Goal: Install Home Assistant as ONLY operating system of 32" Insignia FireTV F20
Can this be done? Is there enough CPU/RAM on the SoC to handle such a thing? My goal isn’t to have a full-blown HAOS instance but just a stand-along kiosk displaying live security cam feeds 24/7 and nothing more.
I’ve got several of these around my house running an app to display the security cameras. The issue is that I have to leave them on 24/7 and I’d like to turn them on/off based on room presence. With the current FireTV OS this isn’t possible as a power on requires several minutes of boot time and then manually scrolling to the IPCamViewer app using the remote to launch it. There’s an option to auto-launch an app in the FireTV OS but this doesn’t seem to work.
Now that I’m running HA, I had an idea to create a kiosk dashboard with my camera feeds as this should allow me to also create a time/temp overlay which is another feature I’d like to add to the current solution.
I then realized that, if I could run HAOS as the only OS I could have the cameras display nearly instantly at boot up which might allow me to add occupancy automations to achieve the dream device for this purpose. I have zero desire to run anything on the FireTV itself and would have zero issue nuking the OS in favor of HAOS to achieve this.
Does anyone know if this would even be possible? Gain root access to the FireTV and install HAOS instead of the FireTV OS that’s currently running on it. Then I just create a dedicated dashboard for that device in kiosk mode that is the default dashboard whenever it launches. I don’t need to navigate or interact with the displays at all. Just on and off with this displayed whenever on would be perfect.
Kind of a thought experiment at this point so feel free to add any thoughts. I’m hoping that those who know a lot more on this topic can tell me if this is doable as searches I’ve done don’t yield much info. Most everything on this topic is about integrating HA with FireTVs & Firesticks which isn’t what I’m looking to do.
That’s a question for some fire-devices (fire tablets, fire tv) hacking community, but I VERY HIGHLY doubt it’s possible.
Fire-devices are usually incredibly locked-down. You’d need to have unlocked bootloader (which amazon won’t provide unlock keys) to be able to flash different firmware, and custom firmware for your particular model. Doubt anything like that exists or there’s enough interest in it to get some community magicians to spend some time on it.
Not the reply I was hoping for but not at all unexpected. I’ll probably need to make due with a dashboard with the cams + time & temp which would be a nice step towards ditching my Alexa Echo show devices that are all next to these cam monitor TVs currently. That would be another step towards ditching them completely in favor of the HA Voice (PE or otherwise depending on lead time and how that project has developed) devices.
Are you sure it’s HAOS you want to install on the TV? HAOS is the server component and the only UI you will see is the command line interface, not camera views.
I assume you want to install an app or OS that lets you have a browser with an HA dashboard. For example, Android with Fully Kiosk. I see there’s a Fire TV app called Kiosk that might help, but it doesn’t seem to work with HA. But as it stands your post is a bit confusing.
If you can get it working, there’s a Home Assistant integration which would give control over things like screen on/off on movement detection, and navigation to specific dashboards (or any web page).
Not to mention that TV is surely very hungry with power… and, according to my experiences processors in TV’s are pretty ancient… graphics parts are good, but main cpu is pretty basic, since it doesn’t need to be state-of-the-art… and for running home assistant you need CPU, not graphics.
Well then I’m confused because I have HAOS running in a VM on Synology. I thought this was the most basic & supported version of HA that worked on minimal resources but still had the GUI that I’m currently using. No? If I’m wrong, then that’s not what I meant. I just want the most basic form of HA that has a graphical user interface so I’m not running command lines to do stuff. So no, I’m not at all sure what I’m doing or even talking about really. Hence the post seeking guidance or at least consultation on if what I’m imaging is even a thing that can be done and if the hardware (specifically the TV’s SoC) supports such an endeavor.
In cursory researches of this idea I saw where there was ways to integrate Android powered TVs into HA. This may be my next best option for this project if I’m unable to just install HA directly using the FireTV as a barebones chassis to run it. I had a feeling the SoC wouldn’t provide the CPU/RAM necessary for such a thing but thought I would ask. I wasn’t sure if there were super stripped down versions of HA for such things or if there was another way I wasn’t aware of. I’m pretty new to this HA stuff so I’m sure what I don’t know could fill an ocean at this point. Just seeking knowledge from those are have it as I come up with crazy ideas of ways to better my life using HA as the catalyst. I was hoping to take on something like this further downstream as I’d like to use our primary TVs to trigger automations or help with presence detection in rooms & such. That was something I was waiting on until I had a better understanding of the basics.
ETA: it’s a tad confusing how this forum doesn’t show who I replied to with my posts when I click the “reply” button on their original post. It would help to keep this straight as to who people are responding to.
The GUI is your web browser. HAOS is almost always run headless on a huge variety of host computers. You can access the Home Assistant front-end from any device that can connect to a web site.