I’ve been a home assistant tinkerer for some time now, but this project is at a stage where the wife doesn’t struggle so I thought I’d share. It’s actually so easy and handy, that we’ve stopped asking Alexa to do stuff (often repeatedly) and just touch a few buttons on the wall panel.
I’m using an Echo Show 15 as a wall panel with Fully Kiosk browser. A lot of stuff such as motion detection from fully doesn’t work with the Echo, however I’ve found some ways around it. The goal was to have a home assistant dashboard on the screen, but not lose Amazon Echo functions like the picture slideshow screensaver, reminders, large clock, calendar etc. The dashboard runs at device boot too, so very family friendly if there is an outage.
Using a zigbee motion sensor mounted under my couch, along with the Fully Kiosk Browser integration, I’m able to bring the dashboard to the foreground when walking up to the screen and send it back to the background after 5 minutes of no motion.
The recent Sub view additions have made it really handy to quickly enter a room’s devices page and toggle what you need. I’ve had to manually create back buttons though as I am using Kiosk Mode front end extension and don’t want the header displayed. My wife however never presses the back button so Fully Kiosk will return to the home page automatically after 60 seconds of inactivity, except when watching the garage camera.
Here’s a video of it in action, as well as some other screen grabs of the wall panel. The sub views still need some tidying up. Happy to answer any questions if you like my setup.
Just an echo show 15 and several hour of free time
Need to load a network file manager from the Fire TV app store. I’ve read reports Amazon are blocking some so YMMV
I have just bought the echo show 15 2 says ago, but I am unable to install the fully Kiosk Browser.
Can you detail the steps taken to install the browser so I can set it up as well, as I bought the Echo show 15 for the reason to display home assistant.
You need to find an app in the app store that lets you upload files over the network. Then just download the fully kiosk APK and upload it to the device and run it.
I initially did this about 2 months ago, so I’m not sure if they’ve blocked all those apps. I’ll take a look over the weekend
Here is the guide I used to get it working. The apps mentioned in this guide still show up in the fire TV app store so it should work if they show up on yours
This looks great and is exactly why I bought an Echo Show 15. Unfortunately, it appears Amazon has completely disabled the ability to install APKs directly. You can install the apps in the guide you mentioned from the app store but the step for selecting the “Downloads” folder in Taotlus isn’t possible. That folder no longer shows up. All the methods I’ve found on the internet fail. If anyone has a method to install the Fully Kiosk Browser or Home Assistant on this thing that has done so in the last couple months, please share.
Just wondered what firmware version your Amazon 15 is currently? Is it updating to latest version still and has that any effect on your existing HA / FullKiosk install?
Looking at ways of stopping Amazon updates on the 15. If anyone has a known working solution please let me know. The block I’ve seen only works on Fire tablets I think….
I never got around to blocking amazon updates and I have seen the unit update itself when I am up late watching TV.
Current firmware is 27549192068
I did go into Taotlus to see if the options were still there and it prompted me to update that app. I skipped this in case something broke. I do recall having to pair a fire tv remote to it to get it to work properly though.
This is so disappointing!!! I thought I scored a deal on an Echo Show 15 on a prime days deal. However once I got it setup I discovered Amazon has blocked EVERYTHING needed to sideload. Hopefully someone smarter than myself will figure out another way!
Picked up a show 15 as well a couple days ago. Ran into the same issues trying to get Fully Kiosk going, so went a different route. Still testing but so far so good. I’m simply launching my dashboard in the Silk browser. The initial issue is that the show will go back to the Home Screen, or, sleep without additional intervention. I did adjust some setting on the Show itself (display etc), but the main thing that is working is this – https://gitlab.com/DaGammla/keep-silk-open
On the developers page is a “Test” area with a url. Right now I just added that page as a web page on my dashboard. I set the ration to like 5:1 so it wouldn’t take up much space. The first time you open it you have to click on that "web page to start it going. But I’ve had my dashboard up on the show literally all day today without issue. I know it’s not the idea setup with fully kiosk, but so far it’s working great.
There’s more info on the developers page, but Im not super technical in this aspect, so I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate the js into the page itself so it’s all taken care of locally and behind the scenes. Hope this helps someone : )
@deepspacedave - does the silk browser show the address and menu bars at the top? I tried using this at the start of the project and found there was too much wasted real estate and I couldn’t down-scale the sizing to be usable. Got a screenshot?
Jokes. I put an iBeacon on his diaper bag. When the baby ever leaves the house, so does this bag.