Dashboards

Sensa organises everything your van can do into a handful of dashboards. Each dashboard is a full screen built for one job, so you are never hunting through a single long page.

The five dashboards

• Habitation. Your main living-space hub: power, batteries, water and waste tanks, lighting, heating and air conditioning, and your van's network. Its Home tab also carries the controls worth having one tap away, the inverter mode and the trickle charger. On a Dometic FreshJet the air-conditioner card also carries Interior and Roof buttons for the unit's own lights, on the Climate tab and on the Home summary alike; a button appears only when the unit reports that light. Its Switches tab carries your relay controllers and, if you have a managed network switch, its Ethernet ports. Its Network tab shows your router and, if you have one, your Starlink dish. A History tab shows how much energy you have used and made, day by day and month by month, along with your battery's health and graphs of any reading you like; it appears while Nerd Mode is on. A Crypto tab appears when you add a Bitcoin miner, and a DJI tab when you add a DJI Power station, which is shown as the portable unit it is rather than as part of the van's own power system. Its Home tab starts from a ready-made arrangement that you can rearrange, see Home layouts.
• Cab. The driving and park-up screen. Its Home tab pairs your engine dials with the navigation map, and the map takes the full height of the screen. With no engine adapter fitted, a van with a GPS source still gets a speedometer; with a GPS router such as a Teltonika it reads the speed the router's GPS measures, every second, and otherwise it works out how fast the van is moving between GPS fixes. With neither, the map takes the full width too. The levelling guide (a top-down and a side or rear view to help you get level) has its own tabs, alongside a park-up view pairing the level with the signal you can expect there. With a Van Level fitted, every Cab Home layout also carries a roll tile showing how far the van is leaning to one side, and a Roll tab shows the same reading across the whole screen, large enough to read at a glance on an off-camber track. The reading turns amber as the lean nears your limit and red when it reaches it; set the limit with Maximum roll angle on the Settings Vehicle tab (5° to 45°, 25° to start with). Everything that changes what the map shows sits in the buttons around it: who is driving, what to look for, and which map to use. See Navigation and tracking. Add tyre pressure sensors and a Tyres tab appears, laying every wheel out on a top-down view of the van. Add a camera and a Dump tab appears: a live picture of the drain from the driving seat, with the dump valve button on it. See Dump camera.
• Mobile. A condensed view designed for a phone. It uses a tab bar along the bottom so everything is in reach of your thumb. Its Navigation screen is now the same screen as the Cab map rather than a reduced copy of it, which matters if your phone is your only cab screen.
• Intelligence. Alarms, scenes, instincts, routines, a message log and, when your system knows where it is, the Schengen day counter. See Intelligence.
• Settings. Where you configure the system: your devices, network, switches, images, backups and system details, plus People and the Vehicle tab for your van's size, fuel and journey tracking. Its Data usage tab shows how much internet data the unit has used in the last 24 hours and 30 days, which is worth knowing on a metered mobile plan; with Nerd Mode on it breaks that down by what was sent and how often. The figures are close to, not exactly, what your mobile provider counts, and they leave out remote access sessions, Home Assistant's own traffic and operating system updates. Each device's own settings open from the cog at the end of its row, as a popup you close with Done; what you change there takes effect as you change it. A red Not Configured label on a row means the device is missing something it cannot work without, such as a router's login; an optional setting left blank never brings it up. Its own Log tab is where the system reports on itself, separately from the van's Log on Intelligence. Its Diagnostics tab holds the file check, the analytics switches and how long logs are kept. That tab and the Log tab are for looking into a problem rather than running the van, so they appear only while Nerd Mode is on. On a unit we supplied, its System tab is where the unit itself is looked after: passwords, updates, remote access, restart and Factory Reset. Your licence sits there too, with the Check in now button and the box for entering a licence code, so a system locked out by its licence can be put right without hunting for it. The same tab has an Experimental devices switch, which lets Sensa find devices we are still testing; leave it off unless we ask you to turn it on.

Moving between dashboards

Every dashboard has a menu button (the three-line icon) at the top left, next to the Sensa logo. Tap it to jump to any of the other dashboards, or to log out.

In a web browser, the tab shows the Sensa icon and reads Sensa, and a shortcut you add to a phone's home screen is called Sensa too. A shortcut added before this update keeps its old name until you remove it and add it again.

With Nerd Mode on, the menu also has Clear cache, just above Log out. Use it if a screen still looks the way it did before an update: it throws away the copy of the screens your tablet or phone has stored and reloads them fresh. Your choices on that screen, such as Nerd Mode and locked cards, are kept. Sensa does the same for you after every update.

To put a dashboard's tabs in the order you want, turn on Design Mode, then press and hold a tab until it lifts, drag it along the strip, and let go. With a mouse, press and move. The order is kept on your Sensa unit, so every screen showing that dashboard uses it, and it survives restarts and updates. A tab that appears later, such as one Nerd Mode shows, takes its usual place beside its neighbours.

Which dashboards you see depends on how you signed in. Everyday tablet logins see Habitation, Cab, Mobile and Intelligence. On a unit we supplied they also see Settings, which asks for a PIN first if you have switched Admin Lock on. See Accounts and access for who can do what.

Nerd Mode

The header on every dashboard carries a glasses button, just right of the Sensa logo. It is one switch for the whole system rather than a setting per screen, and it decides whether Sensa shows you the technical detail behind what you are looking at.

With it off, each screen keeps to what you would act on. Turn it on and the rest appears: the extra readings on the cards that have them, a History tab on Habitation, and the Diagnostics and Log tabs on Settings. The Network tab keeps to one card saying whether you are online, over what, and how well; with Nerd Mode on a tablet it becomes a diagram of the whole network. A managed network switch, which has nothing on it you would ever change, is not shown at all until it is on, and neither is the raw pitch and roll reading on the levelling tabs. Turn it off and the screens go back to the short version.

It only changes what you are shown. Nothing about the van behaves differently either way.

Design Mode

Beside the glasses is a pencil-and-ruler button, Design Mode. With it off, the screen stays exactly as it is, so nothing moves under a stray finger. Turn it on to rearrange things, and the header changes colour so you can see you are arranging rather than using the screen. Every item you can move then shows an outline.

With Design Mode on you can:

• Reorder tabs along the tab strip, and scenes along their row and on the Home and Cab tiles.
• Move a card on a tab that can be arranged, by dragging it, and resize it by dragging its corner. Short cards stack beside tall ones. A card cannot be made shorter than what is on it.
• Stretch a card with the two switches along its bottom edge: full width spreads it across the tab, full height takes it down to the bottom of the screen. Most cards grow and shrink with the room you give them, so a card made larger shows everything on it larger, and one made smaller still fits.
• Reorder the instincts on the Intelligence Instincts tab by dragging their tiles.
• Remove a card with the X on its corner.
• Add a card with Add card. The gallery shows the cards you removed from this tab first, then the cards from every other tab, grouped by dashboard and tab.
• Reset a tab to how it was built.

Each card shows its name while Design Mode is on, so if you need to tell us about one, you can tell us which.

Not every tab can be arranged. The other Intelligence tabs and the Settings tabs that are a single page, such as Images, People, Backup and System, stay as they are; Settings Switches can be reordered but not resized.

Pick an item up by pressing and holding it until it lifts, or with a mouse by pressing and moving, and let go where you want it. Your layout is kept on your Sensa unit, so every screen showing that tab uses it, and it survives restarts and updates. A phone keeps the order of the cards but stacks them in one column.

Design Mode belongs to the screen you turn it on at, so arranging on your phone leaves the cab screen alone, and it turns itself off when the page reloads. If Admin Lock is on, turning it on asks for the Settings PIN. Turning it off never does.

The Order of use list on the Network tab is the one thing that drags without Design Mode, because its order is a setting for your router rather than a layout.

Locking a card

A finger scrolling the page past a dial can land on the dial and change a setting by accident. Cards with a dial carry a padlock beside the power button: the air-conditioner card, and the climate summary on the Home screen. Tap the padlock and the card freezes as it is. The dial stops taking a drag, so the gesture scrolls the page instead, and every control on the card, the power button included, stops responding until you unlock it. Only the padlock itself stays live.

The lock belongs to the screen you set it on. Locking a card on your phone leaves the same card working on the cab screen, and a card you locked stays locked on that screen after a reload.

Temperatures

Temperatures are always shown in the unit your system is set to (for example °C), no matter what a particular sensor reports in. You can change the unit in Settings, under System.

The header bar across every dashboard can carry a temperature reading beside the scene chip, and you choose which. Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, tap the cog at the end of a temperature sensor's row and switch on Show Temperature In Header. Nothing is shown until you pick one, so choose however many fit your screen. The Climate tab shows every temperature whatever you pick here.

A shorter name for the header. Any device that can put a reading in the header, a temperature sensor or a Starlink dish for example, also has a Header Short Name box on its row. Type a short name there, "Dish" rather than "Starlink Mini Roof Dish", and the header uses it, so more readings fit across the bar. Leave it blank and the header uses the device's usual name.