Do I need custom cards from HACS to build this?

To match the look in the screenshot, yes: Mushroom, button-card, card-mod and mini-graph-card. None of them are required for the underlying controls to work - every button is a plain script call, and the custom cards are the styling on top.

Why do the info tiles show a value but the buttons do nothing?

The projector sensor publishes its readings as soon as you sign in and sync in the app, so info tiles are live right away. The control and Scene buttons call scripts that only exist in Home Assistant after you paste the app's Copy block into configuration.yaml, restart Home Assistant, and tap Sync With HA once.

Will my entity IDs match the ones in this guide?

The pattern will, the exact characters will not. Your projector sensor is named after your projector's model, and every script is named after your projector's serial. Wherever this page writes YOUR_PROJECTOR, put your own sensor's entity id; wherever it writes YOURSERIAL, put the serial-derived id shown on the app's Home Assistant screen.

Home › User Guide › Home Assistant dashboard

Home Assistant · step by step

Build this dashboard in about an hour

Ten steps, every card's YAML, and a complete view you can paste in one go. Green glass tiles, a live picture readout, your Scenes, and a laser-hours graph, all off one projector sensor. Change two strings and it is yours.

4 HACS cardsInfo tiles live at onceButtons after one pasteFree to build

Before you start

Projector Pilot is linked to Home Assistant. The setup guide covers signing in and turning on Send the projector's state. You should see your projector as a sensor in Home Assistant before you build anything on top of it.
You have synced at least once. Settings › Home Automation › Home Assistant › Sync With HA, after pasting the app's Copy block into configuration.yaml and restarting Home Assistant. This is what creates the scripts every control button below calls.
Your projector is switched on while you build. The picture attributes below are what a projector in standby leaves mostly blank.

Two things feed this dashboard, and the difference matters at every step below.

Comes from	Gives you
The projector sensor, `sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR`	Every reading. Power, input, color mode, all the picture figures, HDR and signal, lens and geometry, lamp hours. Live as soon as you sign in and sync, no Copy block needed.
The app's synced scripts, `script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_...`	Every control. Power, inputs, color modes, lens memories, and your Scenes. These exist only after the Copy block is pasted, Home Assistant is restarted, and you have tapped Sync With HA.

Step 1

Install four cards from HACS

All four are in the default HACS store. In Home Assistant: HACS › Frontend › Explore & Download Repositories, search the name, Download, then reload your browser.

Search for	Used for	If you skip it
Mushroom	Every info tile, control button and Scene tile	Use a plain `button` card. Works, looks squarer.
button-card	The hero, with its live label	Use a `entity` card, or a Mushroom template card with less detail.
card-mod	The green glass background, borders and gradients	Everything still works. Nothing gets its glow.
mini-graph-card	The laser-hours history under Maintenance	Use the built-in `history-graph` card.

None of them are required to make it work. Every control below runs from a stock Home Assistant button card pointed at the same script. The custom cards are the green glass look, not the plumbing.

Step 2

Find your entity ID and your serial

Every snippet on this page uses two placeholders. Find yours once and the rest is copy and paste.

sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR → Developer Tools › States in Home Assistant, filter on projector_pilot. Something like sensor.projector_pilot_epson_qb1000b_qb1000w.
YOURSERIAL → open the app, Settings › Home Automation › Home Assistant. The serial-derived id is shown right there, and it is the middle of every synced script name: script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_power_on, script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_input_hdmi1, and so on.

You can also filter Developer Tools › States on projpilot to see your whole synced control list at once, once step 1's Copy block and Sync are done.

No script list yet? That is expected before you have pasted the Copy block. The sensor still exists and still updates; the scripts show up only after Sync With HA runs successfully.

Step 3

Create the view

Settings › Dashboards › Add Dashboard › New dashboard from scratch. Call it Projector Pilot.
Open it, then the pencil icon top right to edit.
Add a view. Either layout works; the real board uses the default stack of cards, one under the other, which is the simplest to paste into.
To paste YAML, use the three-dot menu on a card and choose Edit in YAML, or the three-dot menu on the dashboard for Raw configuration editor to paste a whole view at once.

The view's own settings, if you prefer to type them:

title: Projector Pilot
views:
- title: Projector Pilot
  path: projector-pilot
  icon: mdi:projector
  cards: []

Step 4

Add a live info tile

Start with something that only reads, so you know your entity ID is right before you touch anything that sends a command. This one is live the moment your projector sensor exists, no Copy block, no sync. Add a card, Edit in YAML, paste:

type: custom:mushroom-template-card
primary: Brightness
secondary: '{{ state_attr(''sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR'',''brightness'') }}'
icon: mdi:brightness-6
icon_color: green
layout: vertical
fill_container: true
card_mod:
  style: 'ha-card { background: rgba(18,26,20,0.60); border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.20);
    border-radius: 16px; box-shadow: 0 6px 22px rgba(0,0,0,0.32); backdrop-filter: blur(8px);
    min-height: 104px; }'

Same shape reads any of the ~80 attributes the sensor carries: swap brightness for contrast, gamma, color_temp, hdr_pq, lamp_hours, whatever you want on the tile.

Save it. If a real number or word shows up, your entity ID is right and everything below will work. If it shows blank, go back to step 2.

Step 5

Add a green section header

A plain title is dead space. This is a markdown card with a gradient background from card-mod, and it is what turns a stack of tiles into named sections. Every section on the board opens with one of these, just a different label and emoji.

type: markdown
content: '&#128268;  &nbsp; **POWER &amp; SOURCE**'
card_mod:
  style: 'ha-card { background: linear-gradient(135deg, rgba(61,220,107,0.30), rgba(16,120,60,0.30));
    border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.45); border-radius: 14px; box-shadow: 0 6px 20px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); }
    ha-markdown { padding: 12px 20px !important; } ha-markdown p { margin: 0 !important;
    letter-spacing: 3px; color: #eafff0; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 700; }'

Change the emoji code and the label text; the card-mod block is identical on every section.

Step 6

Add a control button

This one sends a command instead of just reading a value, so it needs the scripts to exist first. It calls script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_power_on, which the app writes only after you paste its Copy block into configuration.yaml, restart Home Assistant, and tap Sync With HA.

type: custom:mushroom-template-card
primary: Power On
icon: mdi:power
icon_color: green
layout: vertical
fill_container: true
tap_action:
  action: call-service
  service: script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_power_on
card_mod:
  style: 'ha-card { background: linear-gradient(135deg, rgba(61,220,107,0.16), rgba(16,90,46,0.20));
    border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.34); border-radius: 16px; box-shadow: 0 6px 22px rgba(0,0,0,0.32);
    min-height: 92px; }'

Same card for Power Off, Screen Blank, HDMI 1, HDMI 2, A/V Mute, a color mode, or a lens memory: only the label, icon and service change.

If it looks right but nothing happens when you tap it, the Copy block is either not pasted or Home Assistant has not been restarted since. Run Test Connection in the app, which checks for exactly that, before assuming the dashboard is wrong.

Step 7

Add the hero

The hero at the top of the board is a button-card: a big power state, a one-line summary built from several attributes at once, and the green glass treatment on the whole card rather than just its border.

type: custom:button-card
entity: sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR
name: Epson QB1000
show_state: true
show_label: true
size: 48px
state_display: '[[[ return entity.state==''on'' ? ''Powered on'' : ''Standby''; ]]]'
label: '[[[ var a=entity.attributes; return (a.input||''-'')+''  •  ''+(a.color_mode||''-'')+
  ''  •  ''+(a.video_range||''-'')+''  •  ''+(a.lamp_hours||0)+''  h''; ]]]'
styles:
  card:
  - height: 176px
  - background: linear-gradient(135deg, rgba(61,220,107,0.32), rgba(11,64,34,0.6))
  - border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.5)
  - border-radius: 22px
  - box-shadow: 0 12px 36px rgba(0,0,0,0.42)
  - padding: 20px
  state:
  - color: '[[[ return entity.state==''on'' ? ''#3ddc6b'' : ''#8a9'' ]]]'

Trimmed to the pieces that change per install. The full card also sets the icon, name and label grid positions; see the download in step 10 for all of it.

Prefer a slimmer strip instead? A mushroom-chips-card does the same job in one row of small chips: power state, input, color mode, video range and lamp hours, each a template reading state_attr('sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR', ...). Use one or the other, not both, at the top of the board.

Step 8

Add your Scenes

Every Scene you save in the app becomes a script named script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_scene_<id> once you sync, and a tile for one is the same control-button card from step 6 with a Scene name and icon.

type: custom:mushroom-template-card
primary: Movie Night
icon: mdi:movie-open
icon_color: green
layout: vertical
fill_container: true
tap_action:
  action: call-service
  service: script.projpilot_YOURSERIAL_scene_YOURSCENE1
card_mod:
  style: 'ha-card { background: linear-gradient(135deg, rgba(61,220,107,0.16), rgba(16,90,46,0.20));
    border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.34); border-radius: 16px; box-shadow: 0 6px 22px rgba(0,0,0,0.32);
    min-height: 92px; }'

Replace YOURSCENE1 with the id shown for that Scene on the app's synced control list. One tile per Scene, in a horizontal-stack.

Step 9

Add laser-hours history

The projector sensor is recorded by Home Assistant like any other, so lamp_hours has a history for free. No extra sensors, no helpers, nothing to configure first, under the Maintenance section.

type: custom:mini-graph-card
entities:
- entity: sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR
  attribute: lamp_hours
  name: Laser hours
name: Laser hours
icon: mdi:lightbulb-on-outline
line_color: '#3ddc6b'
line_width: 4
hours_to_show: 336
points_per_hour: 0.5
height: 96
animate: true
card_mod:
  style: 'ha-card { background: rgba(18,26,20,0.60); border: 1px solid rgba(61,220,107,0.20);
    border-radius: 16px; box-shadow: 0 6px 22px rgba(0,0,0,0.32); backdrop-filter: blur(8px); }'

336 hours is two weeks. Laser and lamp hours climb steadily rather than jumping around, so a two-week window is usually enough to see the trend without the graph looking flat.

Step 10

Or take the whole thing

The complete view, every section and every card from the screenshot at the top of this page, with placeholders instead of entity IDs.

Download the view YAML.
Open it in any text editor and replace, everywhere they appear: YOUR_PROJECTOR with your projector sensor's entity id from step 2, and YOURSERIAL with your serial-derived id from step 2.
In the Scenes section near the bottom, replace YOURSCENE1, YOURSCENE2 and YOURSCENE3 with your own three Scene ids, or add and remove tiles to match however many Scenes you actually have.
In Home Assistant, open your dashboard, pencil icon, three-dot menu, Raw configuration editor, and paste it in as a view.

Your Scene names and count will not match. The file ships with three example Scenes: Movie Night, Gaming, Sports Day. Rename the tiles, point them at your own Scene ids, and add or delete tiles until the section matches however many Scenes you actually saved.

Info tiles work immediately after you paste. They only need the sensor to exist. Control and Scene buttons stay dead until the Copy block is pasted into configuration.yaml, Home Assistant is restarted, and you have tapped Sync With HA.

Troubleshooting

A tile shows Unknown

Check the attribute name against what the sensor actually carries: Developer Tools › States, your sensor.YOUR_PROJECTOR entity, and read its attribute list. A few readings, like HDR PQ or HDR HLG, only populate while the projector is actively receiving that kind of signal, so Unknown on those two can be correct rather than broken. If the whole sensor looks sparse, wake the projector: a unit in standby publishes very little.

A button does nothing

You have not pasted the Copy block yet, or Home Assistant has not been restarted since you did. Control and Scene buttons call scripts the app writes, and those scripts do not exist until Settings › Home Automation › Home Assistant in the app has Copy block pasted into configuration.yaml, Home Assistant restarted once, and Sync With HA tapped. Run Test Connection in the app first - it tells you whether the block is present before you go looking for a dashboard mistake.

The scripts I expect are missing from Developer Tools › States

Filter on projpilot rather than the full serial - it is easier to see the whole list. If a control or Scene you added recently is missing, tap Sync With HA again; it updates in place rather than requiring a fresh setup. If old, dead scripts are cluttering the list after you deleted a Scene, use Remove orphaned scripts in the app.

My entity ID does not look like the one in this guide

The pattern is fixed, the middle is not. Your sensor is named after your own projector's model, and every script carries your own projector's serial, not the placeholders on this page. Get both from Developer Tools › States and the app's Home Assistant screen, as in step 2, and use those instead of typing the example text.