standard, which is included at the end of the post.

ajkjk | 8 minutes ago

... weird way to say that

skyberrys | an hour ago

The illustrator did beautiful work, it's amazing how much different your program became from the original dashboard to one simple home gui.

palmotea | 50 minutes ago

1. Hiring a human illustrator is the right thing to do, and I applaud this guy.

2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.

beachy | 35 minutes ago

The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".

gerdesj | 47 minutes ago

Great job and a cracking write up. The notes on making sure you get layers etc right so you can animate effectively is great advice.

Thank you.

cringleycringe | 16 minutes ago

I hired an AI to do it faster and cheaper

zatkin | 14 minutes ago

Whose attention are you trying to capture by making this post?

cringleycringe | 9 minutes ago

Yours