I purchased an S9E hoping to use it with HA. But it has proven more difficult than expected. The main issue is it uses a very outdated version of WebView (83.0.4103.120). So fully Kiosk and the HA app don’t render dashboards correctly. Chrome can be installed and works but it’s not as nice as the app or fully Kiosk browser because the address bar displays. And there is only 2.5MB free on the system partition.
I have tried all sorts of things, Magisk won’t install the riru module or the OpenWebView module.
I can get the hardware buttons working using Automagic. And there is control with the Fully Kiosk integration, just poorly rendered.
But for the life of me I can’t figure out a way to update the webview implementation.
If anyone has some advice or has managed to get it working properly that would be fantastic.
Well…some good news. Just after posting this I thought I would try one more thing. Turns out I had to use an older version of the OpenWebview module (v24.0) for Magisk. And voila it worked. It did have to hack the ‘VolumeSelector’ script in the openwebview installation to substitue the buttons (F1, F2) for the volume keys as the device doesn’y have volume keys.
Now I have working Fully Browser Kiosk and companion app for that matter. The hard buttons can be used via Automagic.
The next step is to try and get the inbulit temp and humidity sensors to work, and the proximity radar.
Thank you for posting the discoveries you made. I too got a Smatek S9E (actually, I got the S9PE-NZ just incase anyone is searching for more specific terms!) and your info was super helpful in getting my webview updated!!
Did you make any progress on the proximity radar? It’s the only other thing I think I really need to make this a perfect device!
@James821 Hi James,
Smatek have released a new firmware version for the S9E that has an update webview. It works with the native HA app and Fully Kiosk without the need for Magisk.
That’s interesting that you have that version of code with the updated webview. I got some files from Smatek earlier; “(S9-NZE) Read sensors values of temperature, humidity, radar and adaptive brightness” and “S9 Hardware Interface Debugging Instructions” and the debugging guide contained link to code dated 20240914. It would be good to find out if there’s any limits to the supported HW versions of that code, or some release notes!
For the proximity sensor, I wrote a really simple script that just detects if the GPIO18 value changes from 0 to 1 and if the screen is off, turns it on, but it’s a little bit clunky.
And from the searching I’ve done so far, it seems like the simple way to make use of the 4 physical buttons, is using something like Automagic to send HTTP requests to Home Assistant (and receive too, for controlling the little LEDs in the buttons!), but it might be nice to make something that uses MQTT instead.
I’ll continue to post my efforts and findings here!
After mminehanNZ posted that link above, I just asked the seller I got my (ever so slightly different) device from on Alibaba for the latest code that a) works with my device and b) will still give me root access and they’ve provided me with exactly the same link. I also asked if there were any release note, but I was told the only update was the webview component.
I’d previously asked them for any programming/API info etc, and they provided me with the two documents I mentioned above, one of which contains a few links.
But I agree, the website is poor and the linked to site that contains the image doesn’t allow any browsing.
Seems there’s a few people on here with there devices and at least a few in the discussions on the NSPanelProTools github too.
Wait so you got the password to unlock developer mode in the ui?! My seller hard refused to support and my emails to smatek didn’t get a response. If so was the password hard coded or unique to the device? Thanks!
