In several of my rooms I want a little desk Home Assistant dashboard. I’ve looked at various devices but each place I need one, my phone is already sat upright in a stand. It seems pointless then to potentially have another device with a screen (that needs powering) when my phone is sat right there.
There are several problems with this however.
My phone goes to sleep and locks. I can partially get around this with the Google Extend Unlock feature that keeps the device unlocked at Home. However, Google in their infinite wisdom decided that even though the phone is kept unlocked, there is stil a lock screen that needs swiping away. This makes accessing the phone annoying. There’s little I can do to get around this besides maybe rooting my phone and using a launcher that doesn’t do this. Suggestions welcome.
Even if my phone is easy to access, I can’t be sure it will instantly display the right Home Assistant dashboard. I did create an automation that opened HA when the devices wakes and instantly went to the right dashboard but it got annoying as I only want to do this when the phone is sat upright in its stand i.e not in other places around the house. I can’t seem to find a way to limit this to perhaps when the phone is sat at a certain angle. Any thoughts?
Since you’re using Android, have you looked at the Fully Kiosk browser? That certainly allows you to specify a specific dashboard as the start page, and I think it may allow you to override lock screen settings.
You can have a specific account per room or a single account for all. I’m working on this now but using iPads and iPhones
If using account/room you can set a single dashboard specific to location with common used items added in. Basically all in single page
I actually want screen to turn off but as option you can set long turn off or no pin turn on. When on HA however it basically never turns off but I think that’s because I display entry camera and video may keep it on.
Check out available widgets. I actually may utilize more widgets on tablet/phone screen than actual HA display. HA app has several widgets that I found very useful
In my living room i use an android tablet running FK browser (without the integration as it caused loads of issues). In my bedroom i have an old phone also running FK browser. They each are a seperate user so i can set a default dashboard. (Bedroom only shows a few items i need from there).
I turn the screen on and off trough a browser mod command triggered by self built presence sensors when i walk to the screen (seperate zone in the sensors). Works perfect and eliminates one flaw in FK where it reloads the page. Now it doesn’t and it’s always directly usable when turned on.
So I only want a HA dashboard shown if the phone is sat vertically in a desk stand. This is my main phone I actually use so I don’t want the companion app popping up when I want to pickup my phone and use it normally.
I may have to resort to Tasker on Android to do this. There is screen rotation sensor in the companion app I could use to detect the phone is sat upright in a stand BUT it seems broken and has never shown anything but 0 degrees.