broadsheet

Home Assistant, rendered as a magazine.

A front-end for Home Assistant shaped like a publication. Italic display serif. Newsreader body. Pages, not screens. Prose, not specs.

Adapts to whatever you already have in HA — areas, lights, climates, locks, media players, sensors. No house.yaml to write before it works. Install, point at your HA, see your house.

One opinionated take on what a home dashboard could feel like, if you wanted it to feel less like software.

🛠 Early-tester soak. broadsheet is in a small private soak — a handful of trusted HA users running it on real installs while it bakes. If you're testing it, please read docs/EARLY-TESTERS.md — it covers what's stable vs fresh, what kind of feedback is most useful, and how to file what. Bug reports go to Issues; everything else lives in Discussions.

Install

broadsheet ships as a Home Assistant add-on. One install path, zero credentials to handle.

Requirements

• Home Assistant OS or Supervised install (the kinds that have the add-on store). Most people run HA OS — if you installed via the official HA image on a Pi, NUC, or a VM, you're set.
• HA 2024.4 or newer.
• amd64 is the tested, supported architecture. The aarch64 image builds in CI and is published, but hasn't yet been verified on real ARM hardware — treat it as experimental for v0.1. (Pi users: it should work; reports welcome.)

Running HA Container or HA Core? v0.1 doesn't ship for those (no Supervisor = no add-on store). Docker support is on the roadmap — open an issue if that's you. Volume of requests will tell us when to prioritise it.

Install in two minutes

1. Add the add-on repository to your HA add-on store:

   

2. In Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store, find broadsheet, click Install.

3. Click Start, then Open Web UI.

That's it. The add-on auto-authenticates against your HA via the Supervisor token — no long-lived token to paste, no .env to fill in. broadsheet appears in your HA sidebar and stays there.

By default broadsheet can control your house (lights, climate, etc.) — you installed it as your dashboard, so that's the sane default. Set the add-on's read_only option to true to make it a read-only viewer. (lock.* writes are hard-banned regardless.)

For building from source, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

What you get

Eight surfaces, each shaped for what it's actually for — not a uniform grid of tiles. Every page discovers what's relevant from your HA at boot: a new room added in HA tonight is on the right pages tomorrow, no editing.

One frontend, not two

On install broadsheet takes over the HA frontend — the HA sidebar collapses, the broadsheet ingress becomes your landing surface, and the eight to ten settings broadsheet renders natively (People / Areas / Entities / Voice / Plugins / Integrations / Add-ons / Devices / Logs) read like prose, not a config tree. A single "Open HA settings" affordance in the kebab nav drops you into HA's own UI for the unusual flows (initial integration setup wizards, debug snapshots, advanced YAML). HA stays whole; broadsheet just stops being a peer frontend you have to remember to visit.

Roll back: the addon's sidebar_takeover option is on by default but flip it to false to keep HA's sidebar in place and run broadsheet as a peer frontend instead.

Voice — Harold, or your own

A built-in voice substrate (@broadsheet/voice plugin) wires a WebSocket-streamed STT + LLM + TTS pipeline through HA's existing conversation framework. Discovers your installed HA conversation agents (HA-native intent matcher, Whisper, OpenAI Conversation, Anthropic, etc) and your TTS providers (HA Cloud, Piper, ElevenLabs, OpenAI). HA-native intent matching gets first attempt on every utterance (lights, scenes, climate — sub-200ms response, zero LLM spend); only unmatched intents fall through to your LLM of choice.

Ships with Harold as the opinionated preset (@broadsheet/harold-preset) — Hitchcock-register British baritone, Claude Haiku for the conversational layer, ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 for TTS, the "Hey Harold" custom wake-word model + Atom Echo satellite configuration, the meeting-mode hard-mute, the Italian-when-spoken-Italian detection, the garbled-input filter, and the conversational memory layer. Tap to install on first launch, or ignore it and pair voice with whatever LLM/TTS you already pay for.

If your HA install has things broadsheet doesn't know how to render (custom integrations, exotic device classes), they show up in an Unsorted section with a one-click "hide / pin / categorise" affordance. Out-of-the-box render coverage is the goal; manual curation is the escape hatch.

Plugins

broadsheet ships with three first-class plugins in the box, off by default. Enable them in Settings → Plugins — each one says its status honestly (active / enabled-but-checks-not-met / why it can't load):

• @broadsheet/emanations — multi-person presence painting on / and a dedicated /emanations page. Procedural by default; uses your own room paintings when you provide them.
• @broadsheet/ghost-cloud — The Long Take. 24-hour radar event playback per room as a translucent water-membrane time-tube. Ships with demo data; for the advanced user with mmWave radar.
• @broadsheet/tmdb-tv — Trending and New content rows on /tv, from TMDB. Needs a free TMDB API key (entered in the plugin's settings panel).

The plugin contract is documented in docs/RENDERER-CONTRACT.md.

Why this exists

The Home Assistant frontend ecosystem is rich. Mushroom, Bubble Card, Tile, the Lovelace strategy generators — there's a mature, well-loved set of options for laying out tiles, sliders, and status chips, and most of them are excellent at what they do.

broadsheet is a different shape — not because the others are wrong, but because some people want a register the existing options don't aim for. Italic display serif. Sentence headlines. Three deliberate tap-targets above the fold instead of forty. A page where the live painting takes the visual centre and the controls quietly sit beside it.

If you love your Mushroom config, keep your Mushroom config. broadsheet isn't an upgrade — it's a stylistic alternative for the cohort that opens HA's default dashboard and thinks this is fine but it doesn't quite feel like something I'd want on the wall in my hallway.

Adapt to your house

Out of the box, broadsheet uses what HA already knows: areas, devices, entities, the relationships between them. If your HA install is reasonably tidy (areas named, devices assigned), you'll see a sensible broadsheet on first load with no configuration.

When you want it more your-shape, Settings in the kebab nav opens an in-app curation layer — no YAML:

• House — every area + entity broadsheet found, with rename / hide / move-to-area. Place a device in a room and its entities follow.
• People — broadsheet finds your person.* entities; for each, pick the presence sensor you actually trust. (A warning is surfaced for the iOS Companion-App GPS-suspension case that bites Pixel/iPhone mixed households.)
• Voice — the editorial strings. Default copy ships in English; you override per section.
• Plugins — enable / disable the first-class plugins, see each one's live status, open its config panel.
• Pages — author custom pages from your own things (since 0.9.1). See below.

Curation is persisted to the add-on's data volume as broadsheet.json (and so rides HA's snapshot/backup system). You can edit that file directly if you prefer files to UIs — the Settings panel is a thin wrapper over it.

Custom pages + the wall builder (0.9.x)

Beyond the eight core pages, broadsheet ships with a things-first custom page editor. You browse the controllable things in your house (grouped by room, then by Lights / TV / Heating / Locks / …) and tap or drag them onto a canvas. broadsheet picks the right widget for the entity's domain automatically — a light becomes a toggle, a scene becomes a fire-tile, a TV becomes a full remote.

Composed recipes do more in one tap: "Living Room lights — panel" drops a single block that renders every light in the area inline + grows as you add more lights in HA. "Living Room media — panel" drops the TV remote + speakers together. "All Living Room lights — off" drops a one-tap macro across N lights.

Plugins can contribute their own blocks to the browser. When @broadsheet/tmdb-tv is enabled, every TV-having area gets an extra recipe — " TV — TMDB show & movie rows" — so the browse-and- play poster grid lands on YOUR wall page right next to the remote.

For wall-mounted tablets, the page editor includes a Wall device preset picker (Fire HD 10, Galaxy Tab A9, iPad, Pixel Tablet, etc.)

• a Kiosk URL + Fully Kiosk Browser hints. The preview pane renders at the device's native dimensions, scaled to fit your editor screen.

• docs/WALL-BUILDER-GUIDE.md — step-by-step "build your first kiosk surface in 5 minutes".
• docs/CUSTOM-PAGES-GUIDE.md — full reference for the things-first editor + every block type.
• docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md — the operational gotchas.
• docs/IMPORTER-GUIDE.md — bringing an existing Lovelace dashboard across.

Architecture

For people who care:

• SvelteKit 2 + Svelte 5 runes, adapter-static — pure-static build, no server runtime.
• Single persistent WebSocket per device, owned by the layout. Auto-reconnect with exponential backoff. Application-level heartbeat (30s ping / 10s pong-timeout / force-close on zombie) — survives HA restarts cleanly.
• Three discovery layers — HA's registries (Layer 1) → a domain model (Layer 2) → your curation overrides (Layer 3). See docs/DISCOVERY-CONTRACT.md.
• A frozen plugin contract — plugins register pages, renderers, settings panels, and discovery contributors. The three first-class plugins are bundled + lazy-chunked; a disabled plugin's code is in the image but never fetched. See docs/RENDERER-CONTRACT.md.
• Same-origin reverse proxy — the add-on's nginx fronts the static SPA and proxies /api/* to HA's Core API with the Supervisor token injected, so the SPA never handles a credential.
• Safety rails — every service call passes a read-only / audit-log envelope; lock.* writes are hard-banned regardless of settings.

Everything else lives in the architecture deep-dive.

Status

v0.1 — in production-canary, ship target ~3 weeks (2026-06-06). Running daily against the author's real HA across three surfaces (phone, desktop, wall tablet). Scope expanded 2026-05-16 after the V2 fresh-user dogfood surfaced two product-shaped omissions — the "frontend takeover" and "voice + Harold" stories below. Both land before ship.

What's done:

• The eight core surfaces (/, /lights, /heat, /door, /tv, /body, /wall, /settings).
• Discovery + the in-app curation layer (House / People / Voice / Plugins).
• The HA add-on packaging — auto-credential flow, ingress, the broadsheet HA theme.
• The plugin system + all three first-class plugins (emanations / ghost-cloud / tmdb-tv).
• Lovelace importer (27 translators, 98% real-world coverage).
• Full markdown renderer (CommonMark + GFM via marked + DOMPurify).

What's in flight (v0.1.0 ship blockers):

• Frontend takeover — broadsheet collapses HA's sidebar on install + becomes the landing surface, with broadsheet-native UIs for the 6-8 most-touched HA settings (People / Areas / Entities / Integrations / Add-ons / Devices / Logs / Voice). See docs/plans/plan-sidebar-takeover.md + docs/plans/plan-ha-settings-native-uis.md.
• Voice substrate — @broadsheet/voice plugin discovering HA's installed conversation agents + TTS providers; HA-native intent matcher first, LLM fall-through. See docs/plans/plan-voice-substrate.md.
• Harold preset — @broadsheet/harold-preset one-tap install of Hitchcock register + Claude Haiku + ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 + the "Hey Harold" wakeword + meeting-mode + Italian detection + conversational memory. See docs/plans/plan-harold-preset.md.

What's still raw:

• aarch64 is built but not yet hardware-verified (see Requirements).
• Theming — one editorial register ships; multiple registers planned.
• The plugins' deeper modes — emanations' painting-set authoring, ghost-cloud's live-radar pull (v0.1 ships demo data) — are follow-ons.

What needs help:

• Translations beyond English.
• Apple Health bridge for /body (Pixel / Health Connect only today).
• ARM hardware testing.
• Local-only voice testing (Ollama + Piper combinations) — the voice plugin is designed to support this, real-world coverage is the open question.

Contributing

Issues, PRs, and screenshots of your install are very welcome. The codebase is small and well-documented — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup, the workspace layout, and the doc reading order. pnpm dev produces a working local instance against your own HA in under five minutes.

MIT licensed — see LICENSE. Use broadsheet's editorial language in something you ship if you like; fork and rebrand wholesale if you like.

Acknowledgments

The four-font studio register and editorial paradigm were originally built for a single private house, alongside the public studio project at haroldathome.com. broadsheet is the extracted, generalised version — same paradigm, none of the personal specifics.