Home Assistant powers my smart home, which consists of several smart devices. The built-in cards will work for fairly simplistic configurations like mine and may look a tad vanilla. Luckily, the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) hosts several repositories of custom add-ons, which include custom cards. To spruce up the cards on your Home Assistant's dashboard, dive into the vast array of custom cards available from HACS. Although the numerous choices can be overwhelming, I've selected a handful of custom cards from HACS that can enhance your Home Assistant experience.

5 Tuning in with a Mini Media Player card

Handy playback controls

The custom Mini Media Player card is a fantastic example of how a little customization can save effort and time. This minimalist media player card is an ideal first custom card, as it doesn't require you to add any code. You can select the entity (media player) from the dropdown when adding to the dashboard. Next, you can add other settings, such as sound mode, displaying the media source, and showing artwork. Most importantly, there's a dedicated option to add a volume slider, which comes in handy. Here's what the code for my card looks like:

type: custom:mini-media-player
volume_stateless: false
group: false
artwork: full-cover
entity: media_player.

The Mini Media Player combines all the customization options for multimedia playback into a single card. To use it, search for 'Mini Media Player' in the HACS section and download the repository.

4 Club multiple cards into a single vertical card

And then there was one

This is not to be confused with the default Vertical Stack card option, which lets you bunch cards into a single stack. It stacks multiple cards in a single column. What if you squeezed all those cards into a big one? That's what Vertical Stack in Card (sounds quite a mouthful) lets you do to keep the dashboard lean. To add it to the dashboard, you'll need to select the Vertical Stack card first and then add different cards you want to stack together.

The best part is that you get to customize every card you pick to add to a vertical stack and even move their positions. Unfortunately, you can't resize a card individually. A vertical stack in card option works if you don't want to build different dashboards by area or a specific type of smart device. You can stack buttons or switches together or put cards of an area into a single stack.

3 Adding more sliders to buttons and entities

Pick a simple or cool one

Sliders are easy to scrub and adjust the brightness of lights or volume in a media player. The default light card features a bulbous slider, which may not be intuitive for some users. Instead, you can add sliders to adjust brightness, temperature, color, volume, and more. To incorporate simple sliders, go for the Slider Entity Row custom card, which adds easily usable sliders. If you're comfortable with a YAML code editor, you can configure different entities in visual mode or quickly populate values.

Alternatively, the Slider Button card option turns an entire card into a slider. Scrubbing across the slider button card also changes the color of the slider, and you can change the direction of the slider as well.

2 Keep an eye on trends with charts and graphs

Tracking the progress

Building charts and graphics can provide a clear visual representation of the temperature history of energy usage in your home. To get a simple graphical view, grab the Mini Graph Card from HACS and enter it into your Home Assistant instance. Although there is no visual editor, it utilizes simple code to populate a graph. Here's an example of a graph card I made for my router's speeds:

type: custom:mini-graph-card
name: ASUSRouter
entities:
 - entity: sensor.asuspod_uptime
 - sensor.asuspod_download_speed
 - sensor.asuspod_upload_speed
show:
 graph: line

Would you like a more detailed chart or a graphical view? Then, check out ApexCharts. However, it deals with a complex code to calculate data input by date and chart the outcome in a line, bar, or pie chart view.

1 Amping up the aesthetics of the cards

Make them visually appealing

Polishing the look of the Home Assistant's dashboard requires custom cards. You'll need to work exclusively with the Code Editor to tweak a card to your heart's content. Start with custom button cards that allow you to create a tiled dashboard with various colors for simple button actions. Here's a simple code I used to create a custom button card for a floor lamp:

type: custom:button-card
color: rgb(150,255,150)
color_type: card
entity: light.bedroom_hue
icon: mdi:floor-lamp
name: Floor Lamp

Although they appear simple, these custom button cards are also fully customizable. For example, adding the Slider Entity Row code will also add a slider to your otherwise simple-looking custom button cards. You will never run out of ideas if you grab the Mushroom cards, a collection of custom cards designed to build a gorgeous yet detailed dashboard quickly. Scoop in the Bubble cards collection to jazz up and create an Android-like look with some of the cards.

For customization, the sky is the limit

HACS encouraged me to explore things beyond custom integrations. It is so easy to download and try out custom cards in a matter of a few minutes. I've gone down the rabbit hole of customizing the cards in every possible way I can. And if you have the time and coding skills, you can craft custom cards by combining a few repositories from HACS.