Having to use FullyKiosk to manage Android tablets is a real pain. It is unreliable at best and very inconvenient, especially when using lower powered, affordable devices like Fire 7. The features necessary to turn the HA Companion app into a wall mounted kiosk device should be built in to the basic Android applicaiton. Key features should include at least…
Keep the screen on and prevent the tablet from sleeping.
Automatically start on reboot.
Dim the screen when not in use but bring it back when the camera sees motion.
A fully dimmed screen should be black, i.e. turn off the back light alltogether.
Wake the screen on touch or camera seeing movement.
That really isn’t the answer. Fully Kisok has some severe problems and is not open source. Trying to set up a wall tablet for home assistant is extremely difficult because it is really designed to lock the tablet down. We just need a couple of features added to the home assitant companion app and it would be fine for this applicaiton.
Fully Kiosk has a funky way to get out of the companion app to fix issues. You have to tap 7 times in quick succession somewhere on the screen then enter a pass code. This rarely works when you really need it requiring you to completely reboot the tablet and grab it quickly.
The camera recognition to wake up the display works most of the time but there is no way to turn it on or off when you don’t want the display waking up in the middle of the night.
The app requires you to buy a license for every tablet you have.
After the tablet has been running for a few days it becomes impossible to get back into Fully to restart Home Assistant and the whole tablet becomes unresponsive.
If it loses wifi connectivity it forces you to power down and restart to get reconnected because you cannot get to the settings in Android to reconnect.
I agree with your request. I use the wallpanel app and it works more or less OK. But I also have the companion app installed, which is a bit strange. As well I would like to use the app for different automation scenarios and control it by automations.
If I had the bandwidth I would get involved and add this capability to the Android companion app but I am swamped with other stuff right now and cannot take on the learning curve to start writing Android apps. I cannot believe we are now in 2024 and this still has not been added. There must be a lot of users out there who need to put a wall panel in their house for anyone to use. I have 5 panels in my smart home. Three Amazon Fire 7, one Amazon Fire 8 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8. They all work well some of the time but certainly not reliably enough to convince other, less technically savvy folks, that they are worth while. I have endless arguments with my wife and kids about how it would be so much simpler if we just has regular light switches.
I use Fully Kiosk on them but it is flaky at best and extremely hard to set up to the point where it is even tolerably unreliable. 99% of the features of Fully Kiosk are not required and the only thing it is really good for is autostarting Home Assistant and blanking the screen at night in the bedrooms. Even the screen blanking does not work properly as the backlight is still on so in a dark room it still shows a dim panel on the wall.
A couple of additions to the Home Assistant Companion app would allow it to be used as a wall panel and turn, what is a really great system for techno geeks, into an excellent system for everyone on the planet.
I started down the smart home panel road but soon realized that (at least in our case) it’s mostly a pretty decoration. The best use we give the tablets is to show the doorbell feed. I use the smart home tab sometimes and as for my wife and daughter, they don’t even bother.
Fully Kiosk works reliably for me, even on a tablet with Android Go. Only have to mess with it every few months.
Are you turning on screensaver instead of turning the screen off? Screensaver doesn’t turn the screen off completely, just the pixel layer. You have to set brightness to 0 for the screen to be as dim as possible when the screensaver is active.