This is a follow up from Atlona Velocity Touch Panel (didn't work)
Background: Atlona sells commercial-grade AV hardware (as a smaller Crestron competitor), including wall-mounted POE powered touch panels. They are Android tablets (OEM is ProDVX), but have a custom firmware to only work with their own Velocity control systems. I used a AT-VTP-800, which is only recently discontinued and available for under $100 on ebay.
I gave the free version of Gemni a shot and we were able to get this working with Home Assistant, kicking and screaming all the way!
The trick is to use Android Debug Bridge on a computer connected to the touch panel over USB. That way you can disable the Velocity app, and upload Fully Kiosk Browser, and set that as default. I’m not sure exactly what commands worked, but I have the powershell log if anyone wants it.
Caveats:
- In order to stop the Velocity app from taking back control upon a power cycle, you need to to set Fully Kiosk Browser to Kiosk mode, which is a premium feature. You can demo it for free but it costs ~$10.
- The VTP-800 I used is Android 6 and was a bit slow. Everything in my custom dashboard worked, including loading camera streams, but it was slower than what I consider acceptable for interactive use. The new auto-generated dashboard in the 2.2026 release also had some rendering errors.
Conclusion: if you need a cheap commercial-grade POE powered touch panel, used Atlona touch panels can be contenders, especially if you can get a good price on the current-gen models. They used to offer these with 5 year commercial warranties, so the hardware should hold up for quite some time.