Making use of physical display on Raspberry Pi 5

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I have HomeAssistant OS running on a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s connected to a physical display which currently only displays the (rather restricted) CLI. Ideally I’d like to be able to display various graphs etc. Is this possible?

I don’t really need the full HA overview page as there’s no touch screen and I have access via SSH for maintenance.

I’ve seen various descriptions of how to do this online but they all appear to require installing Raspbian rather than HA-OS.

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I don’t believe this is possible. HAOS on the pi does not expose the HDMI ports for display of user data (AFAIK). I would be happy to be proven wrong if anyone has a different answer.

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You would need to run a Linux OS and then HAOS on top of that as a 'Supervised’ install method, or go down the VM route.

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A HA system/server is not meant to be used as a client with GUI and I would advice not to do so since that can have a negative effect on the stability/availability due to extra potential issues.

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Apologies for reopening a dead thread, but given that HAOS isn’t meant to be a client, and people are recommending VM’s or similar, what would you recommend for the client? For example, I can have HAOS installed on a totally different machine in a VM or otherwise, but I’d love to use my RPi as the client, but RPi OS and other GUI-based OS’s seem to have so much overhead that even simple web browsing is taxing. Is there an OS that you recommend for literally just displaying the graphs and widgets like OP requested?

6

Hi, welcome to the forum!
I’m not a Linux expert so my advice would not be the best.

Look for a lightweight distro, maybe without GUI and install X and a browser.
Even though I’m not fan of that big-search-engine company, I’m using UG Chromium on my RPi to serve as a HA dashboard.

7

Thanks for the quick reply! I’ll do some digging. I’m still new to HA, so I’m trying to explore, like OP said. Does HA serve any web portal that would act as a dashboard? Or do I need to log in on the Pi and use the :8123 port?

Edit: I apologize if this is all in the documentation or something, feel free to direct me there if needed.

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Unless you’re using a mobile device OS (phone/tablet) where you can use the HA mobile companion app, all clients connect through a web browser using

http(s)://ip_address_of_your_HA:8123

So for your RPi, you ‘just’ needs a browser

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