(Apologies in advance if this is the wrong area to post this question to; it spans several different things, and I wasn’t sure.)
I’ve set up nice HA dashboards for a handful of rooms in my house. They show things like temperature, humidity, air quality, radon, etc., and have controls for lights, fans, curtains, etc. The problem is… they’re not actually useful because they’re hidden inside my smartphone or computer web browser. So I was hoping to get a half dozen or so simple touch displays and mount them above the lightswitches in each room. The goal would be that each display shows the dashboard I built for that room (and allows use of the touch screen to, e.g., flip switches or scroll) That’s it. Nothing else. If I want to show other things I’ll edit the dashboard.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found any straightforward way to do this that doesn’t create a LOT of administrative overhead. (I’m kind of baffled, because this would seem to be the main reason to create HA dashboards…) Ideally I could just get a purpose-built piece of hardware that simply does this (e.g., “adopt it”, let it know which dashboard is its, and forget about it). I haven’t found that. I’ve found a number of ESP32-based smart displays (which have the advantage of being easy to manage/update/etc. via ESPHome builder), but none seem to have the ability to simply point them to a HA dashboard and be done with it.
A majority of the advice I’ve read basically says “just get an old Android tablet, and use the web browser to log into Home Assistant and click on your dashboard”. This sounds like a nightmare because those devices require their own management, for example:
I don’t want to have to walk room to room every couple weeks and make sure I’ve downloaded the latest android update.
I don’t want to have to worry about what other gunk is installed on the tablet, or security vulnerabilities associated with all of that stuff I didn’t want anyway
I don’t want a camera or microphone
I don’t want to have to worry about getting going room to room to get each device back into the right application/mode if someone navigates the wrong way or accidentally presses the power button or after a power outage
I don’t want to have to create and remember and manage user accounts (either locally for the device or as home assistant users) for another half dozen devices,
I don’t want to have to worry about permissions: if a guest is somehow able to navigate away from the intended dashboard I don’t want them to have full home assistant access
I don’t want to have to learn a new language/environment for creating UIs. The tools for creating HA dashboards is enough, thank you.
If you want each room to have a touchscreen that displays the specific dashboard you created for that room, I think your only option is to use either an Android or Amazon Fire tablet, as others have suggested. However, instead of using the tablet’s web browser to log into Home Assistant and select a dashboard the way you normally would, I would use the Fully Kiosk Browser app to handle everything. The app has a wide range of features that allow you to lock down the tablet and maintain it exactly the way you want. You would not have to worry about any of the issues you listed. I have been using it for several years and have not had any problems.
Thanks. But it sounds like I’m stuck with the long list of drawbacks I was trying to avoid. I don’t really want to have to manage a fleet of sketchy old android tablets.
You can also try NexusViewPanel as FKB alternative. You purchase the app per user, not per device. This means you can run it on multiple devices with just one licence. It also offers the opportunity to add multiple dashboards for different services and a native RTSP player. The tablet display can be remotely controlled via custom HA integration, a REST API or MQTT. You canralso enable a floating pop-up window. I personaly run it on an Amazon FireHD tablet.
Ive bought an esp32c6-p4 and the idea is to turn this into a remote ha panel, just wondering if anyones done similar and has any code for the c6 and lvgl library? Idea is to create the widgets in lvgl on the panel and subscribe to ha via mqtt or html requests… can be varied ui by room or even passcode… 1 in each room 30 quid panel…hopefully…
So I’m definitely not pursuing the android tablet path. I got an older Samsung Galaxy Tab and the sheer amount of apparently-unremovable spyware, sleaze, and garbage on there even fresh out of the box is genuinely TERRIFYING, and being a mainly Mac/iOS/linux person user, I have zero confidence that I’ll be able to reliably get it all off. A wall display should never need any third party services on it, and I should not need a Google Play account for something that should basically be a peripheral (and is mounted on my bedroom wall WITH A CAMERA AND MICROPHONE).
So the two options I’m still looking at are:
A) raspberry p with a touch screeni running a web browser
B) A Shelly XL display
The shelly has the edge on physical form factor as well as managing things like auto dimming or waking up when someone approaches it. But it also adds a lot of shelly-specific stuff that I don’t really want on there (e.g., swiping the wrong way replaces the HA dashboard with theirs, which is very confusing to non-expert users in the house…)
In both cases I have different versions of the same problem: I just want to display 1 dashboard. A random guest in my house should not be able to navigate away from the room dashboard to, e.g., see my todo list or power bill or security camera history, etc. Anything outside that one dashboard should be impossible to access from the tablet, blocked via password protected access controls, not just UI lockdown hacks. How can I do this? A few specifics I’m wondering about:
I’m assuming I need to create additional Home Assistant users (1 per panel, I guess?) to ACL this. Is there a way to limit what an HA user has permission to do to the contents of a single dashboard?
Is there any way to set up a dashboard to make it impossible to navigate away from?
For the Raspberry PI, should I just use a normal web browser or is there a recommended kiosk browser for applications like this?
