A panel for Home Assistant. An app for Apple Home or Home Assistant.

A picture of your home.
Until you reach for it.

Hauser turns a wall tablet or your phone into a calm view of your home. One room filling the screen, or all of them at once — either way the picture is the state: it follows the sun, the weather and the lamps that are on. Touch it, and the controls come forward. On the wall it runs on Home Assistant. In your pocket it is a native iOS app that also runs with Apple Home, no server needed.

Open the live demo Install it
The home screen in full screen: the sunlit living-room illustration fills the panel, and one narrow control surface on the left carries the six rooms, the scenes Cozy, Bright and Off, the room’s lamps, its blinds and its climate. The h signet sits in the middle of the title bar. The same home screen in the all-rooms view after dark: six room tiles, each with its own illustration. The living room and the bedroom carry their lit evening picture and a small note saying how many lamps are on; the kitchen and the bathroom stand in their dark picture with no lamp on at all.

Full screen. One room, the whole wall. All rooms. Lit where a lamp is on.

Two views of the same home screen, both captured from the running app. After dark the all-rooms view reads from across the hallway: a room with a lamp on carries its lit picture, a room with every lamp out carries the dark one. Your own rooms are drawn from a photograph you take with your phone.

The house is the stage.
The interface is the light on it.

A wall panel is touched for perhaps five per cent of its day. Most home dashboards are designed for those five per cent: tiles, numbers, a grid. Hauser is designed for the other ninety-five. It is the first smart-home interface that people describe not as practical, but as calm and beautiful. Whether that holds is decided in three moments.

  1. 01

    The glance

    Standby is a picture on the wall that lives with the day: paper, map, week, season, weather as an ink trace.
  2. 02

    The room

    The illustration is the state — one room on the whole wall, or all of them as tiles. Light, dusk, weather and the lamps show in the picture.
  3. 03

    The touch

    Every command has physical weight. Light comes on fast and goes out slowly. Undo instead of confirmation.

01 · The glance

Most of the day, the panel is a picture on the wall. So the picture got the most care.

After a few idle minutes the panel settles into standby: a large clock, the household's post-its, the shopping list, and the week ahead lying open on the map as seven columns with a fine line per day. And behind all of it, faintly, the streets of your own neighbourhood.

The map is not a texture. It is drawn once from OpenStreetMap around the place Home Assistant already knows, and the radius picks itself: a city centre gets its grid, a village its handful of lanes. Six places, the same wall.

The Hauser standby screen by day in Cologne: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Ring around the old town and the bend of the Rhine. The Hauser standby screen at night in Cologne: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Ring around the old town and the bend of the Rhine. The Hauser standby screen by day in Paris: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the avenues meeting at the Étoile. The Hauser standby screen at night in Paris: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the avenues meeting at the Étoile. The Hauser standby screen by day in Barcelona: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Eixample grid cut by the Diagonal. The Hauser standby screen at night in Barcelona: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Eixample grid cut by the Diagonal. The Hauser standby screen by day in New York: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Manhattan grid with Broadway across it. The Hauser standby screen at night in New York: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the Manhattan grid with Broadway across it. The Hauser standby screen by day in Amsterdam: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the canal rings drawn by their quays. The Hauser standby screen at night in Amsterdam: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing the canal rings drawn by their quays. The Hauser standby screen by day in Petting, Bavaria: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing a village: a handful of lanes. The Hauser standby screen at night in Petting, Bavaria: clock, date, the week as seven columns along the bottom, post-its and the shopping list over a faint street map showing a village: a handful of lanes.

Cologne. The Ring around the old town, the Rhine as a gap. Paris. Twelve avenues meeting at the Étoile. Barcelona. The Eixample grid, cut by the Diagonal. New York. Midtown Manhattan, Broadway crossing the grid. Amsterdam. The canal rings, drawn by their quays. Petting, Bavaria. A village: a handful of lanes, and that is the map.

02 · The room

The illustration is the state.

Every room carries an illustration of itself, and the picture is the reading. When the sun sets, the evening picture fades in over the length of dusk. When a lamp is on, it is on in the picture. When the last one goes out, the room goes dark. When it rains outside, the window light turns grey and the rain runs down exactly where the glass is.

Beside the picture sits one narrow control surface: rooms, scenes, the lamps, the room's climate. It follows the sun too, so nobody in the household ever reaches for a theme setting. Try the four states.

The room screen by day: a compact control surface on the left with rooms, scenes, lamps and the room's climate, and the sunlit living-room illustration filling the rest. The same screen on a rainy day: the room in flat grey window light with rain on the balcony door, the control surface unchanged. The same screen after dark: dark surfaces on the control side, the living room lit by its own lamps. The same screen at night with every lamp off: the room illustration has gone dark, only a faint glow from the balcony door, all lamp tiles unlit.

Real captures of the same panel. Sun and rain by day, evening and lights off after dark; the controls change with it.

Or every room at once.

The same screen has a second view. Instead of one stage it shows all rooms as tiles, each with its own illustration, and the control surface steps out of the picture until you touch one. After dark the view earns its keep: a room with a lamp on carries its lit evening picture, a room with every lamp out carries the dark one. A green dot appears on a tile while a motion sensor in that room reports someone, and a room with a camera carries a quiet camera mark. Nobody reads a list to see which lights are still burning — the wall shows it from the hallway.

The all-rooms view by day: six tiles with the living room, the kids’ room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen and the hallway, each in its own daylight illustration, with the heating and the house status along the bottom edge. The same six tiles after dark: the living room and the bedroom are lit from inside and note how many lamps are on, while the kitchen and the bathroom stand in their dark picture with every lamp out.

Six rooms by day. A tap puts one of them into the control surface. The same six after dark. Two rooms have a lamp on; the kitchen and the bathroom do not, and look it.

Photograph the room. That is the whole input.

The rooms that ship with Hauser are of one particular home, which is no use to yours. So the room-image wizard draws yours from a phone photograph: choose the crop and the focus point, and it returns the room as a set of pictures for sun, overcast, evening and lights off, with its windows already known, so the rain finds the glass.

An ordinary phone photograph of a living room in evening light, with a sofa, a dining table, a balcony door and children's toys on the floor.

Input Evening light, a wide lens, toys on the floor. Nothing staged.

The same living room redrawn as the Hauser illustration: the balcony door, the grey sofa and the wooden dining table in their original positions, in afternoon sun. The same living room under an overcast sky: flat grey light from the balcony door, colours cooler, the pendant lamp still off. The same living room in the evening: the pendant lamp and the reading lamp are on, warm pools of light on the table and the sofa. The same living room at night with every lamp off: only a faint blue glow from the balcony door outlines the sofa and the table.

Output The same room in the four states it ships in: sun, overcast, evening, every lamp out. This is the living room in the pictures above.

This is the one place where Hauser talks to a paid third party: the wizard needs your own OpenAI access, and your photo is sent there to be redrawn. That trade is stated before anything is uploaded, every paid step is confirmed by hand, and the wizard is not part of the public demo. It is an interim solution: for the iOS app a free way through Apple Intelligence is in development, and for the web app local models and your own keys for other providers are planned.

03 · The touch

Light physics.

Every command in Hauser has weight. Light comes on fast and goes out slowly, the way a room does. Nothing jumps; everything fades like dusk. The interface answers before the house does, and when the house disagrees, the control eases back to the truth instead of lying.

It answers before the house does

Tap a light and it is on, on screen, immediately. The command travels to Home Assistant afterwards. Every intent is tracked and reconciled against the state that comes back.

Undo instead of confirmation

"Everything off" does not ask whether you are sure. It goes out, and for five seconds a small strip offers the way back. Undo is a second command, not a dialog.

A pulse when the house is silent

If no answer arrives within a second, the control pulses softly until it does. If the house says no, the control fades back to the true state. Nothing snaps.

A moving blind stops with a tap

While a blind, shutter or garage door is on its way, a tap on its tile stops it where it is, like the switch on the wall. No second control, no confirmation.

The bottom of the panel after a scene change: a small strip reads 'Scene Bright applied' with an Undo button and a close mark, and a thin gold bar along its lower edge running out.

The undo strip after a scene change. The gold bar is the five seconds running out.

Setting up

Configure on the blueprint. Then hand the panel over.

One mark in the middle of the title bar carries the mode: the h signet alone means use, the h with a gold dot means edit. In edit mode a long press on a room opens its configuration, and the room picture dissolves in place into a blueprint of itself — fine light lines on blue, computed from the picture you already have, so it works with your own photos too.

Devices are arranged by moving their tiles: hold one, drag it, the others glide aside. A small minus takes a device out of the room, a dashed tile opens the search, and adding a device celebrates with a gold check and six sparks. Rename the room where you set it up, pick its sensors, decide what its tile shows.

The living room's configuration on the panel: a dark sheet with quick setup, the six devices in their order with drag handles, and a search field to add a device, over a blueprint of the living room drawn in fine light lines on blue.

The living room's configuration on the panel: quick setup, the device order and the search, over the blueprint of the room.

Use mode closes every door.

Switch to use mode and the panel belongs to the household: lights, scenes, climate, blinds and everything else keep working, including a long press on a lamp for its brightness, but no configuration opens. The panel can fall back into use mode by itself after a while, and the way back to editing can sit behind a PIN. The mode belongs to the device: the hallway panel can be locked while your own phone keeps configuring.

The middle of the title bar in edit mode: the h signet with a gold dot, and the word Edit beside it for a moment. The middle of the title bar in use mode: the h signet on its own, and the word Use beside it for a moment.

Edit. The gold dot sits on the h; a long press opens configuration. Use. The h on its own; every control keeps working.

One hand, two voices

Paper for the household. Instruments for the house.

Everything a household says to itself is written on paper: post-its in a colour per person, the shopping list grouped by shop, the week as seven columns, the calendar as a sheet, the energy of the day as notes pinned into a picture. Everything you do to the house is an instrument: gold on a cool ground, tick scales, switches with travel. There is no third voice. No dashboard tiles, no generic grid.

And both voices write in one hand. Alegreya Sans carries everything you operate, Alegreya the paper — the greeting in standby, the notes, the calendar sheet, the energy figures. Figures stand upright and keep their width, so a clock or a slider value never jumps.

The notes screen: a shopping list on the left grouped by shop, and reminders as coloured sticky notes grouped per person on the right.

Reminders are post-its per person. The shopping list reads in the order you walk, and a ticked item stays under its shop for a day.

The calendar screen as a sheet: the month name in a serif, small-caps weekdays, hairline rules between the weeks, timed events listed under their day, multi-day events as bars across the week, today carrying a small gold mark.

The calendar is the paper of the week band, only larger. Your Home Assistant calendars, one sheet.

The instruments.

Hold a lamp and its panel comes up: a tick scale for brightness, warm to cool, the colours it can take. Hold a fan and the panel shows what that fan can do and nothing it cannot: speed, presets, oscillation, direction. Hold the TV and, when Home Assistant places a remote beside it, a direction pad comes up. Every device gets the same hand, the same scale, the same weight under the finger.

The lamp panel: a large vertical tick scale for brightness at one hundred per cent, a warm-to-cool scale beneath it and a row of colour swatches. The same lamp panel with the brightness scale at sixty per cent. The same lamp panel with the brightness scale at twenty-five per cent.
Dining table, 100 % Dining table, 60 % Dining table, 25 %
The fan panel: a vertical tick scale for speed at thirty-five per cent, four preset cards, and two-way switches for oscillation and direction. The same fan panel in turbo with oscillation switched on. The same fan panel in breeze mode with the direction reversed.
Ceiling fan, 35 % Turbo, oscillating Breeze, reversed

The energy lives in the picture.

There is no column of numbers. Live load, generation and grid are notes pinned to the sun, the house and the pole in a picture of your home; the day's curve runs along the bottom edge in the same hand, and a small arc between sunrise and sunset says how far the day has walked. When it is cloudy, the house is drawn under an overcast sky, and rain falls over the picture. A second tap on Today lays the day's balance beside the wall: the share of your use that came from your own sun, the gap the grid filled, two bars on one kWh axis. What a house cannot measure is not shown: without a solar meter there is no solar note. No dash stands in for a number, anywhere.

The energy screen on an overcast afternoon: an illustration of a house with solar panels under a grey sky, three paper notes pinned into the picture at the panels, the house wall and the grid pole reading solar, measured load and feed-in, today's figures written top left in a serif with a small sun arc beneath them, and the day's curves drawn as thin lines along the bottom edge. The same screen with today's balance laid over the house: a large percentage of today's use came from your own sun, the gap the grid filled in one line beneath it, and two bars on one kWh axis, produced above and household use below, with the part used at home bridged in gold.

Late afternoon under clouds. The notes hang on the panels, the wall and the pole; the sun arc says the day is nearly walked. A second tap on Today. How much of the day came from your own roof, and what the grid filled in.

Same language, different hand.

On the phone the rooms are the same cards the panel shows in its all-rooms view, and they go dark with the room in the evening. Navigation moves to the thumb as a floating bar. Under the rooms sits a quick bar with four fields that are yours: everything off, the central temperature, and buttons of your own that run scenes and devices from any room in one tap. A room opens as a sheet with its readings under the name — temperature, humidity, presence — and its climate behind the temperature. Configuring happens where you control: the picture dissolves into its blueprint and every tile stays where it is.

The phone layout: six room cards with their illustrations in two columns, the living room with a green presence dot and two lamps on, a quick bar with the all-off button and the central temperature, and a floating bottom bar with Home, Shopping, Reminders and More. The living room as a sheet on the phone: the room name over its picture, the temperature reading under it, the scenes Cozy, Bright and Off, and the room's lamps and blinds as tiles. The same room in configuration on the phone: the picture has become a blueprint, every tile carries a small minus, a dashed tile reads Add device, and the climate card and quick setup follow below.

Home. The rooms, the quick bar, the bar under the thumb. A room. Its readings under the name, scenes and devices below. Configuring. The picture becomes its blueprint; the tiles stay where they are.

The iOS app

The same home in your pocket. With Apple Home or Home Assistant.

Hauser is also a native app for iPhone and iPad, drawn screen by screen in SwiftUI rather than wrapped around a web view: the same look, the same words, the same gestures. It runs three ways. With Home Assistant, paired to your Hauser installation by a QR code shown on the panel. Directly with Apple Home, with no server at all. Or with a built-in demo household, to look around before anything is connected. On an iPad it becomes the wall panel.

It is in TestFlight today, free, with a public link. Builds update in place, and what changes in each one follows the same release notes as the panel.

Join the TestFlight How pairing works
The iOS app's home by day: a line saying one window is open, the washer with 23 minutes left, six room cards with their illustrations, the living room with two lamps on, the quick bar and the bottom bar with Home, Shopping, Reminders and More. The same home after dark: the living room and the kitchen carry their lit evening picture, the bedroom and the hallway their dark one.

Home. A window open, the washer nearly done, the rooms with their lamps. The same home after dark. Lit where a lamp is on.

A room in the iOS app: the living room's picture with its temperature, the scenes, the lamps as tiles, the patio door contact reading closed, and the camera as a live picture.

A room. Scenes, lamps, the patio door contact and the camera, live.

Energy in the iOS app: the power right now, production and grid, the sun arc beside the title, and under Today the balance of the day with its two bars over a pale picture of the house.

Energy. The day's balance under Today, the house pale behind it.

Widgets and a Live Activity

A room, a scene, a device, the home or the energy as a widget on the home screen. A lamp you switch on shows up as a Live Activity in the Dynamic Island until it is off again.

Siri, NFC and the share sheet

Add to the shopping list from anywhere with Siri or the share sheet. Stick an NFC tag by the door and a tap runs a scene. Leaving or arriving home can send a notification with buttons on it.

Your calendars, on the device

iCloud, Google and Exchange calendars of the phone merge with the events the server knows. The shopping list sorts itself into shop sections on the device with Apple Intelligence, no subscription.

Offline and private

Ticks on the shopping list and reminders queue while you are out of reach and land when you are back. Documents open behind Face ID. Nothing leaves your home but the pairing with your own server.

The app is a project of its own beside the panel. It needs iOS 17 or newer; the glass surfaces come with iOS 26, and the features that use Apple Intelligence need a device that supports it.

Weakness with dignity

A wall clock never goes out.

When Home Assistant cannot be reached, the stage stays lit. The controls dim, the connection state is one quiet word in the title bar, and nothing stacks a banner over the room. In standby the clock, the date and the week keep going from the panel itself.

Empty states are designed like the rest: a clock instead of a message, leaving out instead of a dash, a mood instead of a warning. A disconnected home should look like a quiet one, not a broken one.

The home screen while Home Assistant is unreachable: the living-room illustration stays exactly as it was, the scenes and lamp controls are dimmed, and the status chip in the title bar reads Disconnected.

Technical beta

Built in the open, for one household first.

Hauser installs and runs today. Compatibility with the enormous range of Home Assistant setups is still growing, there is no support SLA, and it is built for trusted deployments on your own network rather than for the public internet. Which version is current, and what changed in it, is in the release notes; the iOS app follows the same beta in TestFlight.

What you get

  • A complete, working interface you can run and read
  • A documented design system, interaction contract and performance budget
  • A guided Home Assistant setup with versioned external configuration
  • A stress house before every release: the built app is set up against a simulated Home Assistant full of real-world pitfalls and clicked through end to end, in the web app and in the iOS app
  • AGPL licensed: fork it, run it, modify it; share your changes if you offer it to others

Worth knowing

  • No SLA and no promised response time
  • Device and Home Assistant coverage grows release by release
  • Intended for trusted local networks, not for internet exposure
  • Versions move fast; read the release notes before upgrading
  • The iOS app is a TestFlight beta; its builds expire after ninety days and are replaced by the next one

Installations outside this household exist and report back. The first one ran on an Asustor NAS with Docker Compose against Home Assistant Container, with the first light under control ten minutes in. Reports like that, on GitHub and in the Home Assistant community, shape the next release; the full picture lives in the release notes and the README.

Install

One click on Home Assistant OS. Compose everywhere else. TestFlight on the phone.

Both server paths end in the same guided setup: it scans Home Assistant, proposes rooms and devices, lets you correct the result and activates a validated configuration in one step. No source edits, no YAML. The iOS app pairs to that installation — or skips it and talks to Apple Home.

Home Assistant OS & Supervised

As a Home Assistant App

  1. Add github.com/ralleur/hauser as an App repository.
  2. Select Hauser, install it, start it.
  3. Open the web UI and run the setup wizard.
Add the repository

A thin wrapper around the same image, with all state in Home Assistant's persistent storage, so App backups cover your household configuration.

Container, Docker hosts, NAS

With Docker Compose

  1. Copy .env.example to .env.
  2. Run docker compose up -d.
  3. Open port 4173 and run the setup wizard.
Read the install guide

Home Assistant Container has no App system, so this is the path there. Backup, restore, update and rollback are documented end to end.

iPhone & iPad, iOS 17 or newer

As the iOS app, via TestFlight

  1. Install TestFlight from the App Store.
  2. Open the public link and accept the invitation.
  3. Choose Home Assistant, Apple Home or the demo household.
Join the TestFlight

With Home Assistant the app pairs to your Hauser installation with a QR code from the panel's System screen. With Apple Home there is nothing to install on the wall.

Open the live demo Release notes