this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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I have a Samsung Android tablet (running LineageOS) in the kitchen.

What kind of App is recommended as of today? I want it to automatically come on when there's movement detected in the kitchen and display the weather forecast, the calendar, birthdays and so on. Remind me to put the trash out and have the most important buttons and switches for the house. Ideally also double as an internet radio and a digital picture frame.

I've tried WallPanel and the HomeAssistant Companion App.

Are there alternatives? What do you use? Do you integrate your Dashboards/Wallpanels via MQTT?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I definitely recommend Fully Kiosk Browser, it’s easily worth the 10$ license even if you don’t need the features. The integration into Home Assistant is great, you can do all kinds of things really easily to the app through HA like loading URLs and controlling the screen on and off, the integration is really superb.

ETA: I forgot, it also has a webui to manage it remotely. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s free still, I just mean it’s that good of an app that it’s worth whatever their license costs (I bought it a while ago).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My idea is to use this https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.waveup/

You would need to place the hand nearby the proximity sensor

In order to wake when you enter the room you would need an external pir sensor and some hack. Or a sophisticated app that does computer vision all the time with the front camera, but I never saw an app like that

Alternatives that I evaluated as a concept:

  • a pine tablet with Linux and a pir sensor connected to the gpio ports - need to code a wake screen feature, then show a dashboard from ha in a kiosk browser

  • using some custom python script generate an image on your server with the status of your home, then jailbreak an old kindle to download and display that image ever few minutes. No need to turn on and off the screen anymore

A tablet that turns on every time you enter the room might be annoying night time

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just a heads up that the paid version of Fully Kiosk Browser has a wake-via-camera motion option built in, and with the HA integration you can also do wake via PIR or some other input, or use the motion detection of the camera as an input to HA for further automation.

Personally, I use a bit of abandoned android software (I forget the name at the moment) that lets me use a node based system to connect the proximity sensor with the screen wake based on whatever variables work, so that works for me, but my touch panel is running an older version of android so it might not work with everything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I just have a home assistant dashboard running as a full screen webpage. I don't have auto wake on movement but it works great otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Consider using Fully Kiosk Browser for your Android tablet in the kitchen. It offers automatic launch on motion detection and customization for displaying weather, calendars, reminders, and smart home controls. To integrate dashboards and wall panels, MQTT is a great option. This setup can also function as an internet radio and digital picture frame for added versatility.

For more details you can also check this: https://blog.scalefusion.com/set-up-chrome-browser-in-kiosk-mode-on-android/