Cheap and Simple Fire Tablet Based Home Control Touch Panel

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I’m not sure if this is the right place for this. But I bought one of the cheap Fire 7 tablets and made it into a nice little touch panel for home control. I put a good bit of work putting together a bunch of other tools to get it to work the way I want and I wrote a blog post about it. It talks about ways to get power to it, which is the hardest part, and configuring all the apps to get it working properly.

It turned out way better than I expected. It reliably turns on as you walk up to it. The interface is very smooth on LoveLace even though it’s a slower tablet.

Here’s a link to my post.

Let me know what you think.

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Great post! I’ve been working on a similar project and I like the idea of using a Qi charger to get just a tiny bump on the side where it plugs in. Also using Fully Kiosk but wasn’t aware you could set a custom user agent. Already using CCH, so that will help limit the screens available on this tablet. Thanks for the ideas!!

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Thanks for the feedback. Happy to hear you found it useful.

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Thank you. This article will surely help me setup a Touch Control Panel.

What type of Fire tablet do you have, Fire OS and have you been able to disable automatic Fire OS updates?

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I have not tried to disable updates.

And it’s the Fire 7 tablet that is linked in my blog post.

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That’s really cool, so it looks you can convert almost any tablet to wireless charging with a ‘qi reciever’

I may give this a go.

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Yes. The Qi charger is generic. It should work with anything.

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Nice I do have a few old tablets around that would be much nicer to use with wireless charging, and make a nice touch control panel.

I can’t seem to find any QI recievers for older 30 pin port apple devices but I think I may be able to use an adaptor or something similar :slight_smile:

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Good advice on how to charge the tablet only when needed. I’ll look into doing that with my setup later.

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Just a heads up. These tablets are ridiculously cheap if you have Amazon Prime.

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How do you get Fully Kiosk Browser to show custom components?
I just got a Fire Tablet 8 and when I start FKB it gives a warning about old version of WebView and almost none of the custom components work.
No Atomic Calendar, custom weather card, mini-graph.

Do I need to find different cards…

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In my experience all the custom components in “js” work, the ones declared as modules do not (big ugly red box in Fully Kiosk). I found that for some components, even if the developer asks the config to be a “module”, changing it to “js” in the raw config file will make it work on the Fire tablet with no apparent functionality change. For instance just today it did this with “custom-config-template-card”.
Full disclosure, I am not a developer and could not recognize a js from a module if it hit me in the face :). i am sure someone here can enlighten us with the difference :slight_smile:

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The cards I’m using work. Im using mini graph and dual thermostat. I think a couple others but I forget which ones.

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ok, thanks for the reply.
I might just root it and put a custom rom on it so I don’t need to deal with the amazon stuff.

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Were you able to root it? How hard was it to do so?

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  1. how do you get it to wake up when you walk up to it?
  2. what is with the stamps about home-assistant not being activated… it is free
  3. you need more color and maybe a theme?
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1, Camera as a motion detector
2. it’s Fully Kiosk Browser that isn’t activated, not hass
3. meh… maybe yes, maybe no. guess it all depends on your aesthetic

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Thanks, How do you configure it to wake up? is that a feature in the paid software you have?

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I followed this guide to root it and install LineageOS. It’s pretty easy to just follow the steps.
I started with another guide where you don’t need to open it up but I wasn’t paying attention and messed it up so I ended up needing to open it any ways (which is easy and doesn’t make any marks).

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Yes it is.