(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.
- Etc.
Is there any reasonable way to do this?
Thanks in advance!
