I’m looking to have a wall mounted tablet in each room of a small guest house/hotel.
Each guest can control temperature in his own room and perform other operations. I would have access to remotely control temperature etc.
My concerns would be:
Is Home Assistant production ready with permissions per user (room in my case) and appropriate for a small hotel scenario? I’m not worried about the load, which HA can handle for sure: about 10 rooms, 3-4 sensors + 3-4 actuators per room, all cabled.
Is there an open source kiosk mode option for Android tablets? The tablet must be locked in the browser at the HA URL, without the option to open another URL or app. It should be full screen and with address bar hidden. I’ve noticed some paid apps, but I’m assuming there are some open source options for such basic requirements.
What would be a decent quality tablet at an affordable cost. Ideally I guess it should have a POE Ethernet in the back. No need for a battery and power connection should not be at the bottom as it’s visible and kids can mess with it.
Any other feedback and experience sharing regarding HA in a small hotel environment would be really useful.
The building does not exist yet, so there’s a great opportunity for proper design and cabling right from the start.
Your problem will be that there are no users in HA in the typical sense. So using lovelace has the potential for anyone that has access to a kiosk can access everything.
I have an apartment building and have been giving this some thought. HAD on appdaemon and wallpanel both have android apps that will only display the page as built. AFAIK there is no way to access anything other than what is displayed.
Wall panel has an option to set the android app as home. This locks even the subsystems of the tablet, I believe. I have not implemented any of this, just something I’ve been contemplating.
appdaemon is in the supervisor add-on store
Edit: Another thing to consider is presence detection. I have been using monitor and my router to give friends and family access and presence in HA. I only need to set-up sensors using their mac addresses nothing needs to be installed on the phone.
Caveat is that bluetooth has to always be on and some phones put them to sleep. The other thing is you need to set the wifi connection to not use a randomized mac on the phone. Monitor will resolve the randomized bluetooth address.
At the very least it could be used to shut lights off and such when they leave the room. You could use the motion from the kiosk, a door sensor and wasp in a box (or some other logic) to establish occupancy.
There’s even Room Assistant for bluetooth room presence.
If you setup a user for each room and a specific lovelace dashboard for each room, then you can use something like this to practically hide every other options from the sidebar, except for the room’s specific dashboard.
With a combination of the above, you can pretty much “lock” a tablet only to a specific lovelace view without the user being able to exit the app (fully kiosk lockdown) or access any other part of HA.