Once you get so far with adding smart devices to your home, you realize that not every device is easily controlled via voice assistants and that digging out your phone for app control gets tiresome. Having a smart display like the Google Home Hub or Nest Hub gives you a touch-controlled screen to see what's on your playlist, calendar, and to-do list while making it easier to control some aspects of your home.

But there comes a time when the Home Hub will fail you. Maybe it's an integration that's awkward to use via voice commands, or some new smart home sensors that don't play nice with Google Home. Or you want a custom display that Google doesn't provide. And that's where Home Assistant comes in. It's the best way to control almost any smart device you can think of (or dream up!), but it doesn't have its own nice smart display.

So I fixed that for my home, with one app running on an Android tablet. Now I have a smart display that wakes when I'm near, goes back to sleep when I'm not, and can show me the parts of my smart home I want, including handy calendar reminders. It's made a big difference in how I interact with my smart home, and I can't wait to add more devices, so I can tweak the dashboard even more.

Home Assistant on a touchscreen tablet is magical

I've only just begun and I can't wait to bring more things into my dashboard

One of the things that always bugged me about the Google Home Hub (or the later Nest Hub) was the interface. I never liked how locked down it was, or that only a few Android apps worked with it, or that I couldn't customize it to my liking. It also lacks deep automation support, and, of course, it's limited to Google Assistant. But ever since discovering Home Assistant, I've wanted to replace my smart display, and then I found the app to help.

Gone are the limitations of a smart dashboard designed to use only a few scattered apps and services. In its place is an open-source, robust dashboard that I can pull any of my smart devices into, for those times I don't feel like remembering which voice commands do what. It's been liberating, but it's only the start of what's to come.

My smart home is probably typical for anyone who didn't plan ahead and purchase everything at once. I've got Sonos speakers, Echo Dots, Nest Minis, and a cornucopia of other ecosystems, including Eve, Leviton, Hue, and a handful of others. None of it works in one place normally, although HomeKit does a surprisingly good job of things. But it wasn't until I stuck Home Assistant on my NAS that things clicked, and then I wanted it on a smart display.

The Home Assistant app does a good job of replicating your dashboard and letting you add more devices and tweak things, but that's not ideal for a smart display, as it's too easy to swipe it away and leave the tablet on the homescreen. Turning an Android tablet I had lying around into a kiosk with another app was the missing link to what I wanted to accomplish, and now I've got a smart display that I can customize, use the apps I'm used to, and show various parts of my smart home at a glance that wasn't possible before.

What you need to replace your Google Home Hub or Nest Hub

Almost any touchscreen tablet will do, although the process is different for each

Getting a custom dashboard display from Home Assistant depends on which tablet you have. I had an Android tablet and found a fantastic app that turns it into a kiosk display. This app gives you the option to lock the tablet to the Home Assistant dashboard view and prevents other apps from taking over. Or if you prefer, you can create your own Android Launcher with Home Assistant and a few other apps, so you can still do video calls and other functions. It's really simple to get started, once you've picked up a few things:

• Android tablet: Almost any model will work, as long as it runs Android 4.4 or newer.
• Fully Kios Browser & Lockdown: This is the Android app where the magic happens.
• Home Assistant: The Android app, running on your tablet and connected to your HA instance.
• A running installation of Home Assistant

You can also add the Fully Kiosk integration to Home Assistant, which lets you remotely control Fully Kiosk from HA, and use commands and see the camera feed from your tablet if motion detection is set to on. Note that motion detection is part of the paid license for Fully, which is around $9.50 to unlock as a one-time fee.

Other essential features behind that license include locking the tablet into kiosk mode with a PIN code needed to leave the launcher or app you have set to display, and using the camera and other tablet sensors as room occupancy sensors to wake the tablet screen as someone approaches. Once you've set up Fully Kiosk and are happy with the basic features, it's well worth the one-time cost to get the huge list of advanced features that will make your smart display even better.

You can also use other tablets if you have them:

• iPad: Use the Home Assistant companion app. You can use Guided Access to lock users out from switching to other apps.
• Kindle: With a jailbroken Kindle, you can use the Home Assistant Lovelace Kindle Screensaver. This isn't interactive, but it will periodically take a screenshot of your HA dashboard that gets sent to your Kindle as a screensaver image.

A custom dashboard for your smart home is the best way to repurpose that old tablet

While I've added a custom Android dashboard to control my smart home via a self-hosted Home Assistant instance, I haven't removed any of my smart speakers. To my mind, some tasks are easier on the tablet, while others are simple enough to handle via voice commands. The power of Home Assistant is that I can add the dashboard features that I want, without worrying if the manufacturer of my smart display is going to change things. I can't wait to create custom HTML cards to enhance the aesthetic of my dashboard and add more devices to control.