How to use Raspberry Pi as a proxy to display lovelace in my TV

Configuration
1

Hi, here is what i would like to do in case anyone has an idea on how to:

  • Use a device to show lovelace on my living room TV, so i can pick an HDMI input and look at status of my lovelace views

  • The lovelace views will switch dynamically with an automation, so i can see different lovelace views every x seconds

  • I want to see the view in full screen, meaning, no menus or anything, just the actual content of the lovelace view, no value on displaying the sidebar or the top bar.

I tried to do this with a chromecast and it is not reliable. you canā€™t use custom cards with Google cast and any custom UI stuff looks bad an unpredictable Google cast is not ready for production at this point, too many issues, unreliable, etc. Not going back there, same with CATT. So i want to use an RPI that has a full OS that hopefully it is easier and more flexible to configure and achieve this.

Any recomendations on what do i need to use in that RPI to make this happen? i am guessing i will run a browser on it, which one is recommended and is it possible to trigger switching views from a HA automation?

I am sure someone has tried to do this before.

Thanks in advance

2

If you cant use your TVā€™s built in web browser then either a raspberry pi zero w or a compute stick plugged into the HDMI port running any web browser.

3

yes that seems to be the best option based on what i want to achieve. Some questions on that:

  • What browser should i use on the RPI
  • Can you switch views with an automation?
4

Whatever you want (that supports ARM). Raspbian comes with Firefox that can be put in fullscreen mode to hide the browser. Press F11.

Yes. Create a Lovelace button in the view that uses the tap_action to call the action navigation_path.

5

ok, so which service do i use to call the button/tap action?

Also how can i hide the sidebar and top menus of lovelace?

6

Your finger or a mouse click.

Not sure you can now that compact header is no longer available.

7

well that wonā€™t work, this is connected to a TV and i would like the views to rotate every 15 seconds, there is no mouse, no touch on the TV, it acts as display only, to rotate the views with no user interaction

8

How would an automation know which display to rotate?

You can have many Lovelace clients open.

Actuallyā€¦ hang on. This should be able to do it instead of the button:

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yes, that looks promising, that is what i need. thanks for pointing that out

  • automations will switch lovelace views when an event occurs, like open external doors or simply every 15 seconds you go to the next view, etc

  • Looks like I also need to use ā€œkioskā€ mode with the browser to hide all the HA menus and be able to go full screen with just the contents, this seems to be a good solution:

I have to do all this basically because cast integration doesnā€™t support custom cardsā€¦i hope they fix that one day. But going the RPI way seems to be the way to go. I will give it a shot and maybe write a guide about it

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10

well i am trying this on a raspberry pi zero W. The performance of the browser really sucks, not usable, takes MINUTES to simply log in. Tried with Chromium, Epiphany and Midori browsers. Looks like the only viable option is to upgrade to an RPI4

11

Or a https://www.windowscentral.com/best-stick-pcs

12

Hereā€™s a couple of links I saved which might be useful.


https://toms3d.org/2019/09/19/building-a-digital-dashboard-software-setup/
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Nice info, but thatā€™s more about controlling a dumb TV than displaying Lovelace easily via an HDMI port.

14

Well my thought is if there was something you wanted to display (like an alert) you could have the TV automatically turned on by sending a MQTT command. The second link might be more useful as it speaks to how to configure your PI to default the launch of the browser etc.

1 Like
15

thanks for those links, that was the next step that i will need to do, so i can turn on/off the tv based on a presence sensor. I also wanted to switch HDMI inputs, not sure if CEC lets me do that.

Back to the performance issue. The RPI zero W really sucks :slight_smile:

I swapped the SD card to a raspberrypi 3B+ that i had and it works now decently, i bought a chromecast to do all this initially, but with the shortcomings of the cast integration or CATT, i will return that and by instead an RPI4 for $35, which will do well as the 3B+ is decent, so i expect the RPI4 to do very well on this.

thanks for all the help. I will hopefully post back when i put everything together.

BTW any good mp4 of animated PNG sources for animated backgrounds for lovelace that you know of?

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Mostly free: https://www.videvo.net/stock-video-footage/seamless%20looping/