Wall panels and e-ink

A wall panel is a screen that shows your dashboards and nothing else: no sidebar, no menus, no edit mode. It is meant for a tablet by the front door, a kitchen display or an old phone in the hallway.

Make a wall panel

You can start from a dashboard or from the sidebar:

In a dashboard’s menu, choose Use as wall panel….
In the sidebar, open Wall panels and choose New wall panel.

The New wall panel dialog asks for a Name, such as Hallway or Kitchen, and the dashboard it Starts on. The rest are settings you can leave as they are:

Full screen and Keep the screen on, described below.
Show the name and summaries and Show the time, which add the dashboard’s title row and a clock above the tiles.
Wake for alerts, on for new panels. Smoke, a leak, the alarm, motion or the doorbell wake it from sleep and take over the screen while they last. Which devices alert is set under Alerts on the account page.
Layout, which picks the Phone, Tablet or Desktop arrangement of your dashboards. By width is the default and follows the screen. Choose a size to force it, for example Phone for a narrow strip screen.

Save keeps the panel on your account. Save and start here also runs it on the screen you are using. Panels appear under Wall panels in the sidebar. A panel’s menu has Start on this screen, Copy link, Edit… and Delete.

Put it on the tablet

Open the panel’s link on the tablet, or choose Start on this screen in the sidebar there. Log in with your Athom account once. A panel runs with your login, so the tablet needs it. If you would rather not leave a login on a screen, use a paired screen instead.

Opening the link starts the panel at once, so a kiosk browser that opens it on start runs the panel on its own. The browser also remembers that it is a wall panel: opening Tiledash on it goes straight back to the panel.

To get out, hold the top-left corner for a second and a half, or press Esc. A bar appears with Edit and Leave wall panel. It hides itself again after a few seconds.

Swiping between dashboards

Under Dashboards on this panel, tick the dashboards the panel can show. The panel’s own dashboard always counts. With more than one, swipe sideways, press the left and right arrow keys, or tap the dots at the bottom. A swipe never starts on a slider or a dial, and the tap that ends a swipe presses nothing. Each dashboard keeps its own theme and layout.

Close popups when nobody touches them closes a dashboard that a tile opened over the panel after 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, or never.

Full screen

Full screen goes full screen when you start the panel from the app. Panels also have a Full screen button in the row at the bottom, beside the dots, for screens without an Esc key. The same button leaves full screen again.

Keeping the screen awake

Keep the screen on asks the browser not to dim or lock the screen while the panel shows. If your browser cannot do that, the setting says so, and you can use the tablet’s own display settings or a kiosk browser instead.

Sleep and wake

A panel can fall asleep to something quieter, like a big clock.

Under Sleep, set Fall asleep when nobody touches it to After 1 minute, 2, 5, 10 or 30 minutes.
Choose what to show under Show while asleep. The Sleep start in the new dashboard wizard makes a big centred clock with a few facts for exactly this.
Optionally turn on Dim while asleep, Show the name and summaries while asleep or Show the time while asleep.

On an OLED screen, Shift the screen slowly moves everything a pixel a minute, too slowly to notice, so nothing burns in.

The first touch wakes the panel and takes it back to its own dashboard. That touch presses nothing on the tile beneath. The panel also wakes for an alert if Wake for alerts is on.

E-ink screens

E-ink is a property of the screen, not of a dashboard, so you set it on the panel: switch on E-ink screen in the panel’s settings. The panel then:

shows everything in the black-and-white Paper theme, with no motion;
takes new values in steps instead of live, set by Show new values to every 30 seconds, minute, 2 minutes or 5 minutes. Alarms, smoke, water and locks still show at once;
says “Updated 21:43” in the corner instead of showing the live dot;
flashes black and white to wipe away ghosting, set by Clear ghosting to every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or never.

The dimming and shifting options do not apply on e-ink. Adding ?display=eink to a panel’s link forces e-ink mode for a kiosk browser you cannot change settings in.

To see what a dashboard looks like on e-ink without saving anything, choose Preview on e-ink in its menu.

This device

Every device can look and move differently. Open your name at the bottom of the sidebar and choose This device… to pick a theme and a Motion level for the device you are using only. Your other devices keep their own settings, and a dashboard with a theme of its own keeps it.

Motion is Like the device, Full, Calm or None. None is kind to slow tablets. Themes and styling describes the themes.