Borrowing Apple's Clock: HomeView on My Own Wall
So Apple has finally done it. After years of rumours, and years of me saying "surely this year?", the HomeView was announced on the 13th of October, and it's exactly what a lot of us have been waiting for. A 7-inch screen for the home, either stood on the kitchen worktop with a speaker in the base or fixed to the wall, with Siri, FaceTime, widgets and all of your Apple Home controls in one place. It also works as a Matter controller and a Thread border router, it can recognise up to six people by their face, and it's £299, with pre-orders open now and the first ones arriving on the 13th of November.
And then the catch. If you want the wall version, the screen is £299 but the mount is extra, from £54.95 for the USB-C one up to £119.95 if you want it powered over your network cable. There's also no App Store for it yet, so you get Apple's apps and nothing else. Do I want one? Of course I do, will I buy one, No! But what caught my eye more than anything wasn't Siri or the widgets, it was the clock faces. Like an Apple Watch you can pick a face for when nobody's using it, and one of them, a big analog clock that fills the whole screen with bold numbers on a rounded square, is just gorgeous 😍
Hold on, I've already got a screen on the wall?
If you've read my earlier posts you'll know everything in our house runs through Homey, and in the hallway there's an iPad on the wall showing our Homey dashboards. Lights, heating, the cameras, the music, the lot. It works brilliantly, but when nobody was using it, it just sat there showing the dashboard all day and all night, glowing away at the end of the hall.
So rather than spending £350 on another screen to do half of what the iPad already does, why not give the iPad the HomeView clock? That was the plan anyway, and in my head it was a quick evening job 🤦🏻♂️
So what does it do?
Leave the iPad alone for a couple of minutes and the dashboard fades away and the clock appears. I've done it the other way round to Apple, a black face with white numbers and hands and a red second hand, because a big white screen on a dark landing at night is a bit like being stared at by a lighthouse!
A tap on the screen and you're straight back to the dashboard. Better still, it's linked to the motion sensors in the house, so walk into the hall and the clock gets out of the way before you've even reached it, and it can even jump to a particular dashboard when it wakes, so the front door camera is right there when you come in.
At night it dims right down and the white turns to a warm orange, so it doesn't light up the landing, and the whole clock moves ever so slightly each minute so nothing gets burnt into the screen. And for the really late hours, I can let the iPad switch its screen off completely, then when someone walks past, Homey wakes it back up again.
And there's the original digital clock too, with the date and the weather, if you'd rather have that. Just pick whichever you like in the app's settings.
The screen that wouldn't wake up
Then came the annoying bit. My first go at the night time sleep only worked between 10pm and 8am, because that's when I thought the screen would be off. Simple, right? Wrong. The iPad turns its screen off overnight, but a web page can't switch the screen back on by itself, so at 8am it just stayed dark. Then at 08:13 the next morning I walked past it, and nothing. A black rectangle on the wall, and me stood there waving at it like a lunatic!
The fix was to stop guessing what time the screen might be off, and ask it instead. The dashboard now checks in with Homey all the time while the screen is on, so if Homey hasn't heard from it for 45 seconds, it knows the screen is asleep. Now it wakes up whenever it's actually off, day or night. If only I'd thought of that in the first place.
How's it working out?
Brilliantly. It looks the part, it gets out of the way when you walk up to it, and at night it's barely there at all. The rest of the family haven't said a word about it, which in our house is about as close to a five star review as you get.
Will I still buy a HomeView? Probably, I'm only human, but for now the iPad on the wall is doing a pretty good impression of one. Only time will tell.
Tech Details
For those who like to see what's going on under the bonnet, here's how it all fits together. As always, everything runs at home on our Homey Pro, and nothing goes out to the internet.
The hardware: a Homey Pro, which already runs the rest of the house, and an iPad fixed to the hallway wall running Safari full screen
The app: Wall Dashboard, a custom Homey app written in Node.js on Homey's SDK 3. It serves our Homey dashboards as a web page for the iPad, and the widgets from other Homey apps run their own original code inside the page, so they look and work exactly as they do in the Homey app
Keeping it secure: the Homey API key never leaves the Homey. Each screen pairs with a six-digit code and gets its own token (only a hash of it is stored), and a screen can only make dashboard requests, so editing Flows, apps or users, or removing devices, is refused
Drawing the clock: the face is an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) drawn in code, so it's pin sharp at any size. The dial is laid out 1,000 units wide and as tall as the screen is, so it fills the iPad in portrait or landscape
The rounded square: the numbers and marks follow a "superellipse", a shape somewhere between a circle and a square. For each of the 60 minute marks, the code works out where a line from the centre at that angle meets the rounded edge, then puts the mark there. The roundness is set to 7, where 2 would be an oval and higher gets squarer
The dial: bold 12, 3, 6 and 9, thick bars at the other hours, and a thin grey track for the minutes, all sized from the shorter side of the screen
The hands: made to look like Apple's, a thin stem from the centre then a wide rounded blade, with a thin red second hand and a red pin in the middle. Every second the hour, minute and second hands are rotated to the right angle, with the hour hand creeping round between the hours rather than jumping
Night mode: between 10pm and 7am by default the clock drops to 35% brightness and all the white turns a warm #ffcc99. Once a minute the whole face drifts by a tiny random amount (about 1% of the screen) so nothing sits in one place all night
Waking up: any touch counts, including inside the widgets on the dashboard. The clock clears on a "click" rather than the first touch, so the tap that wakes it can't also press a button underneath. Up to five motion sensors can be chosen to wake it, and one dashboard to jump to when they do
Live updates: the iPad can't hold the Homey key, so the app subscribes to Homey's live events itself and passes them on. The screen asks "anything new since the last one?" and the question is answered the moment something happens, or after 20 seconds if nothing does. That's why motion wakes the clock instantly
Keeping the screen on: Safari only allows the Screen Wake Lock after someone has touched the screen, so it's retried on every touch, and as a backup a tiny silent video loops out of sight in the corner (a playing video stops the iPad locking itself, which is how websites did it before the Wake Lock existed). The settings page shows which of the two is holding the screen on
Sleeping at night: during the chosen sleep hours the page lets go of both, and the iPad's own Auto-Lock turns the screen off. When the screen is off, the iPad pauses the page, so the app spots the silence, and a new Flow condition, "The wall screen is asleep", becomes true after 45 seconds of nothing. The Flow reads motion, then "wall screen is asleep", then a critical alert to the iPad, because ordinary notifications arrive without lighting the screen. When the screen comes back on, the clock clears itself
Camera: the live camera stops streaming while the clock is showing, so it's not using the network for nobody
Settings: everything is set in the Homey app under Configure, then Screensaver, including the face, how long before it appears, the motion sensors and the night hours. The app checks every saved value, and anything missing or wrong falls back to the default, so a bad save can never leave the screen without a working clock
Testing: the settings, pairing, access rules, live events and the "is the screen asleep?" check all have automated tests, and the whole thing has been tested on the wall iPad itself, day and night
For a detailed gude please Click Here
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At the moment it's built just for our house, but if you've got an old iPad sat in a drawer and fancy turning it into something that looks a lot like a HomeView on your wall, it's exactly the kind of project we love, so get in touch.
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