I have long wanted to have tablets on the wall of the ground floor and upper floor where I can control Home Assistant. In the last Black Friday Sale I bought two relatively cheap 10 inch Fire Tablets from Amazon for 99€ each.
The only difficulty was to supply the tablets with electricity. But then I came up with a very practical solution. I use ribbon cable from Qi Charging pads.
Then I attached the tablets to the wall using “Tesa Super Strong Velcro”.
I think that is an very easy and very slick solution.
On my blog you can find more details how I did it:
Where does the USB cable plug into for power? Are you leveraging an old alarm panel connection to get power? Or running an additional cable from a nearby outlet?
In the ground floor I used the old cabling of the doorbell. And upstairs I drilled a hole through the wall and routed the cable through the other room (its behind a cabinet)
I would have liked to learn more about that process (getting power from existing house wiring), since providing a power source to a wall-mounted tablet is the hardest and most dangerous part of these installations.
You can also install a tablet where an old alarm keypad used to be. Konnected.io provides useful instructions and links to required gear for that. Instead of using the ribbon cable from a wireless charging pad, I use a right-angled micro-USB cable. Not as clean but no soldering needed.
In my case I didnt have to handle mains voltage. In groundfloor I had already cable which provide 12V. Here I only had to add an buck converter to reduce the voltage to 5V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter).
And upstairs I used a normal USB Power Supply with an self assembled USB cable. Only reason why I assembled myself was, that I wanted to keep the whole in the wall as small as possible.
Maybe we can get another blog post that details about how you evaluated your house’s electrical wiring, and decided on what items (like the buck converter) you needed to get power to the tablet? I’m more interested in electrical wiring but that info is hard to find in the right context.
As said i used the place where the intercom was hanging before. The intercom was driven by a 12V MeanWell PSU which is mounted in the basement in the “fusebox/controlbox” (German: Sicherungskasten). It’s a PSU like this:
I just used a multimeter to determine which cable where +/- and then I used a cheap buck converter from AliExpress to reduce the Voltage. I dont think it matters too much which one you choose (please correct me if iam wrong). For example one like this: