I need to demo HA and I have HAOS installed on a RPi400 with an attached small screen.
Most of the time there will not be a LAN/WiFi at all as I’ll be briefly setting up in an coffee shop or someplace without WiFi.
Thus, I need the RPi400 to also be able to show a browser or the HA dashboard.
Can I installed Raspian on the PI then run HA as a server but still be able to use Chromium?
Or is there a plugin that will give me a browser on HAOS?
Since the RPi400 has a keyboard and I can plug in a mouse with a screen I just need some way to show the dashboard on that RPi.
TIA
What is the ‘important’ point of your demo? Are you trying to show the UI? Do you want to show how a device can work?
Reason I ask - you may not actually need a Pi. It’s just a demo. If you need to demo UI just connect to a remote session over the internet. Showing a UI on a pi locally is going to be ‘less than optimal’ but if you can use remote or virtual your demo suddenly is way less complicated.
I am demoing various IoT devices thru a Z-Wave dongle connected to HA.
So I need a UI to be able to add/remove and control IoT devices.
I was hoping HA could do that without needing more than 1 computer.
I am likely to also be using this very remotely at an open-air range without internet at all and power coming from a small battery powered inverter. So I need an all-in-1 solution.
You can do it with one machine. Use a laptop with a hypervisor. Run HAOS in virtual, make sure you use a virtualization solution that allows passing through the USB ports. (read: not Hyper-v)
Then you can run the virtual instance of HAOS. Connect to your usb stick and connect to it with the laptop browser.
That said. I’ve been doing live demos of tech for nearly 20 years. Just remember you don’t have to use the exact hardware and environment for a demo. In fact of you do and it doesn’t work right (very likely in a coffee shop with an ad hoc setup) then your audience will come away less enthusiastic than you started. Personally I’d take a video to show lights going on and off in a real room in response to a HA-UI. Then once the video is done swith to your live machine to demo the UI and finally show a disconnected usb dongle and a few common sensors and a wall switch. You’ll get the same point across and won’t hose yourself.
I assume the reason the server isn’t also a desktop is because that would make the distribution even larger requiring bigger SD cards? SD cards are cheap so this is less of an issue now?
Seems like a common ssetup is to have a RPi with a screen mounted on the wall somewhere handy in the home. But this situation requires a “server” RPi probably plugged directly into the router in a closet somewhere then mount a tablet running as a kiosk somewhere else.
The 2 computer solution isn’t what I was expecting but I suppose I can make it work.
Nah, storage isn’t the problem. It’s probably just the focus on stability. You don’t want client stuff (like site rendering) or simply the browser getting your system (HA server) to it’s knees. It is simply bad practice to host server & client on the same machine for serious tasks an demanding programs.
Well, I read about a “1 computer solution” for your “proof of concept” from @NathanCu in this very thread
But is HA really a “demanding program”? every now and then it has a tiny amount of stuff to do.
Granted we want the latency to be low, but it’s still on a human timescale of 250 milliseconds which is an eternity on a RPi400.
There are a lot of layers I suppose with MQTT, serving web pages, and all the protocol layers. But we’re not running an AI Classifier on 4K images, we’re turning on a light when a motion sensor detects it.
I can see the stability thing as an issue. I dislike all the dependencies on shifting sands of Open Source software that tends to break when various pieces decide to break backwards compatibility for the sake of some small improvement.
I don’t have a Raspberry Pi 4 but only the 3B(+) and it was a PITA to only use the web browser (without HA running). How demanding HA is obviously depends totally on your setup. The RAM usage on my HA server for example is close to 2GB.
This thread should give you already all bits & bytes you need to try the setup you want - feel free to tell us about your mileage in case you got a working POC (or not)
Am also looking in to something similar, not for demo purposes but to have a touch screen showing the HA dashboard + server. Now I have installed (first timer) on an Intel i3 pc with 15" touchscreen and besides showing me the HAOS where you have CLI etc it’s just a black cmd-prompt-ish screen… So I have to separate HAOS and the GUI and use 2 HW devices for that? Or I have to re-install and start fiddling with Docker containers?
Would be awesome to have it running on a single device
Also would need access to the Linux system to turn my screen 90º if possible in HAOS.
It is simply bad practice to host server & client on the same machine for serious tasks an demanding programs.
