Your first dashboard¶
Onboarding offers four starting points. Everything stays editable afterwards, whichever you pick.
Set up your areas in Home Assistant first
HKI 7 builds its rooms from Home Assistant's areas. If you have not assigned your devices to areas yet, do that before auto-generating — otherwise there is nothing for the importer to build rooms from, and you will get a dashboard with no rooms in it.
In Home Assistant: Settings → Areas, labels & zones. Create an area per room, optionally group them into floors, then assign each device to one under Settings → Devices & Services → Devices.
It is worth ten minutes. Areas are also what make the room screens, the per-room counters and the room-role slots work, and Home Assistant itself uses them for area-targeted automations.
Auto-generate¶
Recommended for most people. HKI 7 reads your Home Assistant areas, floors and entities and builds a dashboard from them: a Home page with the things that matter, and a room for each area you have.
No areas means no rooms. Auto-generation has nothing to group entities by, so you get a Home page and an empty Rooms page. Set the areas up in Home Assistant and re-run the import, or add rooms by hand afterwards.
Auto-generation is a one-time starting point, not a live mirror. The moment you edit anything, the dashboard switches from Automatic to Manual mode and HKI 7 stops regenerating it — your arrangement is yours, and a new entity in Home Assistant will not shuffle it around. You can see which mode you are in as the subtitle under Settings › Dashboard.
Adding things later
In Manual mode, new Home Assistant entities do not appear on their own. Add them in edit mode, or use global search to reach them without putting them on a page at all.
Start empty¶
Builds nothing. You get the Home and Rooms pages and an empty canvas, and you add every button, stack and widget yourself in edit mode. Choose this if you have a specific layout in mind and would rather not undo someone else's guesses.
Restore a backup¶
If you have used HKI 7 before, restore instead of rebuilding. Three sources are offered:
| Source | What it needs |
|---|---|
| Local file | A backup file on the device or in cloud storage the file picker can see |
| Google Drive | Sign-in to your own Google account; backups live in the app's private Drive area |
| Home Assistant | The HKI 7 Cloud component installed on your server |
See Backup and restore for how each one works and what a backup contains.
Import from family¶
If someone in your household is an HKI 7 admin and has published a dashboard to you, it shows up here — pick it and it is imported, complete with its rooms, widgets, pages, navigation order and theme.
If the list is empty, one of two things is true, and the screen says which:
- No HKI 7 Cloud component. An admin needs to install it on your Home Assistant first.
- Nothing shared with you yet. The component is there, but no dashboard names you as a recipient. Ask your admin to publish one.
Permissions¶
The last onboarding step offers three permissions, with a progress counter. All three are optional; the app is fully usable with none of them.
- Notifications
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Lets Home Assistant alerts reach the phone, including actionable notifications with buttons. See Notifications.
- Background location
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Keeps presence detection and zone automations working while the app is closed. Android requires this to be granted in two moves: allow location, then choose Allow all the time in system settings. See Presence and location.
- Unrestricted background usage
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Stops Android from delaying battery reporting and presence updates when it decides the app has been idle too long.
Each one can be turned on later — notifications under Settings › Notifications, the other two under Settings › Location, which also shows the current state of each permission and links straight to the relevant Android settings screen.
Next¶
Your dashboard opens with a Quick start dialog showing the five gestures that get you around the app — including the pull-down on the header that reaches edit mode and settings. It is worth the thirty seconds.