Wall Tablet – Fully Kiosk Home Assistant

This is my most wanted Smart Home feature, I studied a lot of different documentation and finally I realized my own Wall Tablet mounted with Fully Kiosk Home Assistant!

The Tablet

I’ve choose an Android Tablet to run my Home Assistant Dashboard: Alldocube KPad UNISOC T610 Octa Core 4GB RAM 64GB ROM 4G LTE 10.4 Inch Android 11 Tablet

I picked up the most economic one (around 150 during a sales discount) but with these key features:

  • 10.4 Inch with high resolution (2000*1200). Resolution is important to get maximum space available on a 10 inch display for my HA Dashboard
  • Android 11, stock version. Newer Android version is important for obtain newer Web View component. This component is used from Kiosk App to render the dashboard and doesn’t works well with older version. Stock version is also important because often cheaper Tablet use very limited Android version.

The Case

I’ve 3D printed my own case to fit exactly my tablet and fix it to the wall. It’s printed on a CR10 3D printer, so with a 330×330 mm build plate I were able to print the two main parts, back and front cover, in one piece. Material used is white PETG, and it takes around 20 h to print both the pieces.

STL files are available here

Smart tablet powering

To protect the Lithium Tablet battery, preventing any issue due to the constant power connection, I’ve added a Sonoff Micro USB Switch that turn on and off automatically the charging based on the tablet battery level.

The Sonoff must be connected to a 5V USB cable/hub, so I’ve catted off from it the plug and connected it to my electric plant cables using simple electric connectors.

Everything is fitted inside my wall electrical box. Last is a USB Type C from the Sonoff to the Tablet.

Fully Kiosk App

So now that the tablet it’s fixed to the wall and safely powered, I used Fully Kiosk mobile App to show my Home Assistant dashboard on full screen adding some more nice features.

You can download the app from Play Store or their web site.

Fully Kiosk is a configurable Android Kiosk Browser and App Launcher. Lockdown and restrict your websites and lock other apps in kiosk mode. Fully Kiosk Browser provides fullscreen kiosk mode, motion detection, remote admin and many other features for your digital signages, interactive kiosk systems, information panels, video kiosks and any unattended Android devices.

https://www.fully-kiosk.com/

Depending on the features you want to use could be for free, or required a license, with a very little few. Anyway you can try all the feature for free and decide later if you want to buy the PLUS license or not.

Once installed basically you will have to set you Home Assistant URL into the Settings Web Contect Settings – Start Url:

So your tablet will load Home Assistant and show it full screen:

There are a lot of other parameters you can set, most useful you could use it to automatically turn off the screen after some seconds and turn it on once a movement is detected by your tablet camera. (This is a PLUS feature that will require to buy the license)

Go to Settings – Device Management – Screen of Timer (PLUS) and set seconds amount after the tablet display will be off

Go to Settings – Device Management – Motion Detection (PLUS) and click on Enable Visual Motion Detection to turn back the screen on once movement is detected

Fully Kiosk Home Assistant Integration

There is now a wonderful Home Assistant Fully Kiosk Integration on the HACS store that will publish on Home Assistant many sensors from your tablet, for example the battery charge percentage.

So go to your Home Assistant HACS store and search for Fully Kiosk Browser integration. Follow the step to download the repository.

Once download and reboot you can finally add the integration to Home Assistant

Your Tablet IP address and Fully Kiosk Remote Password will be required:

To get your IP Address and Fully Kiosk Remote Password go back to your Fully Kiosk App on your tablet.

Go to Settings – Remote Administration (PLUS)

Turn on Enable Remote Administration and click on Remote Admin Password to choose and set a password.

Finally take note of your IP Address to set on Home Assistant Integration

Once the Integration is completed many new sensors will be available on Home Assistant under the Fully Kiosk Browser Integration and most important the battery level one, that we are going to use shortly.

It’s very important to disable any Energy Saving settings on the tablet related to the WiFi and System standby; otherwise if the tablet stops to communicate with Home Assistant all the entities will became Unavailable and any automation based on them will fail.

Automation to manage Battery charging

As I said above, I’ve used a Sonoff switch to automatically turn on and off the charging depending on the tablet battery level: start charging when the battery reach 30% and stop charging when the battery reach 80%.

The Sonoff switch is integrated in Home Assistant with official eWeLink Smart Home add-on (link)

While the automation is managed by the Blueprint automation called Wallpanel Battery Management (link). Installing it:

You can select the battery sensor, the charged percentage, the low charge percentage and the switch to control the charger.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/wallpanel-battery-management/256317

Alternative automation to turn on and off the tablet screen

Instead of using the Screen of Timer (PLUS) and Motion Detection (PLUS) option from the Fully Kiosk app I’m testing a different solution to automatically turn off the screen after a fixed time and turn it on once you move in front of the tablet: a PIR Sensor.

While obviously you need and extra device, the PIR sensor, to implement this solution, there is a benefit on not using the Fully Kiosk build in Motion Detection: it use the front tablet camera that must stay enabled all the time, even with the screen off. This is a lot battery consuming, so not using it I’ve reduced a lot the charging cycle of by tablet battery.

For details about this solution see this article: ESPHOME PIR MOTION SENSOR