homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Wall control panels (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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On Amzn, there are nicely framed, wall-mounted control panels for proprietary home automation systems. What are people using for HA? I'm leaning toward trying to wall mount tablets, but I'd need 3, and cost starts to factor in. Mounts are a problem; I want it to look as built in as possible, but most mounts aren't picture-frame style. The ones that I've found that are, are designed for specific tablets, and not the low end cheap ones. I don't have a 3D printer, so I'm limited to mounts I can buy.

I like some projects here I've seen using eInk - that's the ideal solution! Is there a source for pre-fab Android eInk wall mounted control panels, or are what I've seen bespoke projects?

I'm not opposed to gross wiring, and am not afraid of cutting holes in dry-wall... it's really the mounting that I'm stuck at. Android 7-10" tablets sufficient to run the UI would probably work, and I can probably even figure out wiring the charger, if I could just get some nice picture-frame style mounts.

What are your solutions that you think is pretty neat? Or products that I may have missed?

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[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Was the NSPanel hard to unlock? Did you have to register it first with the corporate servers, or did you unlock it off-WAN? These are the perfect form factor, but I think you're talking about a different product, because those are only $80, which seems reasonable.

I haven't looked on Aliexpress -- what a great idea, thanks!

E-ink would be great, even with the unlit limitation, but yeah: it seems like a lot of work and money at the moment. The Kobos run a proprietary version of Linux (that's the e-reader I have and love), I think, and I may troll ebay looking for used ones. That might work -- the mount is still an issue.

Great ideas -- thanks again!

[–] Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

NSPanel Pro is easy to unlock, debug mode is enabled by first setting it to a cloud account but you can just use a dummy account for it. it is just android so enable ADB then load a lightweight launcher, change some defaults, remove some fluff and go from there.

The regular NSPanel is not android but can still be modified as it is ESP32 based.

if you really want e-ink, an older e-reader with hackable firmware could be a good way to go, but without a printer you'd have to pay for a printing service to make the mount, which would likely take a few iterations to get right so it wouldn't be particularly cheap. I want to see something about the size of the Boox Palma or Hisense A5 but with a wallmount, POE and some basic sensors.

You can jailbreak many older Kindle models, some require soldering to an internal serial port but then you can load a custom browser with a fullscreen mode, I even had a VNC client on mine to access a VM for a full PC interface.