Android Tablet Kiosk problems

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1

Hello all,

A little background …

I have HAOS installed on my Dell Optiplex 7050. Most my 40-odd devices are ZigBee ZHA with a few wifi devices, like my Reolink doorbell camera. My system has worked pretty flawlessly for about three years.

I’m currently working on a wall-mounted android tablet that I want to behave as follows … I want to show a single tablet view with some basic house sensors and controls. It will only come on when presence is detected by the tablet camera. When presence is not detected after a short time, the screen turns off. When someone presses the (Reolink) doorbell, a live camera feed of the visitor pop-ups on the tablet for a short time, regardless if the screen was on or off when the doorbell was pushed. After the camera pop-up times out, the tablet reverts to the screen off state.

I’ve scoured this site and YouTube for examples and found a few. I’ve found this YouTube video from Dave at Lazy Tech Geek to be the model I used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqGvk1v8W04&list=PLmYU-7DfexjuujN2IvOpk2EvXMKy5HxsB&index=5 Thanks Dave

The stuff that seems to work.

  1. Installed the Fully Kiosk Browser APK file on a Galaxy Tab S2 running Android 7.0 All good

  2. Set up Fully Kiosk remote administration on my desktop and can access all the Fully Kiosk settings. All good

  3. Configured screensaver settings in Fully Kiosk to use the tablet camera for presence detection. Tablet turns the display on with motion and turns off with the delay set. All good

  4. Set up the starting URL in Fully Kiosk of the desired dashboard view. All good

  5. Set up a new user account for the Kiosk tablet to only have access to desired dashboard page. When I open Fully Kiosk on the tablet, it opens to my desired dashboard view, but the header shows all my other dashboard views as well. I think the desired next step would be to install the Browser Mods integration to hide the Fully Kiosk header and sidebar. Maybe good

Here is where it starts getting not so good.

  1. My tablet touch screen won’t work when Fully KIosk is opened. When I start the app, I get a large watermark style text box labeled “restart”. There is also another text block stating “Fully Kiosk Browser isn’t responding” with options to close the app or wait. Since the touchscreen won’t work, I fuss with power on/off and other gymnastics to get it cleared … sometimes.
    Once the tablet prompted that “TouchWiz” user interface wasn’t loading. Samsung has since discontinued using TouchWiz and I’m suspecting it is at the core of the problem. I’m not sure if I can uninstall TouchWiz, and if so, is there a native touch in Android that will still work?

I have other questions, but I need to get the touchscreen issue resolved before I get to them.

Thanks in advance for any help.

regards,
Karl

2

Update on touchscreen failure.

After a hunch that my touchscreen problem was caused by Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, I was planning to remove it and use more of a native Android UI. It seems that is not a good idea because the TouchWiz UI is built right into Samsung’s version of the Android OS. Removal can be done, but would require a better surgeon than I with more tools, more skills and willing to take more risk that I was. A bricked system was a likely outcome for me.

Rather than remove all of the TouchWiz, I hoping I could somehow interrupt the start-up process before it crashed … maybe with the launcher. After more internet searching for a lightweight launcher option, I decided to try the free version of the Niagra Launcher. After a quick trip to the Play Store, it was installed and set as my default launcher.

Viola! I can now open Fully Kiosk and have full touchscreen control.
Now on to the camera pop-up.