SwitchBot has a wide range of smart home products, but one area I have been particularly fond of is their environmental sensors, such as the SwitchBot Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer and the SwitchBot Meter Plus.

They may not be technically the best sensors on the market, but they are incredibly affordable and tend to have superb battery life. In particular, the Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer can be bought for just £13, is IP65 rated, so you can use it outdoors, and has a multi-year battery life. It is officially rated for 2 years, but I reviewed mine 3 years ago, and they are all still going.

SwitchBot has now expanded this range with the SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard, which appears to be the official name now. It was previously referred to as the SwitchBot Weather Station, and the device still shows up under that name in parts of the app, so you will see both names used online for the time being.

As the name suggests, it is a sort of hub for weather and environmental monitoring in an attractive e-ink display that is designed to look like a photo frame.

The Weather Station then has real-time indoor/outdoor temperature and humidity built into it, plus a 5-day forecast, air quality, and sunrise/sunset. You can then add three additional sensors to it for multi-room monitoring.

It also has a handy calendar sync function which works with Google, iCloud, Outlook and Yahoo. It shows schedules for up to 5 family members with sound reminders, making it convenient to use in communal spaces so your family can keep track of events and schedules.

Then you can map scene controls to your other SwitchBot devices to control things like lighting or robot vacuums.

Preview	Product	Price
	SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard, WiFi Weather Station with Family Calendar	£79.99	Buy on Amazon
	SwitchBot CO2 detector with Built-in Hygrometer, Temperature Humidity Monitor with carbon dioxide...	£48.47	Buy on Amazon
	SwitchBot WiFi Thermometer Hygrometer 3 Pack with Hub Mini, IP65 Indoor Outdoor Thermometer...	£44.16	Buy on Amazon

Specification

Set Up

Setting up the E-Ink Home Dashboard follows the same process as every other SwitchBot product I have reviewed. You add it through the SwitchBot app by tapping the plus icon in the top right, then you hold the pairing button on the rear of the frame for five seconds until a small indicator light starts flashing. The dashboard then appears in the device list, and you follow the usual prompts to connect it to your Wi-Fi. On first boot, mine immediately prompted for a firmware update, which took a few minutes and is worth doing before you start configuring anything, as SwitchBot has been actively pushing updates to this device since launch.

One thing worth flagging is that it only supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. This is normal for smart home devices, and my network broadcasts both bands without any issues, but if you run a mesh system that insists on steering devices to 5GHz during pairing, you may need to temporarily split the bands or set up a dedicated IoT SSID. Working in IT, band steering problems during smart home onboarding are one of the most common faults I come across, so it is worth knowing about in advance rather than discovering it mid-setup.

Unusually for SwitchBot, no hub is required for the core functionality. Most SwitchBot devices are Bluetooth-first and need a hub for remote access and cloud features, but the dashboard has Wi-Fi built in, so the weather data, forecasts, calendar syncing and sensor displays all work with just the app. You only need a hub if you want to use the two scene buttons to trigger other SwitchBot devices, and any hub will do for this, including the cheap Hub Mini. You do not need to spend extra on the Hub 2 or Hub 3 unless you want the Matter functionality that comes with them, which I will cover below.

Once connected, you can set your location under the displayed information settings, choose your units, and configure how frequently each type of data refreshes. This matters more than it might sound, because the refresh interval is the main thing that determines battery life. You might want the indoor temperature updating every 10 minutes but the weather forecast only every couple of hours. If you want the latest data immediately, holding the button on the top edge for two seconds forces a manual refresh, which takes around 30 seconds to pull the data down and redraw the screen. Otherwise, changes you make in the app can take a while to appear on the display, which caught me out a couple of times early on when I assumed a settings change had not saved.

Matter Support

SwitchBot lists Matter support for this device, but the wording deserves scrutiny because the official line is Matter via SwitchBot Matter-enabled hubs. The dashboard itself is not a native Matter device, and it does not expose itself directly to Apple Home or other Matter controllers.

What actually happens is that SwitchBot sensors, including the ones you might pair with this dashboard, can be bridged into Matter platforms when they are connected to a Matter-enabled hub such as the Hub 2 or Hub 3. So the temperature and humidity readings from your sensors can end up in Apple Home that way, but the dashboard as a display and scene controller does not appear as a Matter device in its own right. I have seen some retailer listings that overstate this, so if native Matter support is the main reason you are considering it, I would temper your expectations.

Outside of Matter, the dashboard works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Siri Shortcuts, IFTTT and Samsung SmartThings. In Alexa, it appears in your device list as a sensor and you can view the temperature history, although humidity did not sync across for me. The bigger limitation is that you cannot use the dashboard as a trigger for routines in Alexa or Google Home. If you want automations based on its readings, such as switching on a fan when the bedroom passes a certain temperature, you need to build those inside the SwitchBot app, where the automation options are actually quite good. It is a workable arrangement, but it does mean your automations end up split across two apps if you run a mixed ecosystem, which is a mild annoyance rather than a dealbreaker.

Design and Display

The design brief here was clearly to make something that does not look like a gadget, and SwitchBot has largely succeeded. The dashboard looks like a modern photo frame, with a thin black plastic outer frame and a wide white border around the screen that mimics a picture mount. It measures 212 x 146 x 15 mm and weighs 670 g, so it is roughly the footprint of an A5 notepad. The build is ABS and PC plastic rather than anything premium, but it feels solid enough, and because it is designed to sit on a shelf or hang on a wall, you are never really handling it anyway.

You get two mounting options in the box. There are two slots on the rear that accept either a small wall bracket or a pair of clip-in feet that let it stand upright like a picture frame. I have mine standing on a kitchen shelf, and the slight backwards lean gives it a good viewing angle from standing height. There is a USB-C port on the edge for charging, a reset pinhole, and the pairing button on the back corner.

The screen itself is a 7.5-inch monochrome e-ink panel with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and 2-level greyscale. That is not a high resolution by e-reader standards, where 300 PPI panels are the norm, and up close you can see the chunky pixelated rendering of the fonts and icons. In practice, this matters less than the numbers suggest. This is a glanceable display that you read from across a room, and the high contrast black-on-grey rendering is legible from several metres away in a way that a backlit LCD often is not. E-ink also has no glow, so it does not light up a bedroom at night, and viewing angles are essentially perfect.

It is not a touchscreen. Instead, there are four capacitive touch points along the bottom of the white border, with their current functions labelled on a black strip along the bottom of the e-ink panel. On my setup, these show Daily Verse and Today’s Schedule alongside the two scene buttons. The lack of touch input is a reasonable trade-off for battery life, but it does shape what this device can and cannot do, and I will come back to that in the calendar section.

On the top edge, there is a single physical button. A quick press turns on the built-in front light, which illuminates the screen evenly for about 10 seconds before switching itself off. This works well for checking the time or temperature during the night without reaching for a phone. Holding the same button for two seconds forces a data refresh. The screen redraws with the typical e-ink flash, and there is a small amount of ghosting occasionally, but nothing that affects readability.

Home Screen + Multi Sensor / Room Monitoring

The home screen is the default weather view, and it is the screen the dashboard will spend most of its life displaying. It is split into three columns. The left column shows the date, a large digital clock, the current conditions with the day’s high and low, your outdoor temperature and humidity, a second sensor reading, and the sunrise and sunset times. The middle column covers air quality, PM2.5, pollen level, wind speed and direction, UV index, precipitation, visibility and air pressure. The right column shows yesterday’s weather, today’s, and the forecast for the next five days with rain probability percentages.

It is a genuinely useful amount of information on one screen. On mine, I can see at a glance that it is 16°C and 91% humidity outside, my bedroom is sitting at 20.3°C and 67%, and there is a 20% chance of rain today. There is also a simpler minimal layout available if you find the default too busy, which strips out most of the middle column in favour of larger text that is easier to read from a distance. Those are your two options for the main screen, and that is a limitation worth understanding before buying. The layout positions are fixed. You can change the units and which sensors feed the readings, but you cannot rearrange the tiles or choose which data points appear where.

My biggest complaint about the weather function is the lack of an hour-by-hour forecast on the main screen. What I really want from a kitchen weather display is to know that it will rain at 15:00 but be dry by 16:00, so I can plan a run or decide whether the washing can go out. The closest the dashboard gets is the Daily Overview theme on the secondary screens, which breaks the day into four-hour blocks. That is better than nothing, but four-hour granularity is too coarse for UK weather, where conditions can cycle through all four seasons before lunch.

The secondary screens are where the customisation lives. There are 11 theme views in total: Environmental Data, Daily Overview, Calendar, Countdown, Daily Verse, Custom Text, two weekly schedule layouts, two monthly schedule layouts, and an Hourly Overview. You can assign four of these to the device and cycle through them with the touch buttons. The Countdown theme can show days elapsed and remaining in the year or month, or count down to a date of your choosing, which would suit a holiday or event. The Custom Text theme displays a message of up to 328 characters typed in the app, or it can be fed via an API, and SwitchBot has added OpenClaw support so you can pipe in things like bus timetables that you have asked an AI assistant to look up. I can see tinkerers getting some mileage out of that, though most buyers will never touch it.

The Environmental Data screen is the one I find most useful, because this is where the multi-room monitoring comes in. The dashboard supports up to three external SwitchBot sensors over Bluetooth, with a claimed range of 120 metres in open space, which in a real house with real walls translates to comfortably covering a typical UK home. On mine, I have the dashboard’s own internal sensor in the kitchen, the SwitchBot Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer feeding the outdoor reading, and the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 Monitor in the bedroom. All of the readings are also logged long-term in the SwitchBot app, so you can review historical charts, and you can set threshold alerts that push a notification to your phone if a room gets too hot, too cold or too humid.

The sensors can also drive automations within the SwitchBot ecosystem. If a room gets too cold, a SwitchBot Bot can physically press the button on a heater, or rising temperatures can trigger smart blinds or a fan. During the recent heatwaves, I set an alert for when the bedroom passed 25°C so I knew when to shut the blinds and get a fan running, which is exactly the kind of small quality-of-life automation this ecosystem does well.

SwitchBot Meter Pro (CO2 Monitor)

Included in my review sample was the SwitchBot Meter Pro (CO2 Monitor).

This includes:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Track CO2, temperature, humidity, time, and comfort levels on one screen. Know when to ventilate for a healthier home.
• Precision Sensors: NDIR technology and Swiss-grade sensors deliver accurate CO2 readings (400-9999 ppm, plus or minus 5% accuracy) every second (Type-C powered) or 5 seconds (battery mode).
• Custom Alerts: Audible, screen, and app notifications warn you when CO2, temperature, or humidity levels exceed safe thresholds. Perfect for bedrooms, offices, and nurseries.
• Versatile Design: Use with Type-C power or 12-month battery life. Wall-mountable or stand-adjustable (0-90 degrees) for flexible placement.
• Smart Integration: Export 38 days of local data or 2 years of cloud data via the SwitchBot App. Sync with voice assistants and the SwitchBot ecosystem for automated ventilation control.
• Quick Controls: Top buttons allow muting, unit switching, and value refreshing without the app.

I used this in my bedroom as I have been trying to optimise my physical and mental health. I struggle with ADHD and bad sleep problems, so I am always trying to find a balance of medication. I often struggle with brain fog and morning grogginess, and one factor that affects this is increased exposure to CO2. As we breathe out CO2 overnight, if you have your room sealed, CO2 levels increase and can get to the point where it leaves you feeling groggy in the morning.

The CO2 monitor on this surprised me at how high the CO2 levels got in my room. So I am now trying to sleep with the window open all night to help ventilate it more.

For context, outdoor CO2 sits at around 420 ppm, and indoor levels below 1000 ppm are generally considered fine. Checking mine in the early hours, the bedroom was reading 1067 ppm with the window cracked open, which is right on the boundary where studies start to associate levels with reduced sleep quality and next-day cognition. With the window fully shut, I was seeing it climb well beyond that. The Meter Pro makes this visible with a simple traffic light bar across the top of its display, and the reading feeds through to both the dashboard and the app, so I can glance at the kitchen shelf in the morning and see how the bedroom fared overnight. Of the three sensors I have paired, this is the one that has genuinely changed a habit.

Calendar

The calendar is one of the headline features, and it is also where my expectations and the reality diverged the most.

On paper, the specification is generous. The dashboard syncs with Google, iCloud, Outlook and Yahoo calendars via ICS URL, supports up to five personal calendars, displays up to 30 daily events per person, and can provide sound reminders for key events. The idea of a shared family schedule on the kitchen wall is a good one, and for households juggling school runs, clubs and appointments, a glanceable board that everyone can see without opening a phone has obvious appeal.

Setup is straightforward enough. You grab the ICS sharing URL from your calendar provider and paste it into the SwitchBot app, then assign each calendar to a person. The sync is one-way and periodic, so new events can take a while to appear on the screen unless you force a refresh.

The problem is depth. The daily schedule view shows you today’s events, and forward visibility is limited to a couple of days at most depending on the theme you pick. The monthly calendar theme is the most frustrating of the lot: it renders a full month grid, but it does not mark which days actually have events on them. My calendar had a couple of weeks of entries in it, and the monthly view showed a completely blank grid. It is like having a paper calendar on the wall with nothing written on it. Because there is no touchscreen, you also cannot tap a day to see what is on. The four buttons along the bottom switch between screens, and that is the extent of the interaction.

In fairness, SwitchBot has been iterating on the firmware, and the weekly and monthly schedule themes were added after launch, so there is a reasonable chance the calendar matures further. As it stands, it works as a today board: what is happening today, with an audible reminder before events, is genuinely handled well. As anything more than that, it falls short of what the marketing implies. I do rely heavily on my calendar to manage my ADHD, so this is a feature I wanted to be better than it is.

Scene Controller

The two right-hand touch buttons on the bottom bezel can be mapped to SwitchBot scenes, turning the dashboard into a basic smart home controller. This is the one function that requires a SwitchBot hub, because the hub acts as the bridge to your other Bluetooth devices, but a basic Hub Mini is sufficient.

Configuration happens under Custom Shortcuts in the app. You create a scene, such as switching off the lights, closing the curtains, or starting a robot vacuum, and assign it to Shortcut A or B. The button label then appears on the black strip at the bottom of the e-ink screen. One quirk to be aware of is that newly assigned shortcuts sync to the display on the normal refresh schedule, which can take up to around three hours, so if a button does not appear immediately, force a refresh with the top button rather than assuming it has failed.

The buttons themselves respond quickly and reliably, and there is something pleasant about a physical control point in a communal space, particularly for family members or guests who do not have the app. My criticism is simply that two buttons is not many. Given there is a strip of screen dedicated to labelling them, four assignable scenes with the calendar and theme navigation handled elsewhere would have made this far more useful. As it is, you have to pick your two most valuable automations and live with that.

Battery Life

The dashboard runs from a built-in 3.7V 5000mAh rechargeable battery, and SwitchBot claims up to one year per charge under typical refresh settings. That claim is plausible because of how e-ink works. The panel only draws meaningful power when the image changes; a static screen consumes essentially nothing. So battery life is almost entirely a function of how often you tell it to refresh, plus how often you use the front light and audible reminders.

I have not had the unit long enough to verify a full year, so treat the figure as a manufacturer claim rather than a tested result. What I can say is that after several weeks of use with the indoor readings updating every 10 minutes and the weather every 2 hours, the battery indicator has barely moved, which is consistent with the sort of multi-month figures I would expect. SwitchBot also has a good track record here; my three-year-old Thermo-Hygrometers are still on original batteries despite a two-year rating.

When it does need charging, it is a standard USB-C connection at 5V/1A, and you can also just leave it permanently plugged in if it lives near a socket, in which case you can crank the refresh intervals up without any battery anxiety. For wall mounting, the cordless operation is the whole point, and a once-a-year charge is about as low-maintenance as smart home kit gets.

Price and Alternative Options

Preview	Product	Price
	SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard, WiFi Weather Station with Family Calendar	£79.99	Buy on Amazon
	SwitchBot CO2 detector with Built-in Hygrometer, Temperature Humidity Monitor with carbon dioxide...	£48.47	Buy on Amazon
	SwitchBot WiFi Thermometer Hygrometer 3 Pack with Hub Mini, IP65 Indoor Outdoor Thermometer...	£44.16	Buy on Amazon

The SwitchBot Smart E-Ink Home Dashboard has an RRP of £110 and at the time of writing is available on Amazon for £88.

If you buy directly from SwitchBot, it is just £78.

To pair with it:

• SwitchBot Meter Pro (CO2 Monitor) is £60 RRP, available for £46.19
• SwitchBot Meter Pro is £35 RRP, available for £20.99
• SwitchBot Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer is £20 RRP, available for £12.99

The £110 RRP is a touch high for what is a 7.5-inch, two-colour e-ink panel with fixed layouts, but the street pricing changes the picture considerably. At £78 direct from SwitchBot, it undercuts most of the obvious alternatives.

For alternatives, dedicated family calendar displays such as the Skylight Calendar start at around £160 and climb well past £300 for the larger models. They offer a colour touchscreen and a far more capable calendar, but they are mains-powered, always-glowing LCD panels, which changes where you can sensibly put them. An Amazon Echo Show 8 costs around £150 and does far more overall, but again it is a bright screen with a camera and microphone that many people will not want in a bedroom or on a kitchen shelf permanently.

Closer in spirit are the hacker-friendly e-ink dashboards such as the TRMNL and various DIY builds around Raspberry Pi and cheap e-ink panels. These can be far more flexible, with proper hourly weather and richer calendar rendering, but they need more configuration and tinkering than most households will tolerate. If you enjoy that sort of project, they are worth a look. If you want something that works out of the box and integrates with sensors you may already own, the SwitchBot is the easier recommendation.

Traditional weather stations are the other comparison point. Something like the Netatmo Weather Station costs around £170 and offers more serious outdoor measurement, but has no display at all, pushing everything to an app. The SwitchBot approach of cheap sensors feeding an always-visible screen is, for most homes, the more useful arrangement.

Overall

Being a Brit living in the north of the UK, and a keen runner, I am stereotypically obsessed with the weather, checking it multiple times per day so I can plan runs, social activities, or just when I can hang my washing out. Recently, my obsession with solar power has also added to my weather obsession.

I was already a fan of the SwitchBot environmental sensors, and this new E-Ink weather station brings all that together into an attractive package.

I have left it on my kitchen shelf so my partner and I can see what the forecast is and what the current temperature is outside, or, with the recent heatwaves, how hot our bedroom is.

While I have not used the calendar extensively on this, I do rely on my calendar to help manage my ADHD, and anything that can help keep me organised is a welcome addition. That said, the calendar is currently the weakest part of the product, and if a proper family schedule board is your primary reason for buying, I would either wait for the firmware to mature or look at a dedicated calendar display instead.

There are other rough edges worth restating. The main weather screen has no hourly forecast, the layouts are fixed, only two scene buttons are available, and the Matter support only extends to sensors bridged through a Matter-enabled hub rather than the dashboard itself. None of these are fatal, but they are the gap between a good product and a great one, and most of them look fixable in software.

Judged on what it does well, though, this is an easy device to live with. The e-ink screen is legible from across the room at any time of day, the battery life removes the usual placement constraints, the multi-sensor monitoring works reliably, and the CO2 data from the Meter Pro has genuinely changed how I ventilate my bedroom. At the £78 to £88 street price, it is decent value for what you get, particularly if you already own SwitchBot sensors.

Overall, as you might expect, I love the SwitchBot Smart E-Ink Home Dashboard / Weather Station. I think it is reasonably priced, it looks attractive in a utilitarian way, and it has excellent features that work well.

James Smythe( Owner / Editor )

I am James, a UK-based tech enthusiast and the Editor and Owner of Mighty Gadget, which I’ve proudly run since 2007. Passionate about all things technology, my expertise spans from computers and networking to mobile, wearables, and smart home devices.

As a fitness fanatic who loves running and cycling, I also have a keen interest in fitness-related technology, and I take every opportunity to cover this niche on my blog. My diverse interests allow me to bring a unique perspective to tech blogging, merging lifestyle, fitness, and the latest tech trends.

In my academic pursuits, I earned a BSc in Information Systems Design from UCLAN, before advancing my learning with a Master’s Degree in Computing.

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