Managing dashboards in Home Assistant can be a bit of a hassle, especially when changes don’t automatically propagate to all devices displaying the dashboard. After updating a card or making other adjustments, you might have noticed the little popup on other devices that says, “Your dashboard was updated. Refresh to see changes? [REFRESH].” While this popup serves its purpose, it can be frustrating to manually refresh every time you make a change.
![Your dashboard was updated. Refresh to see changes? [REFRESH]](https://smarthome.yoavmor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/refresh-popup.jpg)
Luckily, there’s a workaround to automatically refresh your dashboards, but it requires using Fully Kiosk Browser. If you haven’t set up Fully Kiosk Browser yet, check out my previous blog post on Controlling Your Home Assistant Dashboard with a Wall-Mounted Tablet to get started.
Setting Up the Automation
To ensure your wall-mounted tablet automatically refreshes whenever you make changes to a dashboard, you’ll need to create an automation in Home Assistant. This automation will reload the start URL in Fully Kiosk Browser under certain conditions:
- When the dashboard is updated (Also known as “Lovelace update”).
- When Home Assistant starts.
- When an integration update is made through HACS.
Here’s how you can set up this automation:
alias: Refresh wall mounted tablet
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: event
event_type: lovelace_updated
- platform: homeassistant
event: start
- platform: state
entity_id:
- sensor.hacs
from: "1"
to: "0"
condition: []
action:
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 1
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- target:
entity_id:
- button.wall_mounted_tablet_load_start_url
data: {}
action: button.press
mode: single
How This Works
- Lovelace Update Trigger: The
lovelace_updatedevent is triggered whenever you update a dashboard, which prompts the tablet to refresh. - Home Assistant Start Trigger: This ensures the tablet reloads the dashboard whenever Home Assistant is restarted.
- HACS Integration Update Trigger: Sometimes, updating integrations through HACS also requires a dashboard refresh. This trigger handles that scenario.
There’s a 1 minute delay there which you can tweak to whatever you want.
Summary
By setting up this automation, you can save yourself the hassle of manually refreshing your wall-mounted tablet’s dashboard every time you make changes. This small tweak can greatly enhance the user experience in your smart home setup.
