Atlona Velocity Touch Panel (didn't work)

Sharing my findings here as negative feedback is also important. TLDR: Didn’t work; I’m going to try those Crestron panels everyone recommends instead.

I used to program Atlona Velocity control systems as a AV Systems Integrator. Your basic system is a touch panel connected to a “Gateway” or control processor. I noticed that the touch panels are just POE powered Android tablets with a built-in kiosk mode that uses a browser to display the webpage that the processor serves. The hardware is high quality, and you can get them pretty cheap on ebay.

One day when programming a Velocity system, I accidentally pointed the touch panel to a device that was not the processor, and the touch panel displayed the web interface of that different device. Years later I bought an AT-VTP-800 (same model I experienced the behavior with) because I thought this might work for Home Assistant, but on initial tests it does not (anymore?).

Pointing the touch panel to my HA server, I get “controller not found”, possibly because HA does not redirect ‘wrong’ port inquiries to port 8123.
I can point the touch panel to a different web server which does port redirect and get “loading”, but it does not work.

Has anyone had any success / can anyone packet capture a handshake between touch panel and Velocity gateway so we can see what it expects? I don’t think it’s encrypted.

I brought up Home Assistant and a request for touch panel kiosk mode during an HETMA Advisory Board meeting with Atlona. I don’t think anything will come of it, but they took notes. (I brought this up with Extron too, but they specifically said they won’t enable a kiosk mode.)

Are they running a very old version of Android or the browser that is in kiosk mode? Something along the lines of ‘if it aint broke…’
Maybe it doesn’t support some of the inbuilt browser functionality needed for displaying HomeAssistant code. Java etc?
Are they actually running Android, or something else like a cut-down version of Windoze CE?
Point it at a simple website with simple source code and see if it works.

Can you just change HA port or point it to a domain https://mydomain.com

If it will open a webpage at any port I see potential.