Personally I wouldn’t want to have to put my password in every time Porteous is restarted.
The history is not kept, no passwords are saved, and many menu items have been disabled for total security. When the browser is restarted, all caches are cleared and it reopens automatically with a clean session to ensure no trace of history is left.
If this is going to be a device on the wall in the kitchen, running HA 24/7 in a browser, where’s the need for passwords?
You need a password to log into ha.
Once, or whenever HA restarts if I do an update. I have 2 systems running under Porteus, one of which has only restarted when we’ve had a power cut. HA is running on a NUC elsewhere on the network and Porteus just has a URL to create an instance of HA in a browser window. It’s running 24/7 showing the stuff we want to see at a glance in the kitchen - weather, cameras, hot water status etc.
Ok, not as difficult as I thought. (We have had too many power cuts lately!)
Even though Porteus seems to be a good solution, it’s a pity you cannot use it on a ARM device.
Using a SBC with browser would be cheaper and more energy efficient and for a system at home this would be sufficient.
I’m sure you’re right. I have Frigate doing movement detection and recognition on 3 cameras, so I needed the horsepower for that primarily.
I have exactly the same need - to connect the touchscreen to the assos without a docker, but my 3-day search has not led to anything yet:
… because HAOS simply does not support the feature of Dashboard display natively.
So essentially this route is a dead end:
… and you will want to step back, think about what you really need vs want, adjust one or more of your boundary conditions, so that to be able to arrive at a similar outcome (or same outcome but differently).
Out of the box and off the wall-- which is how I think most of the time…
The Raspberry can also have a proximity detector to turn on the display, or show a “slide show” when no one is in front of it to control anything.
Since the projects are separate, they can be developed independently. Home Assistant only needs to know what to do with the MQTT commands. The display with Raspberry only has to interpret the screen touches.
Too far off the wall?
This sounds like fun. You can have different “screens” for different occasions or seasons, and no changes needed for Home Assistant. You can even have sliders on the screen. And, it doesn’t matter the size of the screen on the Raspberry. You can upgrade later to a 60-inch “Back to the Future” smart wall and you won’t have to change a thing on Home Assistant.
HAOS is meant to be a OS for HA only and as one package so it has very limited options (maybe even none, not sure) to do something else with it.
If you really want to have HA on a RPi with a touchscreen attached, it can be done with another type of HA setup.
I have done this successfully as a test, just for fun, on a RPi with the official 7" touchscreen by installing Raspbian lite, HA Core, a window manager and chromium.
Also for @stevemann (because it can be done much easier then your idea): now I use that touchscreen with Raspbian and browser to have a dashboard/kiosk for HA & mediaplayers in a full-screen browser window with HTML tabs.
Hi everybody,
after starting the hardware discussion I am currently busy in setting up the software side in order to compare Philips and iiyama touchscreen.
I tried Porteus, which serves my needs quite well. I plan to run Porteus in Promox VM, as I want to run HASS IO in a separate VM in parallel. Displaying the Porteus VM in HDMI port seems to be tricky by using PCI pass through. Did not try it so far, but does anybody have experience on that?
With my planned setup I am experiencing some limitations. I am not exactly sure at which point to tackle my challenges so I share the entire derivation. Apologies for the long post:
Planned setup: I wanted to run Proxmox on my NUC7i3BNK to virtualize
A) Homeassistant and
B) Porteus to show my Dashboard on a touchscreen
Current issues with Porteus:
Display dashboard PCIe passthrough seems not to work, because I do not have a secondary GPU, which is apperently hard required. I therefore cannot provide HDMI output while using Proxmox. To my understanding I needed to change Hardware to overcome this issue, or run Homeassistant and the Dashboard on two separate sets of hardware. Quite energy consuming…
I cannot really control Porteus via Homeassistant (On/off/reboot host ,screensaver on/off, blank/wake screen). Natively I cannot connect to Porteus via HASS, as neither SSH key connection is supported by Porteus nor SSH password authentification by HASS. Workarround with Python and SSH password, does not entirely serve my needs, as there is no working Porteus SSH command for switching screensaver on/off. Further I needed to invest some further research how to implement SSH connection with password in HASS properly.
This issue could be overcome by switching from Porteus to other light Linux distro (Any recommendation which distro in particular would be highly appreciated!).
However I expect a lot of fiddly work and I am uncertain about the reaction time, if an SSH connection needs to be established, everytime a motion sensor is triggered for instance.
If I indeed need a second piece of hardware (due to missing PCIe passthrough), I considered switching to Android due to simplicity. As there are tons of howtos about Android based “Fully Kiosk Browser”, which seems to be super easy and exacly serves my needs, I was considering to run Android on an SBC - as controversially discussed by @brot123 .
Which Android SBC hardware? Khadas Edge2/VIM4 seems to be a bit overkill for just browsing?! Wouldnt be a simple YY3568 with 4GB RAM powerful enough (for landcape view)?
Many thanks for your inputs, and ideas, how you solved this!
what screensaver does porteus use?
I find it hard to believe that porteus does not allow key authentication to sshd, they must have really screwed up the sshd install for that.
I am not an Linux expert at all. Therefore I cannot tell which screensaver is used.
Further SSH key authentification is theoretically in place, but with provided key I cannot connect - unsure why. Unfortunately in the forum I did not receive support for that. Further, to my understanding the SSH key does change after every reboot.
Probably each problem is solvable, but quite hard and fidly work without much linux knowledge. I am not intended to blame Porteus (team) for all issues, the problems could also be based on my lacking skills 
This is why I expected Android based Fully Kiosk as easier solution, as there are quite some howtos.
It just occurred to me (via inspiration on reddit) that you could pass through a usb video device for a browser OS.
But yes there are a lot of people running android tablets for ui’s.
Great idea, but I tried this for quite some time now with a HDMI to USB-C adapter without success. Thinking about it with my limited understanding Proxmox host needs one GPU. And if you passthrough a USB device to a VM it cannot be used by the host anymore.
So what I need is probably an external USB graphics card (not only another way of connecting my internal GPU). Probably the invest is quite remarkable, so it may be more reasonable to change my NUC to a one with secondary GPU, or a second Android device. Any other thoughts?
The way my house is set up it is better to have the HA computer away from the clients/frontends so no, I haven’t been thinking any more about it. I get the point though.
Do you already have your Philips Touch screen working ?
It seems to be exactly what I want on my wall for HA Dashboard.