For religiously observant Jews, home automation provides a great means of observing the Shabbat and its strictures around the use of electronics. I've covered some binary sensor configurations in another post.

In this one I wanted to share a slightly updated version of my Shabbat dashboard which I have running on an Android display. This version was updated in January 2025 with the help of Claude Sonnet 3.5 which added some nice stylistic elements to the sensor displays.

Shabbat Dashboard

This version of the dashboard leverages a few different add-ons in order to provide a unified display providing the red alert sensors, the Shabbat times and the weather forecast provided by the Israel Meteorological Service, IMS. The weekly Torah portion (parsha) and zmanim geolocated to your locality can be easily added as well.

Add-Ons & Integrations

I use the following add-ons and integrations in order to build my dashboards:

• Jewish Calendar

• (weather widget)

Many thanks to all of the authors for their hard work in making this technology available and accessible.

Security Disclaimer

As I'm based in Israel, it's important for me to keep on top of the Red Alert sensors. But given that these are hugely important, I feel obliged to make the recommendation that you shouldn't rely on these as your only source of information for this vital purpose. I use the official Pikud HaOref app as my primary notifier but these provide a nice additional display (hopefully they remain green!).#

Shabbat Display Setup

The beauty of Home Assistant is that just about anything is possible.

In order to display this dashboard over Shabbat, I picked up a budget Android tablet and installed Fully Kiosk Mode Browser. It's even possible to coordinate the tablet's turn-on and turn-off time in coordination with the Shabbat times provided by that sensor.

Although I began my Home Assistant journey before the AI era, large language models have made configuring Home Assistant configurations vastly easier. I use Claude's Sonnet 3.5 for writing a lot of widget elements that would be too time consuming to code manually (or, frankly, beyond my abilities!)

YAML Snippets For Widgets

If you like the approach and styling, feel free to customise these YAML snippets to create your own dashboards:

Hebrew Date & Time Row

This snippet provides a two column styled button card showing the Hebrew date alongside the local time:

1type: custom:button-card
2entity: sensor.hebcal_hebrew_date
3show_name: false
4show_state: true
5show_icon: false
6styles:
7  card:
8    - background: "linear-gradient(135deg, #4B6CB7 0%, #182848 100%)"
9    - border-radius: 15px
10    - padding: 16px
11  state:
12    - color: white
13    - font-weight: bold
14    - font-size: 18px
15    - text-align: center
16    - justify-self: center

Next / Upcoming Shabbat Display Row

1type: grid
2title: Next Shabbat
3titleColor: white
4columns: 2
5square: false
6cards:
7  - type: entity
8    entity: sensor.hebcal_start_of_shabbat
9    name: Shabbat In
10    card_mod:
11      style: |
12        ha-card {
13          background: linear-gradient(120deg, #2980b9, #6dd5fa);
14          border-radius: 15px;
15          padding: 15px;
16        }
17        .card-content {
18          color: white !important;
19        }
20        .primary {
21          font-size: 1.8em;
22          font-weight: bold;
23          color: white !important;
24        }
25        .secondary {
26          font-size: 1.2em;
27          color: white !important;
28        }
29        :host {
30          --primary-text-color: white;
31          --secondary-text-color: white;
32        }
33  - type: entity
34    entity: sensor.hebcal_end_of_shabbat
35    name: Shabbat Out
36    card_mod:
37      style: |
38        ha-card {
39          background: linear-gradient(120deg, #2980b9, #6dd5fa);
40          border-radius: 15px;
41          padding: 15px;
42        }
43        .card-content {
44          color: white !important;
45        }
46        .primary {
47          font-size: 1.8em;
48          font-weight: bold;
49          color: white !important;
50        }
51        .secondary {
52          font-size: 1.2em;
53          color: white !important;
54        }
55        :host {
56          --primary-text-color: white;
57          --secondary-text-color: white;
58        }

Red Alert Display Row

Important note: you will need to refer to the add-on documentation to change the entities to your alerting area.;

IMS Weather Widget

And finally, a weather widget!

Full Dashboard Configuration

Here's a full YAML configuration for my Shabbat dashboard with my personal sensors (like lighting displays) excluded:

Yom Tov Version

I created a downstream binary sensor for Shabbat or Yom Tov because for the purpose of driving home automations, at least in my case it doesn't matter which of the conditions is true.

Here’s the configuration:

With this dual sensor, you can easily create styled status grids like these:

An approach to creating a Yom Tov-specific dashboard would be to copy the Shabbat dashboard in its entirety and just swap out the sensors for the Yom Tov ones.

You could even integrate the display into the automation for your tablet (if it’s Shabbat, show the Shabbat dashboard; if it’s Yom Tov, show the Yom Tov dashboard, etc).