YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard

226 points soheilpro 1 day ago 27 comments

nharziro 1 day ago | parent

this is so cool! i love it.

phs318u 1 hour ago | parent

Perhaps “cool” is the wrong word. Did you notice the temperature recorded inside the house? 24degC (26 in the office). A little too warm for my taste.

stavros 23 minutes ago | parent

Unless it was taken in the summer, in which case it's really cold.

dzhiurgis 1 day ago | parent

This is beautiful. Reminds me floor796.

I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.

What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.

The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.

p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.

zerolunier 1 day ago | parent

where are you based, how much you paid for it ?

melody_calling 1 day ago | parent

Really well done, nice work!

_virtu 1 hour ago | parent

Pro tip you don’t even need an illustrator. While I do encourage hiring humans to do this work you can also use PolyCam with a phone that supports lidar, export it to Claude with Blender and voila.

tiagod 1 hour ago | parent

Pro tip the whole point is that it was made by an illustrator, and that's also the reason it's on the frontpage.

vntok 41 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the reason is simply that it's a cool idea?

This is typically the kind of hacking project that is preposterously non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers, let alone regular folks. Now, for the first time ever, AI is making it actually palatable for everyone who wants it done to have it done... and certainly much cheaper too at an equivalent quality level.

orphea 20 minutes ago | parent

I'm sorry, I have a hard time understanding you. Correct me if I'm wrong, are you saying that

1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and

2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?

scubbo 22 minutes ago | parent

It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.

hatthew 25 minutes ago | parent

Most people don't have lidar phones, and commissioning this art is about the same price as buying a lidar phone.

happyopossum 15 minutes ago | parent

> Most people don't have lidar phones

the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...

Tellusion 1 hour ago | parent

I love that you hired an illustrator to make this!

minasrc 1 hour ago | parent

appreciate you sharing the artist name!

Legend2440 56 minutes ago | parent

Cool, but if you can afford to hire an illustrator to make a custom dashboard for your lights and thermostat, you're clearly in the 1%.

sho_hn 53 minutes ago | parent

I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.

You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.

krisbolton 48 minutes ago | parent

Disposable income and being in the 1% are entirely different things.

fragmede 36 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?

kenferry 31 minutes ago | parent

How much do you they think they paid? By home improvement standards, might not be out of line at all.

I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!

loloquwowndueo 17 minutes ago | parent

You say it like it’s a bad thing?

ideasphere 46 minutes ago | parent

This is the illustrator: https://linktr.ee/owenyeconiel

It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!

stronglikedan 35 minutes ago | parent

The illustrator probably didn't want to pay for more prominent credit than the standard, which is included at the end of the post.

skyberrys 30 minutes ago | parent

The illustrator did beautiful work, it's amazing how much different your program became from the original dashboard to one simple home gui.

palmotea 18 minutes ago | parent

1. Hiring a human illustrator is the right thing to do, and I applaud this guy.

2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.

gerdesj 15 minutes ago | parent

Great job and a cracking write up. The notes on making sure you get layers etc right so you can animate effectively is great advice.

Thank you.