Smart Home? Make It Smart Quarters With This LCARS Dashboard

At the risk of starting a controversy: is there anyone who goes to the effort of setting up Home Assistant who wouldn’t really rather be living on the Enterprise-D? If such a person exists, it’s not [steve-gibbs5], who has not only put together a convincing LCARS dashboard on an Android tablet, but has also put together an easy-to-follow Instructable so you can too.

In case you’ve been monkishly avoiding television since the mid-1980s, LCARS is the high-tech touchscreen interface used on Star Trek: The Next Generation and its sequels. It’s an iconic, instantly-recognizable aesthetic, and we think [Steve] nailed it, even if he was taking design cues from Voyager, which is… not everyone’s favorite trek, to put it mildly. Though perhaps the haters are looking back on it a bit more fondly when compared to some more modern adaptations. Check it out in action in the video embedded below.

The secret to getting your Android tablet looking like a 24th-century terminal is an application called “Total Launcher“, which allows one to customize one’s homescreen to a very high degree. [Steve] shows us how he styled Total Launcher, but that custom home screen isn’t enough on its own. Those futuristic buttons need to do something, which is where a second app called Tasker comes in. Tasks in Tasker are linked to the LCARS interface and the smart home features — in [Steve]’s case, Amazon Alexa, but it looks like Google’s spyware or the open-source Home Assistant are equally viable options.

We saw Star Trek style on Raspberry Pi back in the day, but nothing says your smart home has to be Trek-themed. You could even control it via a dumb terminal if that’s more your style.