VNC Web Browser Addon

Third party integrations
1

I made this addon a while ago but never got around to sharing it here.

It is a VNC server with a browser intended to render interactive web pages like a HA dashboard.

I want to use old, obsolete devices as HA dashboards. Old phones, tablets and especially e-ink devices like Kindles. The problem is that it’s difficult to impossible to get Wallpanel, Fully Kiosk or similar apps to work on them and their browsers are also too old and unsupported.
So I thought I should just render the dashboard on the server and only use the device as a networked display.
VNC is a very old and simple protocol that is supported by basically everything so I went with that.

In the Readme, you can see examples of HA running on a Kindle and a Remarkable 2. I’ve been using this with the Remarkable for a couple of months and it works great. I just have to create script that relaunches the VNC client after my HA server reboots.
The next step is to add a VNC client to ESPHome and get full ESP devices with displays to show fully featured dashboards.

5 Likes
2

Hi Petrov,
There is a github page https://github.com/Links2004/arduinoVNC that enables a VNC session display on an esp32.
If one could make a esphome library from it I think this could be very handy in combination with MindFreeze as you can than have a very cheap screen showing info or altering it. It would also be future proof as the server side chromium could be kept up to date for security but also for new developments.

Greetings
Tom

3

This was my idea exactly but I haven’t found time to work on the Esphome side of it.