The following screenshot shows some of the various tile types that are available.
Note that some of the tile types like weather, lock, thermostat, motion, music, contact, and garage door are automatically determined based on the type of device you have authorized. For example, to get the thermostat tile, you’ll need a thermostat device authorized. Similarly, to get the music player tile, you’ll need a music player like Sonos or Kodi authorized.
Weather Tile
For the weather tile, you can create a weather device in SmartThings using the SmartThings IDE. The short version of the process is:
- Login to the IDE:
https://account.smartthings.com/ - Go to the Devices tab
- Click New Device button in top right corner
- Choose whatever you want for name and network id. Change the type to SmartWeather Station Tile. Choose your location. Leave everything else alone.
- Click Create.
When you’re done, be sure to authorize the newly created device from your SharpTools.io user page and then you be able to add it to your dashboard.
Media Tiles
Along the bottom row are Media Tiles. These are really versatile tiles that let you display a variety of media types (eg. JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF, MJPEG). In my particular example, the first three along the bottom row are showing live MJPEG camera feeds from my security system.
The last tile in the bottom-right shows the weather forecast from a local news site - this is a really popular and common use case of media tiles. The following thread has some examples of how to find weather tiles: Weather Image Sources - or feel free to share your location and the community can help you!
Note: One recently added feature of Media Tiles is the ability to use a hyperlink with a Media Tile. This is really powerful for opening up apps, other dashboards, and other websites.
Hyperlinks and Dashboard Tiles
On that note, one other popular feature is the Hyperlink Tiles and Dashboard Tiles. Hyperlink Tiles can be used to open any hyperlink. One popular use case for hyperlink tiles is to open other apps… you can find some common URLs for iOS (and Android) in the following article:
Dashboard tiles are similar to Hyperlink tiles, but they let you navigate between dashboards efficiently. They are commonly used as a ‘menu’ system of sorts. For example, the ← back arrow tile in the top-left corner of the screenshot above is a dashboard tile that jumps me back to my main navigation dashboard. When you start using multiple dashboards, these become really helpful!
Hero Attribute Tiles
One other popular tile type that isn’t pictured are Hero Attribute tiles. You can display the value of any attribute using Hero Attribute tiles - they are commonly used to display temperature, battery levels, energy consumption and more. You can find more detail on them here:
Customizations
Which brings up one final point that you can customize most tile types and even the dashboard as a whole. While you are editing a dashboard, tap the ... in the top-right corner of the tile and you’ll have an option for Edit and Change Layout.
The Edit option for each tile may have different settings, so it’s helpful to check it out whenever you’re using a new tile. For example, most Thing tiles let you customize the icon, size, dimensions, label, security, and more.
The Change Layout option is available for most Thing Tiles. For example, that’s how you access the Hero Attribute and how you change between Thermostat layouts.