Helios
A 3D Lovelace card for Home Assistant that paints live sun position, cloud cover, real cast shadows from buildings and trees and a self-learning PV forecast on a MapLibre map of your home. This site supplies the card with the LiDAR data it needs in regions the built-in providers don't reach yet.
Articles et retours de la communauté
First time here? Read this.
Helios paints the real shadows of the buildings and trees around your home. For each location, the card needs a height map describing how tall every building and tree is.
Good news: the Helios card already ships native LiDAR coverage for a growing list of countries, and the list grows with every release. Take the online coverage test to check if your home is already covered, no upload needed. If your area isn't there yet, this page is for you, it converts your raw LiDAR data (in formats Helios cannot read directly) into the height map the card needs.
Quick glossary of the words on this page
- LiDAR
- Light Detection And Ranging. A laser scanner mounted on a plane or a satellite shoots pulses at the ground, measures how long they take to bounce back, and reconstructs the 3D shape of every surface below (ground, buildings, trees). National mapping agencies fly LiDAR every few years and publish the result as free open data.
- LAS / LAZ
- The raw output of a LiDAR scan, as a list of points (millions of them) with XYZ positions and a tag saying what each one is (ground, building, tree, etc.). LAS is the uncompressed format, LAZ is the same thing zipped, ~10x smaller. National LiDAR programmes hand out LAZ by default. Upload mode "LAZ / LAS" on this page expects one of those files.
- DSM (Digital Surface Model)
-
A 2D grid (saved as a
.tifGeoTIFF image) where every pixel holds the height of the tallest thing at that spot, roof of a building, tip of a tree, or bare ground if nothing's there. - DTM (Digital Terrain Model)
- Same kind of grid as a DSM, but it skips everything above ground level, the cells hold only the bare-earth elevation. Upload mode "DSM + DTM" expects both files for the same area.
- nDSM (normalised DSM)
-
This is the data Helios needs. It's just
DSM minus DTM: each cell holds how tall the
building or tree at that spot is, with zero meaning "no building
here". This page computes the nDSM for you from either
upload mode and ships it to you as a COG (see below): one
.tiffile, nDSM content inside. - COG (Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF)
-
A file format, not a different kind of data. A COG is a
regular GeoTIFF stored in a way that lets the Helios card
fetch only the pixels around your home (not the whole
file). The
.tifyou download from this page is an nDSM stored as a COG, that's the one file Helios reads.
Where do I download LiDAR data for my country?
For each country, this section points at a national open-data portal where you can grab the raw LAZ point cloud or the DSM + DTM raster pair, which the pipeline then converts into a Helios-ready nDSM Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF.
This list is community-maintained. If your country is missing, edit LIDAR_SOURCES.md on GitHub and open a pull request, the PR template walks you through the format and asks for a screenshot of a successful conversion as proof the source actually feeds the pipeline.
1. Upload your data
What this tool does
In one sentence: it takes raw LiDAR data and turns it into a small file the Helios card can read to draw real shadows from buildings and trees around your home.
In a bit more detail: LiDAR is a scan that records the height of every surface on the ground (terrain, buildings, trees). National agencies publish these scans as public open data, but in formats Helios can't consume directly. This pipeline runs the GIS conversion server-side (point cloud or DSM/DTM in -> height-above-ground COG out) so you don't have to install QGIS, GDAL or PDAL on your machine. You upload, wait a minute, download.
Helios-Lidar runs on a server I rent from OVH and pay for, every month, out of my own pocket. There are no ads on this page, and there will never be, unless I can no longer fund the server otherwise. If you enjoy the site and the card, can afford it, and would like to support me, a donation of any amount is always welcome.
Thank you!
The bring-your-own local-nDSM provider in the Helios card and the Python preparation toolchain this pipeline is built on top of were contributed by @jourdant in PR #5 and PR #11. Helios-Lidar is the web wrapper that exposes that toolchain.