Is this the perfect standalone tablet for HA?

Yeah, there’s no warranty from Lenovo as these are discontinued products. You might be able to get a replacement from Woot though as they have them in stock fairly regularly. Might have to wait a few weeks or a month though.

I was thinking of buying an E-ink display to show me things (mostly just a week calendar), but stumbled upon this device, more features (touchscreen, colour, better resolution,…) and cheaper somehow, I found one but the product number is different; ZA690008SE , does anyone know if it’ll just work with this version?

EDIT: Just ordered one, worst case it doesn’t work and I’m out of some money.

You should be ok as long as it’s described as the Lenovo ThinkSmart View. I have seen multiple product codes with these.

Hey fellas! I’m considering picking up a ThinkSmart View. Is the result of the instructions in the original post a somewhat stable device? Like everybody else I’m intending to use it as touchscreen for a Home Assistant dashboard. But installation aside, I’m not looking to do much more tinkering. I’m very much a rookie in this area.

So, how’s the end result working for those of you who’s tried it?

I’d appreciate any views or experiences.

It works great for that. I use mine as a basic weather station, to pick music to play, and to show the status of my door locks. I use the camera to detect motion to turn the screen on when I get close to it or to turn on a light; otherwise, it just screensavers to a clock, which is great for night. I plan on picking up another one if I can grab it again for under $30.

My write up here:

And my guide to installing Lineage 15.1 which is an Android based OS:

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I want to buy this for the speaker quality and volume to play remote notification sounds, mostly. Because most speakers for home assistant are super silent.
For the rest i’d like to remote start a video to play on this device(if baby makes sound it activates the video stream of the baby cam)

Does those two functions work well? For the rest it would be nice to make the display go dark or off, and on when we are around, using other devices for presense detection. But ofcourse when the screen is off i still need it to display video when i want to. Not that i can no longer send commands because it goes into a standby mode.

Thanks!

Edit: and i read about issues at many posts/threads. Is wifi and camera fixed/working?

Edit2: Oh and how do you find the microphones? Are they sensitive to pick up voice from say 5 meters away?

Got mine yesterday as an utter newbie.
Trying to install Lineage 15.1 from a Raspberry Pi 4 (raspbian) following Pgale’s guide (My normal windows machine doesn’t have USB2) hit some walls almost instantly, probably because I had no idea what I was doing when installing half the stuff (PIP didn’t work, python3.9 also never worked it seemed.)

Tried a testmachine I have, live boot ubuntu didn’t work, probably same issue as above, no idea wth I’m doing.
This machine doesn’t let me install Windows. (blue screen) so I put everything onto a USB drive, drove to my parents.
Followed the windows instructions on their computer and it “just worked”… (Apart from the part that was said to be \user\directory\subdirectory which I figured would be /user/directory/subdirectory.)
At home plugged it back in, connected to wifi, installed Fdroid, installed Home Assistant app and it works as expected. I don’t use Fully Kiosk or anything like that, maybe try it later on another one (Yes, I’ll be ordering some more…)

Really happy with what I got so far (for testing the layout etc), just need to fix some stuff to make it a bit nicer/polished.


Will use this one to see the time, pause music/movies/series (on a kodi device) if I go to the bathroom and start them again when coming back.

@pgale Thank you so much for the guide, so easy to follow and it just seemed to work for me!

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Guides are good, just USB connection flaky but got 4 done in an hour now. :slight_smile:

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Glad you got it working in the end. Linux on a Pi can be a bit of a learning curve. There was also some issues with newer Python installs.

Did anyone get this working with the wake word using the build in mic?

Yes, have a look at View Assist

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I am kind of confused at the link provided. I followed this link to set everything up but yours seems to be missing some context. I’ve seen some people talk about getting the wake word working but they needed to update android os to ver 10 and following the instructions I used I have android 8.

My setup guide (that you linked to) doesn’t go into wake word - that’s more specialist and something for when you have the device OS installed.

The View Assist project (by Dinki) builds on that. It’s really designed to be a whole ecosystem for, well, a voice assistant. Part of that is wake word detection but it goes way further than that. Wake word in that case is running on the HA server but it uses the built-in mic on the Lenovo TSV. It’s very responsive though.

Some people have been discussing local wake word if that’s what you are after - but I’ve not tried that and not intending to.

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I found the discord for the wake word and get it now. If I could add anything I would go into the wake word starting off listing your git page and say this is taking off assuming you have done the following.

Thank you also for your work you have done!!! I fing love repurposing for the ultimate home hub!!

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Im interested in checking this out. Ill have to re read the thread

@pgale quick question for you

I know you originally imported a couple of devices into the UK via an Amazon purchase but Im wondering why you didn’t just order directly from Amazon US and have them deliver it

I’ve found this one on Amazon US and I can have it shipped to the UK all in for £72.61

I know that isn’t cheap still but it is better than some of the eBay prices

image

That said there could be a reason why you did it the way you did it so thought I’d reach out first on the off chance.

I’ve been following this post from its early conception and then today read through pretty much every post…so its amazing to see how far things have come on…

Thanks in advance

Hi Jon,

When I bought mine, Amazon didn’t offer shipping to the UK. Maybe you’ve found a different marketplace seller that obviously now does :slight_smile:

I bought mine in batches of two to try and avoid duty/VAT. I can’t remember the exact landed costs but it was around £45 each inc shipping. I didn’t ever get charged VAT (or duty but wasn’t expecting that as they were below the threshold). Mine were shipped UPS and FedEx. A week to get across the US and 2-3 days US to UK.

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Thanks. Think I’ll bite the bullet on one of these and follow your process.

Yeah still cheaper than the UK EBay sellers I’ve seen.

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