Guides › Getting started
Using Theatrium with no smart home
No Home Assistant, no Apple Home, no problem. Theatrium still fills your screen with weather, news, a calendar, webcams, markets and your music.
What this is
Choose No smart home at setup and Theatrium runs with no smart home at all. Instead of lights and thermostats, it fills the dashboard with cards that fetch their own information from the internet, plus your music.
Cards that work with nothing connected
Every card below is marked with a small globe in the card chooser, which means "needs no smart home".
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Weather, Weather Radar, Precipitation, Sun and Moon, Outdoor Air Quality | Conditions for where you are |
| Calendar, Appointments, Meeting Room | Events from a calendar you share with the TV |
| News, Bluesky | Headlines and pictures from sources you choose, and posts from Bluesky accounts you pick |
| Markets, Stock, Crypto | Prices, no account needed |
| Global Postcard, Cameras & Streams | Public webcams around the world, or camera and stream links you add |
| Art, Photo Album, Relaxing Scenes | Paintings, your photos, calm video loops |
| Traffic | Driving time on a route you save |
| Now Playing, Music Visualizer | Your music, from Apple Music, Spotify, Last.fm, Plex or Sonos, and the visualizer in a card |
| Countdown, Timers, To-Do List | Days until an event, kitchen timers, and a Reminders list from your iPhone |
| Network Speed, Apple TV Performance | How this Apple TV and your internet are doing |
| The six Plex cards | If you have a Plex media server |
The music room, the visualizer and the screensavers all work as well. Room light sync does need lights to control, so it stays off.
Setting it up
- On Choose where your home data comes from, choose No smart home.
- Your dashboard opens at once with a starter layout built from the cards above. Change any card you like.
- Tell Theatrium where you are, so the weather and radar are right: select the gear at the top right of the dashboard, choose Connections, and type your town, city or ZIP code under Location. Without this it guesses from your internet connection, which can be a long way out.
- If you have a calendar you would like on screen, see The Calendar card for how to get its address.
Adding a smart home later
You can connect one at any time. Open Settings › Connections and select Connect a Smart Home. This runs setup again, so you can build a dashboard from your devices.