What is the best Frontend / UI to use for a low spec tablet?

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Hi I have a wall mounted iPad 2nd gen which is a rather old tablet but it has a nice screen so I’d like to use it for a basic HA dashboard.

I’ve tried the built in Polymer interface and Lovelace also, and it seems the older Polymer interface was far faster than Lovelace, however Lovelace is not finished yet and I guess it will get faster with newer versions of HomeAssistant.

I tried HADashboard also but that didn’t update the states of devices very reliably, which is a shame as it’s intended for use on tablets and did seem very fast.

I’ve yet to try Tileboard but I’m about to do so, I was wondering if there are any other dashboards or UI’s that are good for older spec tablets?

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I’m not on older devices but the browser you use may make a difference. I use Android devices and use
https://github.com/WallPanel-Project/wallpanel-android, which works very well. There must be a ipad equivalent

Lovelace is what im planning on moving my dashboards over to and its close to general release check out 5th paragraph of 0.82 release notes

HADashboard does not update the dashboard when the value changes outside of it that’s why every dashboard you see has a refresh button on it.

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That wallpanel browser looks good, there is something similar for the ipad where you can load a webpage kiosk mode, this works nicely with the default Polymer UI.

I’ll have to try lovelace again once 0.82 is released, I’ve made a basic layout with Lovelace and it very flexable but far too slow on my old hardware on 0.81.

I’m in the middle of creating a basic layout in Tileboard and so far it seems similar to HADashboard, but hopefully I won’t have to manually refresh it when values update.

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I also had mounted a few ipad mini gen 1, but recently i bought new ipads and mounted instead. There was way to many things i couldn’t do in the browsers on the old ipads.
I all most tried every frontend but I always found some kind of functionality that wasn’t supported on the old ipads.

Also i found out that the old ipad often crashed.

Not any help, but just keep the time in mind, the price for a new ipad is way lower than the time you are using to find alternate frontends to update.

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I too use wallpanel on a KindleFire7. Works great unless you want to use custom cards. They simply don’t work with it.

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I only have one kindle fire 7 at the moment which is on the wife’s side of the bed and she loves it. They are so cheap I’ll probably end up with them scattered around the house for the cost. Just waiting on the long press to fully work then it will be switched over.

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@PeteCondliffe: Long press seems to work on my iPad 2nd gen + tileboard, but only when the tiles are over a certain size, it may be worth trying.

Thanks for the suggestion, right now getting a new iPad would be nice but I can’t really justify the price considering I already have working hardware, it just needs the right software to work. I’ve used the iPad 2nd gen in the past for a basic Node-red dashboard and it’s been great.

I only need a few basic features, just turning on and off lights and sockets, and few temperature readouts - I don’t need custom Lovelace cards or webcam feeds right now, and if I do need more advanced features then I’ll probably get a small HDMI touchscreen which can be wired up to to a RPI/NUC/ or any other future hardware.

I’ve finally installed Tileboard and with the Transitions turned off it seems super speedy even on my old iPad 2nd gen. For anyone else with older hardware kicking about, HA + Tileboard is nice combo. :slight_smile: