this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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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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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.