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?
How are you with embedded programming?
These are great displays, IPS panel, capacitive touch, they have an ESP32-S3 built in with wifi and bluetooth and the display is attached to its native RGB interface so it can pretty easily run LVGL and other UIs at 30+ fps without breaking a sweat.
https://www.makerfabs.com/sunton-esp32-s3-5-inch-ips-with-touch.html
You mention you like picture frame mounts, so why don’t you use picture frames? You can get some used stuff for very cheap at Goodwill. Or get wood trim at home depot and cut to size.
Anything that’s not visible gets the glue gun treatment.
Believe me, I’ve thought about redneck-engineering something myself. I may get there; I’m just checking for more clever, more attractive, turnkey solutions.
I’m certainly not the only HA user who’s approached this! I do seem to be the only one without a 3D printer, tho.
This is not redneck engineering, it’s how evening is attached to walls in the US as far as I can see. An ugly hole in drywall, and cover the rough edges with trim. I’m not sure what else you are looking for.
Something outside the wall could use minimal wood working and nails or command strips.
I currently have an unlocked NSPanel Pro running Fully Kiosk browser for a HA dashboard in one room, but it’s not perfect and its a bit overpriced for what it is, also it;'s wifi only which is a bit of a let down for a permanent control device.
I did see on aliexpress today some new 7-8" android tablets with integrated wall mounts, POE power and data, a basic camera for presence detection etc but minimal sensors otherwise, for somewhat reasonable money, but they’re 3x to 4x what a basic equivalent tablet costs.
I’ve also dabbled with E-Ink displays but they are expensive and most of the hobbyist grade displays you can control with an ESP or PI don’t have any lighting so they cant be used in the dark. and they would require a lot more DIYing than an android tablet running a kiosk browser. I’ve not seen any off the shelf android e-paper devices designed for home control, look at the pricing of devices like the Onyx Boox tablets (I have an Onyx Boox note3 and love it, but it cost me more than an ipad at the time), you will see it’s a pricy tech to the begin with and low volume niche products also drive up prices a lot. the cheaper e-reader devices are less hackable for DIY.
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!
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.
Personally I purchased some cheap 10" Lenovo tabs for my new place. Haven’t moved in quite yet, but some PoE to USB-C adapters and 3D printed wall mount cases outta get me out for ~$150/unit. Not the cheapest, but far from the most expensive. Should work well enough for what I need.
This is the direction I am moving; you must have a 3D printer at your disposal? That’s the blocking component, for me.
Those can be had for pretty cheap these days, or you can order custom printed parts from some online services. Plus, some libraries have them now, free or cheap to use.
What’s your plan on tablet going to sleep? Just force it to stay on 24/7 or is there some kiosk-manager or something which actually works and doesn’t break the whole experience every now and then?
Some devices just sleep the screen and wake on either a movement or proximity sensor. The latter might work for a wall-mounted tablet
Not the one you replied to, but I installed lineageos on a old Samsung tab I had laying around and there’s the android native option to ‘pin apps’ which puts the app before the lockscreen basically until you exit the mode manually, meaning you only need to turn on the screen and it’s still protected by password so can’t be used for anything else.
For waking, it’s in the hallway where I have a hue motion sensor. Whenever the sensor notices movement, it’ll send a notification to the tablet with the command to wake the screen and the screen turns on. Pretty easy and straightforward
I have one Kindle Fire using the Fully Kiosk Browser and a wall mount with a hidden power cord (https://a.co/d/05GVxVP). It uses the camera to turn on when you walk up to it. It’s ok, but I installed it 3 years ago and never really finished making a dashboard for it. In practice, we control the vast majority of stuff by voice with the Google/Nest Home integration, or switches. The big control panel thing doesn’t hold enough interest to even bother putting controls on it, and I mainly leave it showing air quality graphs.
Of more practical use are smaller panels for area-specific uses. I mainly standardized on NSPanel, because I was experimenting with them and ended up with a bunch. Example: https://youtu.be/DBzg7v1Q5Zo. I have a short attention span and tend to stop when it’s 90% good enough. I also have in other places a DIY HA SwitchPlate, and HASPone on a Lanbon L8.
I’m trying to stay away from components that require the graces of external cloud services. That said, I’ll probably end up with some amount of voice control using Rhasspy.
The NSPanels are exactly the thing I’m looking for, but from what I can tell, these are cloud service based. Do they work if they are firewalled off from the Sonoff servers?
The way I use them is to reflash the firmware with ESPHome, at which point they have nothing to do with Sonoff. I got really into these things when they came out and made a video about the process: https://youtu.be/Kdf6W_Ied4o?si=4nh7kP28IglwVHBx. There are a bunch of different ways to use them including retaining the original software, but I kind of stopped paying attention when I got mine working.
It’s worth noting that they have two different products. The “NSPanel Pro” is completely different, I think it runs Android. I haven’t played with that at all.
What a great video! I’m going to try it.
In your video, you mention the horrible Nextion Editor. That was a year and a half ago - have you tried GUIslice? I’m utterly unfamiliar with every component of this, but it seems to write the same TFT display driver needed by that hardware.
What I loved the most: when checking out the product on Amazon after watching your video (on NewPiped and over VPN, so low chance of tracking), was this beautiful recommendation:
I guess a lot of people are using it with non-SONOFF software. It absolutely restores my faith in humanity.
I haven’t seen that software, but it doesn’t look like it can be used with Nextion screens, which are totally proprietary.
Isn’t the Nextion an ESP32 display? The list of devices in the readme doesn’t mention Nextion.
Well, I’ll let you know how it goes. I don’t have access to a Windows computer, and I haven’t had a need to install Wine in over a decade, but that’s what I’ll have to resort to if Nextion is mandatory. I came across a post where Nextion outright said they’d given up on a cross-platform solution.
It’s a little confusing. Nextion makes “HMI displays”. It’s an integrated module that runs its own software, draws the UI, processes events, etc. It’s a black box that just reports back to the processor “button 3 on page 1 has been pressed”. You design the interface with that ugly Windows app and upload it to the display, but there is no direct access to the screen.
To make use of the Nextion display, you need something connected to it, and that’s where the ESP32 comes in. It receives those “button 3 pressed” events and handles them, but crucially, it does not have raw access to the screen, so you can’t just draw your own widgets on it like you’d be able to do on an ordinary display.
There are other projects to build your own controller with a touch screen and a microcontroller; the appeal of the NSPanel is that it’s basically an ESP32 and a Nextion display conveniently prebuilt, has decent hardware and aesthetics, and it isn’t hard to reflash it with ESPHome. Replacing the Sonoff firmware on the ESP32 doesn’t change the limitations of the Nextion display.
Yeah, there’s obviously a learning curve here in store for me. Thank you for explaining it - that makes sense.
It means, though, that I’m stuck trying to get this thing running under Wine, which I read is possible. The post I found says you can even forward the serial port for flashing.
They’re such attractive devices, with nice form factors, it may be worth the effort. Funnily, the flashing doesn’t throw me off as much as running that editor.
Anyhoo, thanks again.
Do you have any unifi kit? The connect displays are nice and can run the home assistant app.
I do not; I’m almost 100% zwave.
$700 per unit is a bit rich, but those look really nice. There’s a picture frame wall mount that hides the power supply on Amazon that looks similar; it’s designed for Samsung tablets, and with a tablet it would be around $500. I may go that route.
I didn’t know about Unifi; thanks for exposing me to something new!
Yeah it is pricey, but if you have a bit of the gear, the addons arent that bad. But the initial cost is hard to swallow.
Personally, I have a very old Kindle Fire mounted to the wall that I set to never go to sleep. Its still powerful enough to run a web browser to access the HA interface, so it’s a good use of tech that would otherwise be sitting in the obsolete pile. However, it is just powered with a USB cable hanging across the wall, so not super elegant.
I wanted to do this with an old, first-gen Motorola Xoom! It’s not supported by any of the Android forks or Linuxes, and Lovelace is too much for its browser. I’d have an issue hiding the proprietary power plug, and then there’s the mount… so many hurdles!
Did you consider running power to yours through the wall?
I bought a $60 Android tablet and run the Home Assistant app with a dashboard I created using the Wallpanel integration. I spent more time than I care to share getting the dashboard how I wanted it but I’m very happy with the result. I also have a smart plug that turns off when the battery reaches a certain level to avoid battery swell. Wallpanel is very cool. I set this up to replace an Amazon Echo Show I got rid of because I missed the clock and weather display. Check it out if you’re still looking for ideas https://github.com/j-a-n/lovelace-wallpanel
Wallpanel is really cool! And the author is pretty active, too. I only have to figure out the hardware.
I was planning on using the Full Kiosk app but after buying a tablet that only had Android 12 Lite, I didn’t feel like ponying up double or more for a tablet with the full Android version. I tried to run Full Kiosk anyway, but had stability issues. Running just the Home Assistant app has worked great
Consider using Android tablets as kiosk-style wall-mounted control panels for home automation. Check out mounts from Heckler Design or VidaMount for a clean, built-in look. While pre-fab Android eInk panels are rare, you can DIY a solution with Android tablets using apps like Scalefusion for a versatile setup.
Yeah, these are what I was imagining when I posted my comment, only I couldn’t find any good looking ones. Thanks for the product names!
