Forgive me if I’m in the wrong place of if this is covered somewhere else. I may be searching on the wrong keywords. My goal is to have touch screen controls in each room in my house where the occupants can adjust lighting, temperature, music, etc without impacting the rest of the house. The technology all seems to be there to actually do the work. What I’m looking for is the best hardware and software alternatives for the remote display. What I don’t want is for the people in the room to have access to the other rooms in the house, or to have to navigate through the house to find their rooms. Any thoughts?
Thanks
Chip
You can group the switches/sensors based on rooms and then point a browser in kiosk mode to that room.
You could use a raspberry pi or something similar with a touchscreen.
You could do this with HADashboard and have a different board setup for each room.
Can you tell me more about kiosk mode, or point me to the documentation on it?
Wonderful, I kept seeing references to the hadashboard, but didn’t find any documentation quickly. I probably should have searched harder. 
Thanks
Kiosk mode is just a browser window without controls. You cannot leave the page unless there are links going out.
For chrome it looks like this:
google-chrome --kiosk http://YOURPAGE
Firefox, or any other browser should have some similar option.
Thanks I was thinking it was some feature of HA. I know this is a little outside the scope of this question, but any inexpensive touch screens that integrate with the pi and HA that you are aware of?
I’ve only got the official raspberry display. That works very well, very easy to set up, works out of the box. I use it with uzbl to display the ha web gui.
A few months ago I’ve had the same idea but fond nothing that can be ran on a raspberry pi zero using a cheap Chinese touchscreen. So I created my own:
a gif of using it (because, who doesn’t like gifs)
Please note, this is still buggy & ill documented.
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If you are comfortably rooting and flashing cyanogenmod (or similar), Amazon Fire tablets are dirt cheap touchscreens (I purchased two for around $35 each on Black Friday last year, they were the same price on Prime Day this year, and I would expect the same Black Friday this month). Even at full price, $50 for a 7" touch screen tablet is reasonable.
I have several mounted to the walls around my home (right above the old “traditional” light switches) running HADashboard full screen (chrome kiosk mode). These also have decent quality cameras in them, which I use with IP Camera (paid version from Play Store) to keep an eye on things while away. You can use the cameras to work as light/motion sensors as well. (combination of IP Camera and Tasker talking back to Home Assistant via mqtt and http). They also have built in microphones and speakers, so they can work as an intercom system as well. In addition to that, they have a headphone jack, which if you run to a set of decent speakers (or use bluetooth), you can run an MPD client on them for whole-house-audio as well. With autovoice and tasker, you can set them to always listen and use them for voice control. - just a few ideas.
Lots of possibilities. For the price, I’m surprised more people aren’t utilizing these for home automation. They don’t integrate directly with the Pi, (more supplement it) but they cost roughly the same as the official Pi Touchscreen, and offer a ton more functionality.
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I thought about this but at the time I couldn’t find a root exploit for the fire tabs. I ended up going non root with an Insignia tab from Best Buy for about $69 USD. I agree with you that not enough people take advantage of this and more people should really look into HA Dashboard as well. Andrew @aimc has made a number of wonderful contributions to HA including HADashboard, SceneGen (a command line util that reads lights into scene format) and of course everybody’s favorite - AppDaemon.
How did you mount your tablets to the wall?
I’m using these
https://www.amazon.com/Damage-free-Dockem-Tablets-Smartphones-eReaders/dp/B008E0Q0C0
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Perfect. I found this on Amazon last night and was hoping it would work.
I printed mounts for mine. Pretty sure this is the source file I used. I have three set up for each tablet, two on the bottom corners, and one in the middle on the top. Here is an example:
I use the same setup for (2) old Nexus 6s, two Fire Tablets, and a few older android phones. It works fairly well. I’m sure a store bought mount or inset would look nicer, but since I already had the printer, these mounts cost around a quarter to fifty cents each. Just thought I would add an alternate option!
I also saw a user here that bought round wooden door pulls at Home Depot for a buck or two and they worked great.
Lots of options, including Command heavy duty picture hangers. Removable and leaves no marks.
I have a couple of cheap chinese tablets hanging around in my house with HAdashboard.
With the coupon it cost around $60.
I have hot glued strong magnets on the back which sticks it to my fridge nicely, with no visible mounting from front.
I’m running a motion detection app and tasker so that the screen light turns on when a motion from front camera is detected.