Helios: a Home Assistant energy card that paints your real sky

An energy dashboard you actually want to look at

Home Assistant's Energy dashboard is excellent and nobody stares at it lovingly. Helios is a custom card built on the opposite bet: make the same data a living scene, where what your home produces, stores and consumes plays out as the sun and the real weather cross your sky, and you will check it more often than you check a bar chart.

The card's scope is honest about its dependency: it reads the Energy dashboard you already configured and wires itself from it, solar, grid, battery and the devices you track. If you have no solar panels, it works without them, showing the sun, your home and your consumption, with the production layers simply absent rather than stubbed with zeros.

The target audience is therefore already defined by the platform: Home Assistant users with energy monitoring set up, who want a wall-friendly ambient view of it rather than another graph, and who care that the pretty picture is fed by the same numbers the official dashboard shows.

Install is three clicks, and the wiring is automatic

The installation path is the shortest the ecosystem allows: open HACS, search for Helios, install, reload the browser, then add the card from the dashboard editor. No API key, no account, and, the detail that sells it, no per-card entity list to fill in, because the card inherits the Energy dashboard's configuration instead of asking you to restate it.

The manual path without HACS is four steps, and its only interesting part is registering the resource:

   url: /local/community/helios/helios.js
   type: module
   

after copying the release file into the community folder and hard-refreshing. Both paths end in the same place: a card whose every option lives in the visual editor, with the full reference published on the project's documentation site.

That zero-configuration promise is load-bearing for a card with this many features. A scene that needs twenty entities hand-picked before it renders anything would die in the editor; one that reads the dashboard you already tuned gets to be installed on a whim, which is how cards like this spread.

The scene: sun, horizon, moon, weather, shadows

The visual vocabulary is geographical rather than chart-like. The sun's real arc is computed over your own address, with a live sun disc, an incidence ray and an irradiance reading, or the plain azimuth and elevation if you prefer the numbers, and sunrise and sunset placed exactly where the arc meets your horizon. That horizon is itself real, worked out from the terrain around your home, so the sun dims the moment it drops behind a hill rather than at some idealized flat line, with the skyline drawn as a discreet ridge.

The moon follows its own arc with the actual crescent for tonight's phase, lit toward the sun, shown at night by default and carrying no reading, which the README states plainly: it is there for the eye. Weather is painted over the scene from local conditions, clear sunshine dimming as clouds build, then rain, snow or a thunderstorm, all following the timeline as you scrub it. Buildings cast shadows projected from real footprints, fading as the sun nears the horizon.

For always-on use, a wall mode fades the controls after a few seconds and leaves only the scene, with a viewing angle you lock once and get identically on every device. That last clause, angle parity across devices, is the sentence that tells you the author runs it on a wall themselves.

Flows, curves and the scrubbable timeline

Live power is rendered as motion: production, grid and battery each get a bead that travels toward the home at the speed of the power it carries, so a sunny kettle is legible without reading a number. The day's curve stands production or consumption on the sun's own path around the house, which means where a point sits on the curve is the hour, an axis trick that replaces a legend.

The timeline scrubs from yesterday to two days ahead, and back across the week and the month, with the whole scene following: sun position, shadows, weather, every value. Outdoor temperature and humidity appear as chips with their own day curves, and either can be pinned to your own weather-station sensor instead of the forecast. A cost chip reads out energy spend in your own currency, negative when you are earning, with its own scrubbable curve, shown only when the Energy dashboard tracks a price.

Individual devices group into up to four named, coloured, iconified groups, each with a chip and a curve of its own. The feature list reads long, but each item attaches to the same scene grammar, bead, chip, curve on the sun's path, so the length is vocabulary rather than clutter.

Where the numbers come from, stated as policy

The section the README titles with that question is the review's headline, because it is a data-integrity policy dressed as documentation. Helios never estimates a value. A chip is always a real-time measurement from the live power sensor of its source; if a source has no live sensor, its chip is not shown, and the editor tells you which one is missing. Nothing is ever derived from a cumulative meter to fake a now.

Curves and totals are always your own meter data, read through the recorder's statistics, the exact numbers the official Energy dashboard's bars are made of, so where the dashboard has a figure, the card shows the same figure. Home consumption is the dashboard's own balance, solar plus import minus export minus battery, and it appears only when every configured family has a live sensor to compute it honestly.

The policy extends to failure: a sensor detected as mis-wired hides the affected chips while the editor explains what to fix, rather than displaying a number you cannot trust. For a visualization this decorative, refusing to invent data is the difference between a toy and an instrument, and the repository commits to it in writing.

Local by design, engineering, licence and neighbours

The privacy posture matches the data policy: solar, battery and grid figures never leave the browser, with no Helios server, no account and no telemetry. Two open services are used, both keyless, Open-Meteo for weather and OpenFreeMap for the map tiles the ground is drawn from, and each weather reading, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, snow or condition, can be pointed at your own local sensor to take over from the forecast entirely.

Underneath the scene, the engineering is conventional and visible: a Vite build, TypeScript with a no-emit typecheck, ESLint, vitest tests, knip for unused-code detection, an architecture document in the repository, and a changelog. The release scheme is calendar-versioned and fast, 2026.9.6 on 2026-09-12 followed by 2026.9.5 the same day and 2026.9.4 the week before, with the last push on 2026-09-12. The licence is GPL-3.0, and the card ships in HACS's default repository list.

The neighbours frame the choice. The stock Energy dashboard is canonical and tabular, no scene and no sun. ApexCharts-based cards give full charting control with any entity you like, at the price of assembling graphs rather than a place. Power-flow style cards animate live flows in a schematic two-dimensional diagram, capturing the bead idea without the sky, the timeline or the terrain. Helios's slot is the ambient, geographical one, and its refusal to estimate values is what lets it occupy that slot without becoming a diorama.

Editorial conclusion

Helios fits Home Assistant users with an Energy dashboard already configured who want it as a living scene: a real sun over their real terrain, weather crossing the sky, power as motion, and a scrubbable timeline, all backed strictly by the same recorder statistics the official dashboard uses. It does not fit homes without energy monitoring, since the card deliberately has no entity lists to hand-wire, or anyone wanting analytical charting, which general-purpose graph cards serve better. Verify first: that your Energy dashboard has live power sensors behind each source, since chips without one are hidden by design, whether your weather comes from the keyless services or your own station, and the GPL-3.0 terms for any redistribution. The last push was on 2026-09-12.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. ReikanYsora/Helios on GitHub
5. Releases