Improve the Family Accaptance Factor
For a while I use the webinterface of to interact with Home-Assistant via a webbrowser 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 livingroom is not the most convenient way. Now days most houses in the Netherlands have a thermostat in the livingroom to view the temperature. The apartment I rent doesn’t have a wallmounted thermostat control panel. Because I did have an temperature sensor connected to an Wemos d1 with ESPHome connected Home-Assistant could measure and show the temperature on it’s dashboard. I had an old 7inch tablet lying arround wich was way to slow to be usable for anything else than showing a webpage.
What to show on the dashboard
So I started thinking about usefull information to show on the dashboard the livingroom temperature and weather where the first things I wanted to show. My workschedule changes a lot which was hard for my housemembers 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 every now and then you want to have local control for brightness of color I do have an remote to control but more ways to control are always better offcourse.
Kiosk mode
Opening a webbrowser on a tablet works but a wrong touch on the display results in the chromebrowser tab showing or opening a new tab. There is an 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 topbar of Home-Assistant for this I used the custom component Kiosk mode.
Browser mod
Another custom component that was usefull for my wall interface is Thomas Lovens Browser_mod this turns the browser in an controllable entity - and also an audio player and possible a security camera the last part doesnt 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 an voice message when there is an 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.