Dashboard is used for offline control, when your cellphone is in the same LAN with the controller you can use the Dashboard to controll your devices, scenes and actions directly without the cloud, therefore Dashboard is more usefull when the internet is disconnected in your home. Dashboard will scan the controllers within your current connected LAN, it may take a few seconds to scan and list all the controllers, if the controller doesn't appear after a few seconds, you can click the Plus button to manually input the controller IP to connect, just make sure it is in the same LAN with your cellphone. When you connect with the controller for the first time, it will prompt to setup a 6 digits PIN for the controller for security reasons, after you setup the PIN, then you can input the PIN to access the controller. Please keep the PIN in mind. In dashboard, you can: - Control devices - Activate scenes - Run actions - Check the state of the controller - Change the PIN of the controller - Remove automations All the data in Dashboard is synced from cloud, except the devices state, you can't make other changes in Dashboard and send the changes back to cloud, for instance, if you removed an automation, which is not working as you expected, but the data is still existing in cloud, you need to remove it from cloud as well to completely remove the automation.