Some of you might already know this, but I was setting up a Fire 7 tablet I bought a few days ago as an wall-mounted input device for my Home Assistant instance and I discovered that it works amazingly well with Alexa hands-free mode enabled. With a little Tasker magic you can convert a 40$ tablet into an Echo Show with HASS support. You can even set the time it will go back to your HASS page after Alexa stops talking.
This is not groundbreaking or anything but it might be of interest for some people.
Demo (sorry it’s in German but I was too lazy to turn Alexa to English):
Sadly, there is no Spotify support and it also lacks the ability to wake you with music.
Nope, but you can use Fully Kiosk App to dim the screen to he lowest possible setting (and optionally make it go black) and let it go to full brightness again when you touch it. I didn’t do any measurements but after some rough calculation I think it will cost me under 1€/month with the display always powered one.
If Screen of: Talk tomorrow use Alexa hands free.
You can use Alexa hands-free if the the screen is on OR the screen is off and the device is charging.
I’m still tweaking the Tasker sequence but I absolutely will share after I’m done.
I’m still looking into how stable the whole setup is but judging by a first impression it looks pretty good. Microphone sensitivity seems to be on pair with my 2nd gen Echo Dot although the tablet is a bit slower.
I’m also trying to find out what’s possible with Tasker and what not. It might be necessary to come up with a custom app although I’d rather use Tasker because I’m a little short on time at the moment.
Having it running for two days now without any major issues. I also ditched Tasker and replaced it with a small self-written app that will close any alexa results (except ringing alarms) after 20 seconds. When I have some spare time I’m going to write a few lines on how to set it up.
Use an app called GMD Full Immersive Mode and Google Chrome to load HA. You will get full screen (without status bars) and your custom cards should work in Chrome. I recently learned of this app and its fixed my problems.
I was quite busy over the holidays so this had to wait. I ended up using a small Android app that allowed for further screen dimming (default minimum was too high) and automatic return to the HA dashboard after an Alexa screen was opened. I noticed some caveats, the most annoying of them being that the whole device would become unresponsive after some time (usually a day or two) and the lack of Spotify support.
So all in all it works but it will need some work to make it completely usable for everyday use. I will post the App when I find some time to investigate further and I think it’s ready for production.
I don’t know if anyone still needs this, well I did. Messed around a little with Fully Kiosk and discovered this behaviour can be achieved with just fully.
And enable the auto reload feature in the settings. For me I took approx. 10 seconds to go into idle when Alexa finished. Doesn’t even require the PLUS Version
