I’ve been building an Android app called Dashie for putting Home Assistant dashboards on android tablets.
Dashie makes hosting your HA dashboard plug-and-play: music, video feeds, video streaming out and voice ready with on-device wake, STT, and TTS capabilities. It integrates with popular HA tools including Immich, Frigate, and Music Assistant.
I built the app shared here as the foundation for a family-management app, but have made the entire non-webApp source public to hopefully benefit a community I’ve enjoyed being a part of for years. Many more details are below and on the github site.
Dashie’s voice pipeline is capable of running largely on-device for those tablets with the RAM/CPU to support it. If you don’t have a mini-PC, GPU, or similar running this can change the game for response times.
This looks genuinely fascinating, but I have a couple of questions niggling at me:
You say you don’t support PRs because the app comes from a private repo? Why not?
My stuff sits in Gitea hosted privately and I push mirror up to GitHub. But if someone creates a PR on one of my GitHub repos, my setup brings it down, incorporates it, then pushes it up - so the PR author still gets the attribution.
Is the intent for this to become a commercial solution? I just noticed the “Dashie LLC”, and so am wary before embarking down this path.
By sideload I mean installing the APK over adb. You can also install from google play or amazon App Store. The advantage to the side load is it gets updates faster when I release them because there’s no AppStore review there. All of them have updates served automatically if the tablet is on the internet.
I’ll have to look at the approach you’re using closer. I’ve got a coding background (EE) but am not a professional developer so this part takes me a little to get my head around.
The code here is the foundation for something commercial that’s built out as a webapp that runs on this infrastructure the same way an HA dashboard does. I started building that on fully kiosk and hit limitations which is what let me to build this platform. The commercial stuff is separate and I’m building that out as a 1-person LLC. I won’t even cross-link to anything related to it here because that’s not the goal with this.
i just downladed it and installed it by opening (thats allowed from untrusted sources) and was wondering, why this adb stuff may be needed (root things?).
You’re all set. Some people prefer to use ADB where file downloading is awkward (like if you’re putting it on a fire TV or google tv type of device). ADB also lets you do other more involved things like set different permissions on devices so some people prefer it. But if the app opened from your install of the file directly you’re good.
I moved my devices from Fully Kiosk Browser to Dashie a few days ago and it’s been excellent! Surprisingly my dashboards seem to perform better on Dashie than Fully Kiosk Browser. Being able to use voice assist without local SSL is great, and it’s brought me a step closer to replacing Google Assistant/Gemini with local voice assist. I did log a couple of bugs on the Android app repo.
