Best current UI platform for a small tablet?

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Yes, @thisisdavidbell - I’d be interested to hear your experiences; I was going to look into this in a bit more depth and I don’t object to the licence fee, but I was put off a bit by the multiple reports of unreliabiity.

The fact is that HA probably has too many dashboard options rather than too few, so no single one gets the attention that it needs, and Lovelace, which does get all the love, isn’t really intended for this; it might be OK if you’re hanging a 12-inch tablet on the wall, but not really for the 7 or 8-inch one that I use.

In my case, though, HADashboard, for all its many limitations, has been super-reliable, and creates convenient buttons of just the right size for my pudgy fingers on a small display! I just use the FullyKiosk browser to point at its URL and the combination mostly does what I need.

Even my wife uses it! (She would never do anything scary like look at the Lovelace page or the phone app :slight_smile: But she also wouldn’t use something more than a couple if times if it did prove unreliable.)

Lovelace is now starting to support multiple dashboards. If we get to the point where they can be individually themed, scaled etc, to be more suitable for fingers on small displays, then I can imagine switching to that, just for the greater variety of widgets, but at the moment HADashboard is fine for me.

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Hey @quentinsf. So far I have 2 wall mounted dashboards on 24/7 (10 inch ancient table which cant run anything due to lack of disk space (8gb, with only 100meg free) and a Fire HD 8.) I have a further 2 devices (a tablet and a phone which are used a few times a day). They have all been rock solid so far (which is admittedly less than a week).

I love:

  • sitting with the device itself and playing around with the widgets and layout until I get it just right.
  • the simple, consistent look. It just looks way more professional than anything else I have found.

Things I hoped are improved in the future (admittedly these are very focused on my needs, so may not all be high priority for everyone, or for the HomeHabit team.):

  • lack of scheduled screen off and on - 1 tablet has this baked in so its fine. The Fire HD doesn’t which Im not happy about, but I’m hoping this will be added to HomeHabit in the not too distant future as its one of the highest voted requests.
  • thermostat widget doesn’t support boost capability (I have Hive Heating), or nicely allow the mode to be returned to auto, or turning off the touch actions. I therefore instead use a standard temperature gauge for current thermostat temp, and a separate switch to perform boost and simultaneously show if the heating is currently on.

I too have no issue with the cost. People spend hundreds or more on the tablets, and smart tech for their home. For me, the whole of my Home Assistant use case just wouldn’t work nicely for me without HomeHabit. I don’t need any of the Premium features, but have bought a license just to make an initial contribution. Im so impressed with Home Assistant generally, its far superior to Domoticz that I came from and made getting everything integrated so easy. However, the community approach just hasn’t made a UI suitable for my use case - but HomeHabit has so they must be doing something right.

Happy to answer anything specific.

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@123 thanks for the background. Interesting to know. I guess I came onboard after all this, and ultimately the community built Lovelace just doesn’t work for me, but HomeHabit does.

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It’s good to have choices; something for everyone.

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Just came across Homehabit last night on play store while downloading grafana.
Very interesting. So easy to set up for simple dashboards like lights etc.
Started on HADash a few weeks but kind of parked it.

I like this for a couple of cheap tablets around the house to display my heating (underfloor heating with 10 zones which are all connected to HA now) and of course the lights.

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Since no one else mentioned it; wallpanel is my current go to interface. I particularly like that I can send MQTT commands to it to control the screen and brightness, so the tablet is only on whenever there is motion or the lights are on, and for its ability to do text to speech over mqtt, makes it very simple to have the tablet say some useful info, like alarm status or motion detection at the front door. It also has some cool features like the ability to use the tablet camera, even use it for motion detection and face detection, although I find that doesnt really work with cheap tablet front facing camera’s in less than ideal light.

All that said, wallpanel depends on lovelace. I dont really have a problem with that, but if you do, look elsewhere. Before I discovered wallpanel (and before performance improvements made wallpanel fluid on my tablet), I used Ariela. It has many similar features and has a native mode that does not use lovelace.

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Im using the Homekit Panel Card with custom pop up card to create a layout to use with a wall tablet.

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wow there are a lot of choices!

I have 2 tablets (fire HD 8 and a Samsung 10) that currently run Action Tiles on ST and now that i am finishing the move from ST to HA i want to get them setup in HA.

It seems the 3 most popular options are:

Lovelace UI - Using either Fully Kiosk Browser or WallPanel

HADashboard - requires setting up AppDaemon

Homekit Panel Card - I guess this would be a subset of Lovelace UI, this also looks nice.

I like that Lovelace UI can show the last motion event of my ring cameras, it doesnt appear this would be possible in HADashboard so that is I guess a con of that if correct.

Then there are a bunch of less popular choices as well…

I may eventually try all 3 of these options, its just that without trying them i have no idea which one will work best.

EDIT: not too fond of Lovelace on my small tablet. so much wasted white space. i used the custom header custom ui element and it worked well to remove the title bar but having multiple views takes up a lot of space with that bar.

i think i might try homekit panel card next or maybe homehabit, it also looks nice.

Anyone use homehabit know if it would work with something like the ring integration cameras? currently i can put a camera in a picture entity and it shows a snapshot of the last motion on my ring, if i tap it, it plays a short video clip. i wonder if 3rd party ones such as hadashboard or homehabit can access and use that properly or not. if not, i likely will need to stick with lovelace…

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Can you show some examples of that please?

Thanks

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Hello,

I’m currently using WallPanel showing my Lovelace Dashboards.
Basically this is working OK. Lovelace offers a lot of different options to show and control things.
However I’m often under the impression that lovelace , or actually it’s components (sliders, buttons, etc.) are not really designed to be on a wall mounted tablet… things are often a bit to small or not really handy to use.

What’s your impression or your alternatives and/or thoughts?

cheers
martin

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If I wanted to try using Lovelace on my small tablet display, is there a way to hide the sidebar completely? (including the icons) I just want the tabs along the top.

It would be great if there were a URL with ?sidebar=no on the end or something! I can always create it, or do some CSS hacking, but if there’s an official route…

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@quentinsf
I dont exactly understand, what do you want, but theres the simple option to hide the sidebar if you use the home assistant app on your tablet.
If you opened the app click on you name at the end of the page.
There is the option “Hide Sidebar”

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Ah, thanks! I’ll have a look at that.

When I started this thread, there was no such thing as a Home Assistant app for Android, so I hadn’t considered running anything other than the Fully Kiosk browser…

Though I imagine Fully Kiosk provides lots of control that the app doesn’t provide in other areas - managing the screen saver, returning to the home screen after a certain period, etc…

But it’s worth exploring. Anyone else using the Android app as the main interface for a permanently-mounted tablet?

35

Hello all - just revisiting an old thread for an update…

When I started this thread, and for the intervening few years, I continued to use HADashboard (part of AppDaemon) as the way I created the display used on my kitchen Fire HD8 tablet, which sits on top of the microwave. I still think that, if your needs are simple, it’s a very good system and I liked the appearance:

IMG_1893
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Over the years, I’ve tried various Lovelace-based and other alternatives, but never found anything which made such good and tidy use of the space, though of course the Lovelace cards are generally much more capable.

Well, this week I decided to have another go; the combination of the grid layout, wallpanel plugin, tile cards allowing me to create something manageable. So the main page now looks like this:

IMG_4374
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And I’m quite pleased with that, but man, was it a painful process getting here!

I started off trying to do it in the GUI editor, but that soon became completely unmanageable, so I reverted to YAML, and split the (four) panes up into four files, much as I described here. Once in YAML, you can lay things out nicely, add comments etc, so things got rather easier.

But Lovelace really isn’t designed for fitting stuff onto fixed-sized screens. (I really don’t want to scroll if I can help it, partly because of the extra load imposed on this limited hardware by Lovelace; it doesn’t scroll very smoothly.) I had to use a fair amount of card-mod to get it looking this good, and there are several bits I’m still not happy with. The whole shadow-DOM thing is a pain, and even when I got it going, things were a bit inconsistent. That card in the middle showing rain probability, for example, is all nicely centred when viewed on my laptop browser…

Bit I’ve sort of reached a good place, and I get to use the extra facilities of Lovelace cards now if I want them, and I’m really grateful for all the people who put so much time into all the projects that made it possible…

But it did take me more than a day, and I have been building websites as part of my job for as long as there’s been a web! For this particular scenario, I think, we still have a long way to go.

And if you’re doing something which just needs a few simple buttons, there’s still quite a lot to be said for HADashboard!

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