How to Set Up a Local Security Dashboard in Home Assistant

A well-designed security dashboard gives you instant visibility into your home security state — open doors, motion sensors, camera feeds, alarm status, and lock states on a single screen. Here is how to build one in Home Assistant that looks professional and updates in real time.

Planning Your Dashboard Layout

A security dashboard should answer these questions at a glance: Is the alarm armed or disarmed? Are all doors and windows closed? Are any motion sensors currently detecting motion? What do the cameras see right now? Are all locks locked?

Step 1: Create a New Dashboard

In Home Assistant, go to Settings → Dashboards → Add Dashboard. Name it “Security” and choose a shield icon. Switch to Edit mode and select “Start with an empty dashboard.”

Step 2: Add the Alarm Control Panel Card

type: alarm-panel
entity: alarm_control_panel.home_alarm
name: Security System
states:
  - arm_away
  - arm_home
  - arm_night

The alarm panel card shows the current alarm state with color coding (green = disarmed, yellow = armed home, red = triggered) and includes the keypad for code entry.

Step 3: Door and Window Status Grid

type: entities
title: Doors and Windows
entities:
  - entity: binary_sensor.front_door
    name: Front Door
  - entity: binary_sensor.back_door
    name: Back Door
  - entity: binary_sensor.kitchen_window
    name: Kitchen Window
state_color: true

With state_color: true, open sensors show in red and closed sensors show in green automatically.

Step 4: Live Camera Grid

type: grid
columns: 2
square: false
cards:
  - type: picture-entity
    entity: camera.frigate_front_door
    name: Front Door
    show_state: false
  - type: picture-entity
    entity: camera.frigate_backyard
    name: Backyard
    show_state: false

Step 5: Lock Status Row

type: entities
title: Locks
entities:
  - entity: lock.front_door
    name: Front Door Lock
state_color: true

Locked shows green, unlocked shows red. Tap any lock entity to lock or unlock directly from the dashboard.

Step 6: Motion Sensor Status

type: glance
title: Motion Sensors
entities:
  - entity: binary_sensor.entry_motion
    name: Entry
  - entity: binary_sensor.living_room_motion
    name: Living Room
state_color: true

Making the Dashboard Tablet-Friendly

Mount an old iPad or Android tablet near your entry door showing this dashboard in kiosk mode (full-screen, no browser chrome). The Home Assistant Companion app has a kiosk mode setting. A $30–50 used tablet makes a dedicated security panel that is always on and always current.

Related: Want alerts on your phone too, not just the dashboard? See how to send Home Assistant alerts to Telegram for free.

Show only what needs attention

A dashboard with 20 always-visible cards is harder to scan at a glance than one that highlights problems. Use conditional cards so an entity only appears when it needs attention — a door card that’s hidden while closed and appears when open, a battery-low card that’s invisible until a sensor actually drops below 20%. The result is a dashboard that’s empty (reassuring) most of the time and impossible to miss the one time something’s actually wrong.

Keeping a kiosk tablet fast

A wall-mounted tablet running Lovelace 24/7 can slow down over weeks if the dashboard has live camera feeds or frequently-updating graphs. Two fixes: use snapshot images (a static Frigate thumbnail that updates every few seconds) instead of a live MJPEG stream for the main view, and disable animations/transitions in the dashboard’s raw configuration — both meaningfully reduce the load on a budget tablet’s aging browser engine.

Wall-mounted vs. mobile: different dashboards on purpose

Don’t reuse the same dashboard for both. The wall tablet benefits from large touch targets and the always-attention-visible layout above; the phone dashboard is better as a condensed summary with a handful of the highest-priority controls (arm/disarm, front door lock, cameras) since it’s used in short, distracted glances, not a full security review.

Designing for every household member

A dashboard built by and for the most technical person in the house often fails everyone else. Larger touch targets and bigger text on a wall-mounted panel matter more than they seem for older household members or anyone glancing at it quickly; a consistent color convention (red genuinely means “needs attention,” never used decoratively elsewhere) prevents the panel from crying wolf. The best security dashboard is the one a less technical family member can glance at and correctly understand in two seconds, not the one that looks most impressive to you.