It’s finally Prime day! I would love to get a cheap amazon fire tablet and mount it on the wall as a control panel. But I am struggling between the 10" and the 8". Price wise they the larger one is almost double the price, but I am not sure how big of a difference the extra 2" can make. This tablet will be 100% full-time wall mounted. So media consumption isn’t a concern.
I have 4 of the FireHD 8" tablets mounted around the house. I couldn’t justify the extra price for a little bit of extra screen real estate, especially since everything in my house can be controlled via voice, motion and/or contact sensor.
The tablets I have mounted hardly ever get used. LOL
I want it mostly to take a quick look at all my cameras, see the status of my larger appliances (car, dryer, etc.). And as a remote for my Sonos system. But honestly, I don’t know. I also control most of my stuff with voice, and the most practical use for it that I can think of is to show the doorbell camera when someone is ringing it.
Ahhhh, gotcha. Yeah, I gave up (for now) on streaming my cameras (Reolink 410/520s) via HA due to all the wonkiness with the camera ffmpeg platform. I use Ring for my doorbell (which is getting upgraded before the end of the year) and it also just plain sucks. By the time it popped up the video feed, the person ringing the doorbell was already in their car, 4 blocks away. sigh
So, I built a small Android app just for my tablets that allow for a single click to launch the various apps/screens and all my tablets use that to launch the Ring app, the Reolink app and HA app should someone need them.
However, now that I can get status from my device via voice (“Hey Google, what’s the temperature in the kitchen?”), I have even less reason to use them. LOL
Which doorbell camera are you using? I REALLY want a new one (because, again, Ring sucks), but I haven’t put much research into what the best ones are now-a-days.
I moved from Ring (sucks) to Nest Hello (works well but I hate subscription) to finally unifi G4 Doorbell.
G4 works pretty well, image quality looks as good if not better than Nest and Ring, also have no subscription fees. The only down side is it’s not as feature rich as the Nest Hello (yet) like I can’t adjust the physical chime’s duration, I can’t have pre-recorded voice replies, and you most definitely need to upgrade your door bell transformer since mine worked fine with ring and nest but not unifi.
One big downside for Nest Hello is ever since Google bought Nest, they forced all of their customers to transfer their account to Google, and Google doesn’t have a “Work with Nest” equivalent. Which means no API, no reliable integration to HA (There is a Bad Nest project which kinda works but not as reliable).
Overall I still recommended many of my friends to Nest Hello since they are fine with subscriptions and some of them are already invested with the nest product line. (Also earlier this year Google changed their camera recording backup subscription model, which charges per household instead of per camera like before. Which makes much more sense and is much more wallet friendly if you have more than 2 Nest cameras.)
I also heard some good feed back on the ring pro (the POE one) but I have no experience with it.
But if you want a local camera doorbell with HA integration you can’t go wrong with G4. (G4 can also do local person detection with it’s recent beta firmware. But since it’s ubiquiti, beta program can last years.)
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Hell, beta? I’d say 99% of the updates they have put out recently have been more alpha than anything else. The 6.0.20 update took me DAYS to fix. But, I have had my eye on the G4 for awhile. Do you need a UDM or UDM-PRO to use it? I honestly haven’t looked very closely at it.
I was kind of leaning toward the Hello, but I hate subscriptions as well. 
I believe as long as you have an unifi protect the supported device (UCK-G2-PLUS, UNVR, or UDM-Pro) you will be able to use G4.
The one thing that pissed me off about nest/Google is how they forced me to migrate to Google Account and took the API away. (I was already paying for 4 cameras separately before the pricing change, but the fact that Google has no actual consideration of their customers when making major service changes constantly makes me want to “talk” to the people who made the decision at Google. Just a random rant, Google is also forcing us to switch to Youtube Music from Google Play Music which worked perfectly fine for the past 2 years. But the Youtube Music App on Android still can’t cast audio to anything other than a native Google product to this day.) Actually, that’s why I want to control my Sonos system from the tablet since Youtube Music works fine as a source from the Sonos App but not the other way around.