A home dashboard system
Lights, locks, climate, cameras, music, the pool, the bins. All of it on screens that are always on, in the rooms you already stand in.
No app to open. No login. You look up, and the answer is already there.
Live · tap the lighting or the lock tile
01 / What it's like
Slate is not another smart home app. It is the house answering the question before you have to ask it.
The screen is already on. Walk past and you can see the weather, whether the front door is locked, how warm the spa is, what is playing downstairs, or whether the bins go out tonight.
Nothing to find. Nothing to unlock.
Is the garage closed? Did somebody leave the lights on downstairs? How long is the drive this morning? Is the pool warm enough?
Most of the time you do not need to control anything. You just need to know.
Kids. Guests. Grandparents. The person feeding the cat.
One tap does the obvious thing. Nobody needs the right app, an account, or an explanation of which company made the light switch.
02 / What it does
Smart homes tend to become collections of apps. One for the lights, another for the thermostat, another for the cameras, another for the speakers, another for the pool. Slate makes them feel like one house again.
Every room gets a panel designed for that room. The kitchen can show the whole house. The bedroom can put Goodnight, downstairs lights and the thermostat up front. The panel by the back door can care about the pool and spa.
Layouts are changed from a browser and appear on the wall live.
When nobody is using a panel, the controls fade away and your own photos take over. Walk back and the house returns.
Brightness settles automatically through the day and drops again overnight, so the hallway does not glow like an airport terminal at 2 AM.
Hue bulbs and Lutron dimmers behave like lights, not competing ecosystems. A room gets one control even when several systems are behind it. Scenes can cross brands, so Dinner, Movie and Away describe what you want the room to do rather than which manufacturer's app to open.
And Slate reports what actually happened. If one lamp did not respond, the room does not pretend everything is off.
See whether doors are locked and the garage is open or closed from any panel in the house. Controls wait for the device to report back before changing state. A lock is not shown as locked because you pressed a button. It is shown as locked when the lock says it is.
Cameras can be viewed around the house, with recording and event detection handled centrally. When somebody rings the doorbell, nearby panels can become the doorbell. See who is there, talk to them, unlock the door, then get back to what you were doing.
Heating and cooling, pool temperature, pumps, spa controls and irrigation all live in the same interface. Warm the hot tub from the panel by the back door. Stop the sprinklers because somebody wants to cross the lawn. Check whether the pool heater is actually running without visiting the equipment room.
The equipment can stay complicated. Using it does not have to be.
See what is playing, where it is playing and how loud it is. Start Spotify in a room, change the volume somewhere else, or stop the speakers the kids left running downstairs.
The control follows the room, not the app that happens to provide the music.
Some of the most useful tiles do not control anything. Weather for the next few hours. Current drive time compared with normal. Which bins go out tomorrow. Vacuum status. The temperature outside.
Small things you check often enough that reaching for a phone starts to feel ridiculous.
Away. Goodnight. Movie. One tap can run a sequence across lights, heating, screens, vacuums and other systems. The same routine can also happen on a schedule, or because something in the house changed.
The important part is that each step reports back. If one thing fails, the rest still happen, and Slate tells you what did not.
03 / A day inside
The individual integrations matter less than what happens when they disappear into the house.
Before anyone is properly awake, the kitchen lighting comes up warm and low. On the way to the coffee you can already see the forecast, the drive time and whether recycling goes out today.
You did not ask the house anything.
Lights off. Heating down. Garage checked. Cameras watching.
No walk around the house wondering whether somebody left the bathroom light on.
The doorbell rings. The nearest screens switch to the camera. Talk from the kitchen. Unlock the door if you want to.
Then the panel goes back to being the house.
Dinner lighting in the kitchen. Movie lighting in the theatre. Music where you want it. Bring the hot tub up to temperature from the panel by the back door so it is ready later.
Every room gets the controls that make sense in that room.
The panels have already dimmed themselves. From the bedroom you can see anything still on downstairs, check the doors and settle the house with one press.
No trip back downstairs required.
04 / Why Slate
A wall switch does not ask you to sign in. Your thermostat should not become useless because a server somewhere is unavailable. The basic things in your house should behave like they belong to you. Slate is built around that idea.
The core of Slate runs inside the house. Local lights, locks, climate, cameras and automations do not need a Slate server somewhere on the internet to tell them what to do.
Services that inherently need the internet, like weather, traffic or Spotify, naturally lose those features when the connection is down. The house itself keeps being a house.
Camera processing, device state and the everyday activity of the house stay on the local system rather than being sent to Slate's servers. There is no Slate cloud account keeping a history of when your door opened or which room somebody walked into.
Individual connected products may have their own cloud services. Slate does not need to add another one just to run your home.
If a device has not reported that something happened, Slate does not claim that it did. A lock tile does not become green because a command was sent. A light does not disappear from the problem because five others responded.
A system built into the wall should be trustworthy enough that you stop thinking about whether it is trustworthy.
The system running today has no Slate subscription and no dependency on a Slate cloud service.
If Slate becomes a product, the core operation of your home should remain yours. It should not stop working because a subscription expired or a company disappeared.
05 / Where it's at
Slate did not start as a startup idea. It started because I wanted one screen in the kitchen that could answer all the little questions I kept unlocking my phone to answer. One screen became six.
They have been running every day in one house long enough that the people who live there barely notice them anymore. That is probably the best sign that it works.
There is no launch date. There is no polished box waiting in a warehouse. The question right now is simpler:
Should this become something other people can have?
Working today
Being finished
06 / The ask
I am not taking orders or deposits. I am trying to figure out what Slate should become, if anything.
So the useful answer is not just yes. It is how you would want it.
Degrade, never go blank. Never show a state you were not actually told.
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