[RELEASE] HD+ - Android Dashboard

There is a faint background on variable string devices in widget. Is it possible to remove? A blank background would make the text stand out make it cleaner to view an empty variable.

See pic
Screenshot_20220822-095808_1

version 1.0.1695 (beta)

  • new feature: geofencing
  • play sounds when device changes via cloud mode
  • new device type - mobile app device
  • several performance improvements

There's a TON of changes in this version.. mostly because I've been working on a new geofencing feature and didn't want to push any builds until it was in a good enough place for others to use.

The biggest feature is geofencing - which I mentioned a few days ago.

I had a long post explaining geofencing - both why I'm adding this feature and what can be done to make it more reliable (hint: if you own a Samsung device - it's not). But, I ended up creating a new page for it here instead

While working on geofencing I made several performance improvements as well.


If you are interested in testing geofencing know that it's still a work in progress.. testing geofencing takes TIME (and lots of moving around with devices). If you've never had an issue with the native Hubitat app then there's no need to use this feature. But, if you want to compare the 2 of them that's what I'm doing and there's at least some signs that it's working.. in the image below the app was able to detect the device left the geofence area ~12 minutes before the native Hubitat app. But, I've also seen cases where neither app received anything at all hours after re-entering my location -- likely Samsung simply refusing to allow any app to detect location.


^^ NOTE ^^ I forgot to mention how I'm seeing that "S20 not present" notification.. it's sent using the Hubitat Hub's Notifier app. To test both the native Hubitat mobile app and this dashboard app side-by-side, I'm letting the Hubitat mobile app set my device's presence. I'm testing the dashboard app with another switch device until I'm confident it's as reliable as I can make it.. then, I'll likely disable geofencing in the Hubitat mobile app and have the dashboard update my device (S20). However, that said - I don't see much harm in having both apps update the same device either.

6 Likes

Sure, I can remove it

Hi, I've also had random issues like this on 1 of my Fire tablets too.. It never happens (that I can see) on my phones or my other always-on Fire tablet.

Anyway, I've been looking at device logs and making small tweaks here and there. So far I haven't noticed any issues running the latest version. Not to say it won't happen again but when it does I also added some more robust logging to figure out the root cause too.

I can't seem to get a temperature reading from a node-red reading (through mqtt) to the dashboard. I have tried the web tile and the link file, but it isn't what I was looking for. Any ideas? Am I missing something?

HHmmm interesting!
Maybe I should get another one of my Fires up and running, just to test this (and also put it into service).
Thanks for the info and hopefully one of us will stumble on what is making this happen, although my HD10's are the variety that isn't rootable.... YET! I do use the FireToolbox to disable tons of Amazon garbage, so it's the next best thing.

With the last update on Google Play Beta:
1.0.1674
My widget for - Front Door Lock - is no longer displaying the keypad to input my PIN while unlocking/locking.
The PIN input field shows, but that's it.
The keypad still pops up when unlocking/locking the front door using the dashboard app, but not with the widget.

version 1.0.1707 (beta)

  • fix PIN not showing for widgets
  • don't show icon behind variable string widget
  • support changing widget text size for label and text
  • show widget preview when configuring

The big changes with this release are being able to change the label size and text size of widgets - including hiding the label. There's also a new preview window so you can see the widget before creating/updating it.

This should be fixed - I think it was broken a long time ago though but I was able to reproduce and it's working for me now

done

2 Likes

I haven't used node-red but are you able to get a virtual device of some type setup on the Hubitat Hub with this value? If so, just make sure that device is included in the MakerAPI Hub app and you can configure the dashboard to display that field

I have seen several reports of crashes so I refrained from a "me too" but now it seems that all the previous reports involved an Amazon tablet. I'd like you to know that I've been seeing crashes at least daily, sometimes more frequently, for a few months now and through at least a dozen versions on my Samsung Tab4 running Android 4.4.

Thanks for mentioning it! Hmm.. I get crash reports but I haven't seen many so I'm wondering if that's working. Do you happen to have any live video tiles? I think the last one I fixed involved RTSP video; it's in the latest build but at least it said it only affected 1 or 2 users over the past 7 days so not sure that's it.

:thinking: I may not have that enabled. I'll go make sure it is.

I do not and never have had. Pretty basic here.

I have found that if I attempt to leave the homescreen running 24/7 on my Wink Relay, the app will usually crash with a day or so. However, if I leave a folder open on the screen (I tried one with about a dozen temp sensors) instead of the homescreen, it runs for days. I think I uploaded a log after one of these crashes a few days ago.

On my homescreen I had a couple of radar tiles (no video tiles); suspecting they might be causing some kind of resource issue I moved them into folders but that didn't seem to increase the uptime.

I have several Amazon Fire HD pads running this app in my house. I am using models from 2018 and up. Most of them are on 24/7. Some of those have video tiles. I am using Fully Kiosk on many of them and they work flawlessly. I have not used the app kiosk mode. The ONLY pad that seemed to have crash problems was one with Alexa "hands free mode" enabled. I have turned that off now and all seems well. On one of them, I use the Fully settings to darken the screen until touched and return to near black screen after 15 seconds. In all, things are working perfectly with this app and Fire HD pads.

For me (with 4 x Fire HDs running 24/7) I've had no crashes as such (not since I was using RTSP for my video tiles). I do get frequent freezing of the tile that I use for mjpeg video. The feed is RTSP to my RPI with Motion Eye, then mjpeg to the app. The freezes are random and if I touch the tile the full screen view is live but closing that goes back to the frozen image. The app needs to be restarted to refresh it. I initially thought this was down to WiFi disconnects but it seems to have started happening on the Fires that have no WiFi issues. As dragging the screen to refresh does not reload/re-establish the connection to the mjpeg feed, it would be handy if there could be an option for some timer setting on the video tile to automatically refresh/reload the url periodically.

In SharpTools I'm using Fully's 'Auto Reload on Idle' timer to reload the dashboard once every hour or two, so I don't see these freezes (as a trial I'll remove the timer on one of them to see if the freezes actually do occur and I'm just not noticing it). I'm unable to do the same with this app, as I'm using that same 'Auto reload on Idle' setting at 20 seconds combined with 'Skip Auto reload if Showing the Start URL'. I do that so that when I start an app such as Sonos or Hik-Connect from a tile, the idle timer expires when there are no touches in the app and returns to the dashboard automatically.

Thanks! All better now.

I noticed it wasn't working for me so I checked my wife's phone, her's was working until I upgraded to the latest version at the time.
She loves it when I make things better. :wink:

Another thing I'd like to change is the widget tap to open I have set for my outdoor temperature sensor.
Unlike the door lock widget that opens a small pop-up that is dismissed by tapping elsewhere on the screen, my widget for the outdoor temp opens a full screen display that can only be dismissed by tapping on the x in the top right corner.
Any suggestions on how to configure it so it opens a smaller, easier to close pop-up?

@jpage4500 I created a virtual presence device in Hubitat but your tracking device selection doesn't see it. It's that device type allowed in the list? I originally set it as my phone as the tracking device but that doesn't seem to flip from present to not present on the dashboard although the activity section in settings it seems to be tracking properly.

I changed that virtual presence sensor to a switch temporarily and your presence tracking was able to use it, though it didn't flip status. I think han was able to change it back into a presence sensor but again it won't flip my presence on the dashboard. The activity seems to be working.

Also I noticed that there can be up to 10-20 "pings" for lack of better word at the exact same time. Is that normal?

Also, Joe is it possible to have more than one geofence. I'd like my hub to know when I'm at work based on a geofence. More specifically I'd like it to know when I leave work so my house can do a little prepping for my arrival.

I do use that full screen popup for several device types and maybe not all of them need it. Generally I want images and videos to show full-screen when clicked - or any other device type that could take advantage of being full-screen.

I did test a temperature sensor as a widget and it's not showing full-screen for me. Are you using a different device type?

The app does do a full refresh every <10> minutes by default. This is primarily to supplement the 'websocket' connection to the hub which pushes out device changes in realtime. For example, if you add a new device to MakerAPI the only way the app will know about it is to do a full refresh.

This refresh is the same as doing a manual 'pull to refresh' on the main screen

That said - I've also had some stale/out-of-date tiles on 1 of my Fire tablets. When I've noticed it and did a pull-to-refresh, everything updated so clearly something wasn't working right. In my case I know my tablet has connection issues due to it's location in the house -- but I'd still like the app to handle these by retrying when it's back online.. anyway, it's one of my top things to solve.

Video tiles don't fall into any of this though.. each of the video drivers (RTSP, MJPEG, etc) has a way to know when the connection fails. Assuming the app can find that out - it should just auto-retry to connect after some short period of time. I've tested some of this but unfortunately I never get enough time in the day to keep a video connection going long enough to see some of the issues you're seeing. It's definitely on my TODO list and I do have at least 1 RTSP device which I can use to test with

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I had to get node-red to seperate the values to use the http get command to set the temeperature. but now, as of this morning, both samsung tablets will not start the dashboard. I factory reset one of the tablets and loaded the stable version with the same result. I rebooted the hub, same. I took out all devices but one, and still can't get the dashboard, either stable nor beta, to start without crashing. I noticed the version of the dashboard in the shop is 1.0.1707