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HADA – Home Assistant Desktop App

HADA connects a Windows computer to Home Assistant. It runs in the background, tells Home Assistant what the computer is doing, and lets Home Assistant control it.

The Overview page of the HADA window

What it does

  • Reports the computer's state. Whether the screen is on, the session locked, somebody at the keyboard; what is playing; whether the microphone or camera is in use; battery, network, disks and more. See Sensors.
  • Takes commands. Volume and mute, media keys, the display, lock, sleep and shut down. See Controls.
  • Shows notifications sent from Home Assistant. See Notifications.
  • Lets you add your own sensors and buttons without writing code: whether a program runs, whether a dock is connected, the output of a PowerShell command, a button that starts a program or presses keys. See Custom sensors and buttons.
  • Starts automations from the computer. Quick actions in the tray icon's menu, each with a keyboard shortcut if you like, and buttons on notifications. See Quick actions.
  • Shows your dashboard in a small window opened from the tray icon. See The dashboard window.

How it is built

  • A Windows service and a small tray app. The service keeps the connection to Home Assistant and works with nobody signed in. The tray app adds what only a signed-in user's desktop can tell.
  • Light. About 15 MB for the service and 20 to 25 MB for the tray app. The window is a separate process that only exists while it is open.
  • MQTT discovery. The computer shows up in Home Assistant as a device with all its entities; nothing to write in YAML. It can report to several Home Assistants at once. A direct WebSocket connection works too, with limits.
  • Yours to control. Every entity has a switch. The buttons that switch the computer off stay off until you turn them on. Settings can only be changed by an administrator.
  • x64 and ARM64, Windows 10 (1809 or newer) and Windows 11. Polish and English.

Start here

  1. Install HADA, or unpack the portable version
  2. Connect it to Home Assistant
  3. Use the entities in automations

HADA is free and open source, under the MIT license. Stable versions keep their settings and MQTT topics from one version to the next; versions marked as pre-release carry new features that have been tried less.