A toolbox for the parts of Home Assistant that are still hard. Build wall-tablet dashboards without writing YAML, clean up the entities a year of tinkering left behind, run a real alarm panel with a keypad, and see what actually happened in your home — all from one hub, all visual, all explained in plain language.
Runs as a Home Assistant add-on. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
Pick a layout. Advance Tools looks at the entities your Home Assistant reports right now, matches them to the places the layout needs them, shows you every match before anything is created — then builds the dashboard.
Four templates ship with it: Family Home, Apartment, Security Tablet (portrait, built around the keypad) and Vacation Rental. Adding your own is a JSON file, not a pull request.
Arm Home / Away / Night behind a PIN, with real exit and entry delays, and choose exactly which sensors each mode watches and whether each one is instant or delayed. When it trips: sirens, lights, locks, scenes, scripts, and a camera snapshot attached to your phone alert.
Eleven keypad designs for the tablet by your front door — Matrix, Police, Military, Vault, Neon, a classic beige alarm panel, a radar scope and a siren bar. All pure CSS, no images, no libraries.
Dead devices, unavailable and orphaned entities, duplicate names, flat batteries — found, explained, and cleaned up with a drag-and-drop triage board. Every deletion is logged, and it shows you which automations reference an entity before you remove it.
| 📦 Starter Templates | Ready-made dashboards matched to your devices |
| 📊 Dashboard Maker | Freeform visual designer, 120+ card skins, per-user access |
| ⚙️ Automation Maker | Visual WHEN / AND IF / THEN builder with live YAML preview |
| 🧩 Helper Maker | Every helper type with a real UI |
| 🩺 Entity Doctor | Health check-up for entities and devices, with cleanup |
| 🎬 Scene Maker | Snapshot the house, edit it, test without saving |
| 🚨 Alert Maker | "Left open too long", "battery low", "went offline" |
| 🔔 Notify Hub | Multi-channel notification rules and a two-way Telegram bot |
| 🛡️ Security Center | Full alarm panel with a tablet keypad |
| 📈 History Explorer | Charts, state timelines, statistics, CSV export |
| ⚡ Energy Center | Consumption and cost per device |
| 🌡️ Climate Scheduler | Paint a weekly thermostat schedule on a grid |
| 📋 Family Board | Shopping lists, chores with rotation, sticky notes |
| 📢 Announce & Intercom | Whole-house TTS with per-speaker volume |
| 🏠 Away Simulator | Replays your real light history while you're away |
| 💾 Backup Manager | Scheduled Supervisor backups with retention |
| 🧰 System Center | Redacted support bundles, export/import your whole setup |
| 📖 Manual | The whole thing documented and searchable, inside the app |
- Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store → ⋮ → Repositories, and add:
https://github.com/FreeHaTools/Advance-tools - Install Advance Tools, start it, and open it from the sidebar.
- The setup wizard walks you through creating a password and building your first dashboard.
It runs inside Home Assistant, so there is nothing else to configure — no
second hostname, no reverse proxy, no forwarded port. Wherever you already
reach Home Assistant, you reach Advance Tools. Wall tablets can also connect
straight to port 8234, which is what the installable app uses.
Needs Home Assistant OS or Supervised. Builds for amd64, aarch64 and
armv7.
- Visual first. If it can be a grid, a dial, a drag or a preview, it is not a text box.
- Explain everything. Every non-obvious field has a
?with a concrete example, and every tool has a "How it works" guide. - Never surprise the user. Destructive actions preview exactly what will happen, imports write a rollback point first, and nothing is deleted quietly.
- Honest about limits. The alarm is a convenience layer that runs while Home Assistant runs — the docs say so rather than implying otherwise.
- Your data stays yours. Everything runs locally against the Supervisor API. No account, no cloud, no analytics.
There is no default password — a fresh install makes you create one before anything works. Sign-in has brute-force protection with escalating lockout, and a security log records sign-ins, failures and password changes. This panel can unlock doors and disarm an alarm, so it is treated that way.
Don't expose port 8234 to the internet; use a VPN or a reverse proxy with TLS.
Every tool is a self-contained plugin — a folder with manifest.json,
tool.py and a static/ directory. Drop one in and it appears in the hub;
no core changes needed.
python scripts/verify.py runs the same checks CI does: syntax, JSON,
truncated files, mangled encodings, version consistency, tool manifests,
uncommitted files, and a real boot smoke test.
Copyright © 2026 Mike Fattahi.
Advance Tools is free software released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. You may use, study, share and modify it. If you distribute a modified version, it has to stay free software under the same licence — so it can never be closed up and sold on.
Built by Mike Fattahi.
- Website — fattahi.us
- GitHub — github.com/FreeHaTools
Advance Tools is free and always will be. If it saved you an afternoon, you can buy me a coffee ♥
Bugs and ideas are welcome in Issues. System Center → Support bundle produces a zip of your versions, logs and configuration with every password and token stripped out — attaching it makes a report roughly ten times easier to act on.