How to control a wall mounted tablet

1

I have couple of tablets mounted around the house running android companion app.

I am looking for suggestions on how to control these tablets from the HA instance running on an Intel nuc.

One of my ideas was to have some sort of webserver running that will receive webhooks… wait Home Aasistant does that but not the companion app.
Also need to be able to run other apps so probably need a third party android app to accept web hooks from HA.

Mac Droid seems to have webhooks now and this is how I was launching some of the startup apps, e.g. a chromecast receiver app, ibeacon trasnmitter, HA and Fotoo for picture frame.

But these require macros to be created and distributed ahead of time not very dynamic or efficient.

So looking for thoughts on how to accomplish loading various apps / HA dashboards on wall mounted tablets as per direction from the main HA instance.

Thanks in advance

2

Notification commands work in a lot of the cases.
When they are not enough, I use a standard “message” notification that triggers Tasker to do an action.

3

Thanks. Yes thats how I have been getting by but I have to keep making changes directly on each of the tablets… or do u have a way to centrally manage the rules for tasker ?

4

I don’t know, I’m not good at Tasker.
I barely get along with what I need it for.

5

Ok I think I can reliably launch apps and control volume (other functions can be set up easily as long as macrodroid supports them)
Steps:

  • setup macrodroid macro with webhook trigger on the tablet. Will require the pro version of macrodroid

  • Call the macro from a web browser to make sure it works.

  • set up a shell script to accept the variables from input_select in Home Asistant.

  • setup a shell command in HA config pointing to the shell script in the last step.

  • setup a lovelace dashbaord for manual or automation for automatically switch the running app on the tablet. E.g I toggle between HA, Fotoo and a digital clock app every 2 minutes…

Now the key was to write this once and reuse on multiple tablets so the macros in macrodroid can be saved to their cloud and restored to another device. Just no automation there for restore yet, asked the dev they are not interested. But each restore to a new device generates a new webhook ID which needs to be captured as the call from HA needs to be directed to a specific device.

Happy to help if anyone needs this…