Hey everyone! I wanted to share my experience with setting up my new Nest Hub to display my Lovelace dashboard. I’ve been using a Nexus 7 for this purpose, but it finally gave out, so I decided to upgrade to the Nest Hub. It worked beautifully at first using the cast.home-assistant.io website, but the challenge came when the Nest Hub switched to photo mode after a short period.
I started experimenting with service calls to automate the casting process. The first hurdle was figuring out how to reliably send the cast command without waking the device up every time. After some research and trial and error, I stumbled upon a clever workaround mentioned in a forum post. The idea was to cast an incorrect view, wait a few seconds, and then cast the desired view.
Here’s the automation I ended up with using Node-Red:
yaml
- id: ‘1591682005536’
alias: Test Nest Hub
description: ‘’
trigger:- event: start
platform: homeassistant - entity_id: media_player.kitchen_display
platform: state
to: ‘off’
action: - data:
entity_id: media_player.kitchen_display
service: media_player.turn_on - delay: ‘00:00:05’
- data:
entity_id: media_player.kitchen_display
view_path: lovelace
service: cast.show_lovelace_view - delay: ‘00:00:05’
- data:
dashboard_path: lovelace-cast
entity_id: media_player.kitchen_display
view_path: home
service: cast.show_lovelace_view
- event: start
I set this automation to trigger every 10 minutes using Node-Red. It’s been working reliably for the past day, and I couldn’t be happier! The only minor inconvenience is that if I want to use the Nest Hub for anything else, I have at most 10 minutes before it switches back to my Lovelace dashboard.
It’s a bit of a hack, but it works perfectly for my needs. I hope this helps anyone else struggling with similar issues. If you have any improvements or alternative solutions, I’d love to hear them! Happy automating! 