Wall Panel for Home Assistant

I have had a tablet on the kitchen wall for a couple of years, showing a dashboard for Home Assistant. The big downside of a tablet is the battery, My first tablet was always connected, that battery lasted for a few years, then it begun to swell.

My second attempt had a charger controlled by Home Assistant, keeping the battery between 40 and 80%. But also that battery gave up after a while.

Time for something new. The plan now is to re-use a spare Raspberry PI 4 and a touch screen monitor.

The monitor I went for is a Elecrow 10 Inch 1280 * 800 Touch Screen Monitor.

The monitor is meant to have the RPi attached to the backside, and used with a stand. However I want it to be mounted on the wall, as flush as possible. So I designed a couple of hangers, one on each side. A hole in the wall and RPi in the cupboard on the other side.

(The line over the monitor is a reflection from the ceiling)

Thingiverse

Raspberry PI case

Automatically login and start a browser with Home Assistant. This procedure is tested on Debian 12.6 Bookworm (Raspbian).

Run raspi-config as admin:

sudo raspi-config

Select 'System Options', 'Boot / Auto Login' and 'B4 Desktop Autologin'.

This will make the user autologin when Debian is booting, and show the desktop.

Next edit the file 'wayfire.ini' for that user:

nano /home/<user>/.config/wayfire.ini

Add a line in the 'Autostart' section:

[autostart]

chromium = chromium-browser https://<HAURL>:8123/lovelace --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --no-first-run --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=Overlay>

Leave all other lines untouched.