GLaDOS AI Animation Card for Home Assistant

A highly responsive, fully animated GLaDOS custom card for Home Assistant. Built using zero-dependency CSS and SVG transitions, this card brings GLaDOS to life on your dashboard as a visual interface for your Voice Assistant satellites.

She tracks your voice assistant's state in real-time, features a randomized idle behavior engine, and includes a dynamic, mathematically-driven dance engine that syncs perfectly to your music.

✨ Features

• Real-time State Tracking: Seamlessly transitions between Idle, Listening (Blue), Processing (Orange/Pulsing), and Responding (Red/Talking).
• Organic Idle Engine: Uses a weighted randomizer to cycle through various idle animations (swaying, looking around, glitching, getting bored) so she never looks robotic or looped.
• Performance Optimized: Uses GPU-accelerated CSS transform and opacity properties. Internal state-caching and garbage collection ensure zero memory leaks and negligible CPU drain.
• Visual UI Editor: Fully supports Home Assistant's visual card editor. No YAML configuration required!
• Response Delay Timer: Configurable delay to keep her in the "Processing" state a little longer before she starts talking, giving your TTS engine time to catch up.

🪩 The Dynamic Dance Engine

When your configured media player starts playing, GLaDOS enters a dedicated Spotify Green dance mode.

Instead of a basic looped animation, she features a Macro-Choreography Math Engine that actively reads the tempo of your music and chains together 32 unique, tempo-locked dance routines. Every 16 beats, she randomly switches her dance style so the animation stays fresh throughout a full song.

Her personality shifts depending on the speed of the music:

• Chill & Soulful (< 90 BPM): Fluid, heavily relaxed movements. Half-note vertical nods, wide figure-8 sweeps, and heavy eyelids.
• Groovy & Pop (90 - 124 BPM): Confident and bouncy. Syncopated U-shaped sweeps, double-bounces, and standard left/right bobs.
• Upbeat & Club (125 - 159 BPM): Sharp, high-energy snaps. Rapid eye darts, diagonal snapping tilts, and 4-beat build-up zooms.
• Intense & Hardcore (160+ BPM): Aggressive and chaotic. Deep vertical headbangs, erratic twitching, and mechanical system overrides.

⚠️ Prerequisite for Dancing

For GLaDOS to sync her movements to the beat, she needs to know the BPM of the currently playing song.

You will need an integration that provides a BPM sensor for your media player. I highly recommend using SongBPM-26, an integration specifically created to pull real-time track BPMs for this exact purpose.

📦 Installation

HACS (Recommended)

1. Open HACS in your Home Assistant instance.
2. Go to Frontend > Top right menu > Custom repositories.
3. Add the URL to this repository and select Lovelace as the category.
4. Click Install and reload your browser.

Manual

1. Download glados-card.js from the latest release.
2. Copy it into your config/www/ directory.
3. Go to Settings > Dashboards > Top right menu > Resources.
4. Add /local/glados-card.js as a JavaScript Module.

⚙️ Configuration

You can easily configure the card using the Home Assistant visual editor simply by clicking "Add Card" and searching for "GLaDOS Custom Card".

Alternatively, you can use YAML:

type: custom:glados-card
entity: assist_satellite.living_room
media_entity: media_player.spotify
bpm_entity: sensor.universal_music_bpm
respond_delay: 2.5
zoom: 85 # Scale percentage of the SVG model inside the card. Default is 85.

Configuration Variables

Name	Type	Requirement	Description
type	string	Required	Must be custom:glados-card.
entity	string	Required	The entity ID of your voice assistant satellite (e.g., assist_satellite...).
media_entity	string	Optional	The entity ID of your media player. Triggers the dance state when playing.
bpm_entity	string	Optional	The entity ID of the sensor providing the current song's BPM (requires SongBPM-26). Defaults to 120 if missing.
respond_delay	number	Optional	Number of seconds to wait before changing from Processing (Orange) to Responding (Red). Useful if your TTS has a slight delay. Default is 0.
zoom	number	Optional	Scale percentage of the SVG model inside the card. Default is 85.

🛠️ Tech Stack & Optimization

This card is completely self-contained. It uses no external image files (everything is dynamically drawn via inline SVG), and all lighting blooms, shadows, and metallic reflections are calculated natively by the browser's SVG rendering engine.

Performance Notes:

• Zero-Drift Sync: Uses performance.now() high-resolution timestamps to ensure dance moves stay locked to the beat during long playback sessions.
• Firehose Gatekeeping: Implements state-caching to ensure the card only recalculates animations when your tracked entities change, ignoring irrelevant Home Assistant state traffic.
• Resource Management: Automatically destroys all active timers and animation loops when the card is removed from the DOM to prevent memory leaks.