Improve the Family Acceptance Factor
For a while I used the webinterface of to interact with Home-Assistant via a web browser on my PC and the Home-Assistant app on my phone. This works great, but using a PC to view the current temperature in my living room is not the most convenient way. Now days, most houses in the Netherlands have a thermostat in the living room to view the temperature. The apartment I rent doesn’t have a wall-mounted thermostat control panel. Because I did have a temperature sensor connected to a Wemos d1 with ESPHome connected, Home-Assistant could measure and show the temperature on its dashboard. I had an old 7inch tablet lying around which was way too slow to be usable for anything else than showing a webpage.
What to show on the dashboard
So I started thinking about useful information to show on the dashboard, the living room temperature and weather were the first things I wanted to show. My work schedule changes a lot which was hard for my house members to plan I did have my schedule imported in an agenda which Home-Assistant also has access to that also has found a way to my wall dashboard. Further, I wanted a button for my lights and music. The light will be 99% automatic but now and then you want to have local control for brightness or color, I do have a remote to control, but more ways to control are always better off course.
Kiosk mode
Opening a web browser on a tablet works, but a wrong touch on the display results in the Chrome browser tab showing or opening a new tab. There is a dedicated browser app Full Kiosk Browser but on my tablet it doesn’t run unfortunately, so I had to resolve to other means. First, I used the Chrome to create a shortcut on the homepage of the tablet. Clicking this shortcut opens the dashboard without the Chrome interface. Then I wanted to hide the top bar of Home-Assistant, for this I used the custom component Kiosk mode.
Browser mod
Another custom component that was useful for my wall interface is Thomas Lovens Browser_mod this turns the browser in a controllable entity - and also an audio player and possible a security camera the last part doesn’t work on my tablet, but I suspect that is a problem with the tablet itself even in the installed camera app there is no video. The audio player can be used to play music or an audible notification or even a voice message when there is a tts integration activated in Home-Assistant
Endless possibilities
The more you use and learn about Home-Assistant, the more it seems the only limit is your imagination.