It's cyber Monday and I am buying the latest Fire HD 10 tablet.
The goal is to have a usable Dashboard to hang on the wall. Perfection not necessary.
I will first try Fire Tools to solve lock screen issues and try to get Google Play Store installed. This may not be successful.
After that maybe: Hubitat Dashboard with Tile Builder, or HD+. Not sure how this will go.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
If anyone else is buying this supposedly great cyber day deal we can do this exploring together.
If it does not work out I can still play stupid games on it.
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I am a big fan of SharpTools to create dashboards. sharptools.io
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I boughta couple a few years ago and have Tile Builder on all my tablets.
They work great.
The only downside is that every once in a while the keyboard refuses to pop up if I need it; not very often.
Then I have to scour the Interwebs for the dark fix.
It's quit simple but burried deep and I never bookmark the solution; stupid monkey.
On my fire hd10 tablets, the toolbox works great, but they are the 2021 version so Amazon may have found a way to disable the toolbox.... hope NOT!
Good luck!
Big fan of HD+ here. I have 5 pads and 2 phones running it.
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This drives me nuts on three different generations of Fire tablet. It's ridiculous that it can't be resolved once and for all. The fix, which only works until the next time it happens, is to change the keyboard language from UK English to US English and back (or vice versa if you're in the US)
SharpTools on a Fire tablet was my solution from 2020 to 2024. The Fire was recently relegated to garage duty and replaced with a Lenovo M11 (on sale for $119).
Circumnavigating the native Amazon bloat was always kludgy. At the time, there were some web pages documenting the process to get the Fire to behave with Play Store and Fully Kiosk Browser. It worked well 98% of the time and my wife liked that it could be used as an Alexa device.
Our needs evolved. Amazon is available on our Ecobee thermostat and Samsung TV (TV has minimal processing, but automatically mutes to prevent interference). The Lenovo handles some functions with the Alexa app, like local voice responses. As a dashboard, the Lenovo is a tool that just works. The Fire was a fun project that mostly worked, and maybe there are even more settings and tricks that could get it the rest of the way.
SharpTools on Fully Kiosk Browser is still my personal preference.
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100%
Sharptools is absolutely unparalleled for anyone wishing to have a dash which doesn't look like something out of a 1980s scifi movie.
Horses/courses.
I've yet to see any dash's which I like. Of course, there are plenty examples of sharptools creations which also make me cringe =P
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I briefly used sharptools in my SmartThings days years ago. Many examples of sharptools that I have seen look really good, but have those required CSS to get like that?
The benefits of HD+ over SharpTools are:
- 100% local
- Ability to add live CCTV video (with SharpTools you can only do a regularly refreshing jpeg)
- No lag whatsoever as it's local, not even a fraction of a second is perceivable. When using SharpTools on Fire I found there was a perceivable lag when operating a device - a fraction of a second but noticeable. I initially thought it was due to it operating over the web, but later found no such lag when using iPhone/iPad.
HD+ is Android/FireOs only which won't affect the OP. My SharpTools dashboard did look a bit more professional than my HD+ ones (I preferred some of the SharpTools icons despite there being a plethora available in HD+) but there's no reason I couldn't get them looking as good.
The closest thing to combing the two and making everything cross platform, fully local and customisable was HubiVue.....and aren't I glad I didn't spend any time setting that up!
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Absolutely agree with HD+ here.
I often design my own in Photoshop.
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Does it have an overlay feature?
Or customisable icons?
Supertiles feature?
Been ages since I tried it.
I have live video on my st dash, from blue iris.
Yeah I remember that was the choice - use Blue Iris or the web server in some other software. With HD+ I can just connect directly to the H264 camera stream without the need to send it through BI or anything else to decode it it and convert to MJPEG. I have the sub stream of one of my Hikvision cameras running on 4 tablets at 12FPS 1280 x 720.
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Installed.
Answered my own question. No overlay, animations, supertiles etc.
Appreciate it's speedy. But really not a patch on st.
Again, horses / courses.
Edit.
Random HD dash example:
Random st example:
Mine:
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Thank you everyone for your help and suggestions.
My Fire HD 10 13Gen has arrived and I thought I’d share my experience with any newbies following along.
I followed the Fire Toolbox instructions bypassing registration and enabling Developer Options and USB debugging.
Fire Toolbox runs with no problems. Ran Lockscreen Management and Google Services.
Google Playstore is installed.
I did not remove any Amazon apps yet. None causing trouble.
Toolbox could not disable OTA updates but that has not caused any issues yet. I imagine I could block internet access with my router if that becomes necessary.
There are no Lockscreen issues because there is no Lockscreen.
Tablet boots into Fire Launcher. WhisperPlay Core Service Daemon says it is starting. Not sure what this is but I’m leaving it alone for now.
I loaded HD+ from Google Playstore because it seemed the easiest and easy it is.
Ran Maker API and selected all my devices, way too many. On a big screen desktop you may want to see everything but on a tablet you have to pick only the ones you actually need.
Even my existing Tile Builder tiles appear but of course not sized for the smaller screen.
It seems I can only select one tile from each Tile Builder Storage Device but I may be doing something wrong.
For now I’m just playing with HD+ trying to make it look nice.
Thanks again everyone.
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Same finding here. Early on, I just dumped everything into one Maker API. My suggestion is to design a specific HD+ Maker API for each pad and use only the devices you require for that pad. Otherwise, you have to go around to all of your other pads hiding devices that you do not need on that specific pad.
Update:
Tablet updates or tries to update. No harm done but HD+ stops.
Blocked internet access to tablet using router.
Tablet now disconnects from WiFi because it has no internet.
Set static IP on tablet.
Using Fire Toolbox - modify system settings - settings database modifier, added these two global keys.
captive_portal_detection_enabled 0
captive_portal_mode 0
Tablet stays connected now, for 5 days, we shall see.
Internet data such as radar.gifs are loaded into Hubitat local memory (file manager) every 20 minutes using a rule and the bearmay’s File Manager Device driver.
Tablet loads these files from Hubitat local memory rather than the internet.
I'll be very interested to see how this works.
i have some Hik cameras, what is the URL's that you use, i have some issues.
my BI server works fine, but streaming kills my CPU on the server
