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Home Assistant: EP2 Let there be touch!

Author

Norbert Takács

Date Published

What?

Its time to upgrade my 24" wall hung home assistant dashboard on the side of my fridge. My 24" used a few magnets and a LCD screen cable extender between the motherboard and the screen panel. I placed the motherboard on top of the fridge and this is where the hdmi and the power cables connected. The only thing I was missing from this setup was the touch. I even had guests coming up and touching the screen hoping something would happen.

Finding a new kll

There are two options when finding screens. Tablets and touch screens. From my research the most recommended tablet is the Amazon Fire HD10. Unfortunately this screen is not readily available in Europe. Either way I would consider it too small coming from 24".

The biggest viable tablet I found was the Lenovo p12 at 12.7", its quite small still, and its not being actively supported. Neither is the homebrew community around this screen active.

On the hunt after bigger touch screens I found a few commercial options deployed in malls and restaurants. Their price was astronomical and the availablity quite low. After some long search I stumbled upon a few aliexpress contestents.

I would advice using a raspberry pi 5, since my pi 4 struggles with scrolling and the UI elements of home assistant

1command_line:
2 sensor:
3 unique_id: ha_screen_hdmi_state
4 name: HA Screen HDMI State
5 command: >
6 ssh bokker@10.0.0.88 -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new "WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 wlr-randr | grep 'Enabled:' | awk '{print \$2}'"
7 scan_interval: 30
8 value_template: "{{ 'on' if value == 'yes' else 'off' }}"
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