[RELEASE] HD+ - Android Dashboard

johnwill1 · October 11, 2022, 6:17am

I have both older 10s and an 8 plus. I do like that the 8 is neater wall mounted. Tile size is a bit small on the 8 with my layout. Not an issue in itself but the text on those small tiles is a bit too small. On the standard 10s, I’ve used a USB C adapter that doubles back underneath the tablet to make the charger cable discrete. On the 8 plus I’ve set/scribed a Qi charger in the wall surface and the tablet is placed over that (neater still)

10 inch:

8 inch plus:

I do wish you could still get them all in white like the older 9th generation. Who really wants a plum or twilight blue?

jnosa899 · October 11, 2022, 11:18am

Do yourself a favor and DONT get a fire tab. Find a standard Android one. Amazon's lock down bs isn't worth the 10-20 buck savings.

Pantheon · October 11, 2022, 11:54am

I just use the Fire Toolbox mentioned above and de-bloat all of my HD Fire pads. Great software.

jnosa899 · October 11, 2022, 12:11pm

Thought that doesn't work everytime anymore. Especially if the tablets update.

johnwill1 · October 11, 2022, 12:11pm

I think the Fire tablets are great. I wouldn't want one to use as a tablet for anything else as the speakers are awful (I'm not a fan of tablets and would rather sit with my MacBook Pro on my lap). But for a dashboard they're spot on. I use mine with Fully which has some great features. The first one I got, I messed around loading Google Play etc but I don't bother with that now. If I can't get an app on the Amazon app store I just get the apk file and load it myself.

johnwill1 · October 11, 2022, 12:15pm

I got some heavy duty self adhesive 3M Velcro hook and loop to fasten mine. TBH it's a bit too strong, but if you slide something between you can remove them without taking the plasterboard with it.

Pantheon · October 11, 2022, 12:39pm

I purchased some nice mounts off of Etsy

That's an old dashboard. Much improved now. But you get the idea.

johnwill1 · October 11, 2022, 12:53pm

Yeah I was looking at the Makes by Mikes ones here https://mbmounts.com which are possibly what you have from Etsy. There are good options for power depending on whether you're using local mains, 12V or USB and also a variety of trims - paintable, wood etc. I have two issues with the mounts:

no access to the buttons without unclipping the trim. Not a big problem but I do occasionally need to be at the buttons.
I was looking at the flush mounts but the fire tablets are very slim anyway and each generation of tablet is different, so if I hack into the wall for my ninth gen model and it goes kaput at some point, I'm potentially making a mess of the wall to change it to the latest generation Fire.

Pantheon · October 11, 2022, 12:56pm

Yes, I use Mike's. You can get them with button access. Or, modify it. Easy to do.

FriedCheese2006 · October 11, 2022, 2:15pm

I've used that elsewhere, but the mounting putty is more than enough to keep the tablet up, but I don't have to worry about it marring the wall. It comes off clean.

They seem to have the "market" cornered. I couldn't bring myself to pay $50 for a mounting system for a tablet that I paid $45 for.

It works perfectly, but yes, an update will put everything back. I've had pretty good success of just blackholing the DNS names of the update servers to stop that.

danabw · October 11, 2022, 4:02pm

Wife wants a new tablet, she wants NYT app, and I want this dashboard (and other stuff) on it.

Has anyone recently done this on a FireHD 8 2020/10th gen tablet successfully?

https://www.androidpolice.com/install-play-store-amazon-fire-tablet/

jpage4500 · October 11, 2022, 7:09pm

Everything needed to connect to your Hub should be contained in the backup file. If you do a backup to the Hub then you can access that backup via http://hubitat.local/hub/fileManager (on the same network as the Hub).

If you copy all 3 backups to each hub you should be able to restore from any of them.

It's also possible to add a shortcut link from 1 dashboard to another.. not trivial to do but I tried to list how here.

jnosa899 · October 11, 2022, 7:22pm

If I read that correctly this would be a prime example of having multiple tabs. What did you end up deciding regarding the tab idea?

jpage4500 · October 11, 2022, 7:53pm

Here's what that looked like (from a long while ago); I don't know about taking up so much space on the screen for tabs though so I think I'd want to auto-hide them. But, I can try to put something together if there's enough people who'd use it..

jnosa899 · October 11, 2022, 8:09pm

I don't think folders can go away. I'm not sure anybody would want that. I was thinking instead it would be in addition to folders. We could use tabs for different dashboard or separate by device if our main screen is organized by room or vice versa. Additionally if it were for dashboards we could keep our different dashboard all together making for just 1 backup for all of our various dashboards.

jpage4500 · October 12, 2022, 1:57pm

Agreed - I forgot my original post was replacing folders with tabs.. I was just looking at the UI part of it.

I'll give it some more thought.. I'd like to make it as simple as possible - both to create and use - and that's usually the challenge.

jnosa899 · October 12, 2022, 2:25pm

That's probably best. Just a few thoughts. Flexibility is always king, hence we all use Hubitat. With that in mind could there be an option like system that we select (though it probably wouldn't matter but your the brains) for each tab. Examples that come to mine.

Select tab type:

By Room
By Device type
By Dashboard

Not sure if there is actually any differentiation between those 3 but I suspect a tab dedicated to a different dashboard might be a bit different than the other 2.

Also what I envision is the tab ribbon on top should be either adjustable or no larger (possibly smaller than 1 column) this could be difficult I'm guessing unless we jack up the column count, which would work just fine. I recently reduced my columns from 12 to 6 on my phone to make the back button usable size wise. The tab ribbon would be way to large atca height of 1 at 6 column layout, but would be an acceptable size at 12 column layout.

Another thought would be to update the AMAZING return home function (I can't express how wonderful this is) to a return to tab function.

Just food for thought

jnosa899 · October 12, 2022, 2:31pm

I recently added Home Assistant to my mix using the Home Assistant Device Bridge app. It's amazing but obviously Hubitat cannot handle all of the "entities" or information contained by Home Assistant. @jpage4500 any thoughts on if your dashboard could take in that info?
Just a very simple example is their speedtest integration. It simply runs speedtest.net every hour and displays the result. That would be nice to have on my dashboard since I use Starlink and when video buffering happens at home it would be convenient to look at that on my dashboard as a first step to figure out what's going on.

jpage4500 · October 12, 2022, 2:34pm

That seems useful although I think ideally it'd be an app that runs on the hub every X (mins/hours) and updates a device with some details (download speed, upload speed, etc).. then that device can be displayed on any dashboard.. I haven't written many (any) Hub drivers but it seems like one that would be pretty easy to write

jnosa899 · October 12, 2022, 2:52pm

That was just an example. I was amazed on all of the info my Amcrest doorbell generated in Home Assistant. Most of it probably isn't useful, but who knows on other devices. Was just curious if there was some sort of template you could make to, if nothing else, import that data into a tile. Maybe along the lines of a notification device for Home Assistant. @tomw might have some thoughts as he was part of the device bridge.

FYI at this point I'm liking Home Assistant and would consider making it my primary system and just use my HE hub for the devices...but your dashboard is just so superior to anything I see on Home Assistant. It really should be the official dashboard of HE in my mind.