I have a few wall mount tablets, Mostly lenovo but a few Amazon fire tablets. My lenovo’s are a bit older and don’t have built in battery charge monitor. So I run these off my POE switch in my "server room’. I have little devices that knock the POE voltage down to 5 volts. This works quite well until the batteries sat on charge for quite a few days and the started to randomly reset. Incidentally there is no source of 120vac near my tablets. This became very annoying and one of the tablets got to the point where the battery started to swell. Not a good state. So I replaced it and had to come up with a solution.
Then I came across the Chargie. Now, I have nothing to do with these guys other than I am a happy customer.
I bought one to try it out. It cost me about $30.00 but hey if it solved my problem I was happy.
I got my test Chargie and plugged it in line with the USB voltage going to the tablet. Chargie has a little app that runs in the background and monitors the charge. You can set the boundaries however you like.
So now here comes Home Assistant. I have an integration for Fully Kiosk. Yes I did buy the advanced. The great thing with the complement of software/hardware is that Fully Kiosk supports the internal settings of the tablets. Two of these are charging % and is plugged in. I added cards based upon the tablet entities and now I can monitor the performance of Chargie and the battery charging.
Since I have added these components my tablet has settled right down and I haven’t had any issues. It’s actually kind of fun the monitor the charge/discharge cycle.
I am so happy I have ordered two more Chargies for other tablets.
One of these is a 10 inch Amazon Fire tablet. So I will be very interested to see how chargie and fully kiosk works with it.
I hope this may be helpful to others who are using POE to drive their tablets.
And no there is no way I can put a smart switch on the switch as it is supporting other devices that can’t tolerate being shut down for a couple of hours.
I don’t understand why not just to use the HA companion app which also exposes various battery states to HA.
With that a $5 USB-smart-swich is enough to have full charge control.
Alternativly a even cheaper self build is possible - including learning new things
You need to read what I wrote. Read it again and you will understand.
Still think that you can just use a $5 hardware (the sinilink device linked) and run open source software (esphome) on it instead of spending $30 for a “chargie” (don’t hold any shares of that company or didn’t even know that this company exists before reading this thread).
Also no need to pay for some kiosk software as the free and open source android companion app can just do the same and exposes battery levels to set (dis)charge limits.
If you have any questions feel free to ask @gtracy!
Also no need to pay for some kiosk software as the free and open source android companion app can do the same…
Sadly, that’s not true. If you mean original HA companion, then Fully kiosk is quite superior comparing with HA companion in quite a few points: First, it has media player, while companion doesn’t (browser mod’s media player is sadly useless). Then, it allows rest commands while companion doesn’t. It allows more control of “full screen” app, it allows camera to wake up tablet when you pass and turn it off after a while when no movement is detected, it allows tablet to lock so no other things can be used there (kids protection against games)… etc…
I have 4 fully licences purchased and no regrets for either of them. I run fully on all my tablets, i basically don’t use companion at all.
And, fully kiosk also reports battery status into HA (among other 25 or so sensors), not just companion. You have fully kiosk integration in HA. Fully is automatically detected.
Regarding battery charging: Lenovo tablets (perhaps not all models) have this function built-in: when enabled battery won’t charge above 60%. I believe that some samsung tablets also have this function.
I wasn’t comparing the both solutions but just pointing out that it is enough to have the HA app as this sends various battery states to HA and allows to limit charge/discharge that way without any third party (closed source) software.
Beside (as mentioned before in other threads) it should be also possible to set (dis)charge limits directly on the phone/device (if the user has sufficient rights over their device)
Well, from my experiences (i have 6 tablets (various brands) around my house) HA companion app is way more resource hungry than Fully kiosk. This is one of important reasons i don’t use app at all. Even on my phone (samsung S22) i rather connect via web, because it’s less laggy. I’m just not prepared to wait 5 seconds or more from my tap to, say, light actually turning on.
I have ipad tablet (10th gen), too, and HA app is quite useless here, it can take as much as 5-10 seconds to respond to my tap. And we’re talking about (pretty) new ipad, not an ancient one. Working via web acces on same ipad works instantly.
I keep it short because went off topic a few feet…
I would suggest you to grab some logs and open an issue over at companion app github. We run 2 tablets (android 7) which turned 10 years old last year and they run the companion app just fine - no lags like you described. Only thing I took care of was to have a recent webview (browser engine). Most vendors stop shipping updates so you have an incentive to buy a new and shiny device
I came to HA from Hubitat. Battery power monitor over there is non existant. If you want anything like that you have to write your own. HA is a WAY better app especially with Fully Kiok.