I thought I would share a project that I'm proud of and maybe inspire some others!
I had an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 laying around. It ran Android version 4 and most of the apps I wanted to install on it such as Hubitat or Fully Kiosk Browser, required Android version 6 or higher. So I rooted it and installed SlimRom6.
Then installed Fully Kiosk Browser from the Android Play Store and pointed it to a SharpTools.io dashboard I made (just prettier than Hubitat, no offence Hubitat!). The nice thing about Fully Kiosk is it automatically goes full screen and hides all the android stuff but also can start-up after the tablet restarts so it's always on the dashboard screen.
I then installed Pushover, Tasker and AutoNotifications for Tasker. When the Hubitat hub goes into Night or Away mode, a notification is sent to the tablet via Pushover. Tasker watches for this notification and turns the backlight timeout to 1 second when away or night so the screen turns off. Any other mode and the screen turns to always on. AutoNotification clears the notification so they don't pile up and bog down the system.
It's been a couple of weeks and setup has been rock solid! Really happy with it. The WAF is also exceptionally high. Some of the things we use it regularly for now:
-See if the kids left on their lights or any other lights in the house that aren't motion controlled,
-Control the lighting scenes for cooking, dinner time, dishes, relax, vacuum, etc. (Note: we both share in these chores).
-She also likes that there is just one bedtime routine button rather than having to tell Google that she is going to bed.
-We also have an indicator that shows whether the cat has been fed at each of the 3 mealtimes throughout the day. Uses a Samsung MultiPurpose Sensor stuck to the lid of the cat food container. If there is motion then it turns a virtual switch On. The kids also get a kick out of making the "has the cat been fed" tile go from red to green by feeding the cat! Bonus!
-Family calendar from Google Calendar
-Current Weather and Forecast
-A guest mode switch to prevent the house from switching modes when we leave and we have guests. Locked by a PIN since it disables the home alarm as well
-See the temperatures in each of the kids rooms as well as each of the floors of the house.
-A virtual door indicator opens if any door in the house is open. Can click the link to the doors dashboard to see which door is open
-we have a door that leads to the basement, we also have a toddler so I have a contact sensor on this door that will chime if the door is open and also sound an alarm if the door is left open. This lets us know if the toddler is opening the door or if our 5 year old has left the door open for the toddler to potentially fall down the stairs. We can turn both the chime and the alarm off with one of the virtual switches for the times where we are going up and down the stairs and don't want it on and the kids aren't home.
-And finally, my oldest daughter wakes up to the lights in her room slowly turning on at a certain time on school days. We have a virtual switch which cancels this for 12 hours for the weekdays where she doesn't go to school. We can hit the virtual switch and the lights won't come on the next morning but will the following morning.
A lot of these automations I wouldn't have been able to easily figure out without the help of the community so thank you everyone. @stephack and @ryan780 have been exceptionally helpful!
That is an awesome setup and seems well-described to me. Reading it just pushes me more to want to get a couple large tablets to use for this purpose alone.
Thanks! The older android tablet works great for this and can probably be bought for quite cheap. Only downside is that I wanted to stream my outdoor nest cameras to the dashboard but the older tablet just wasn't up to the job. I could do it on an older iPad but not the older android tablet.
What I have done so far. I can run Fully on the Android 4.4 but the HE dashboard won't run under Fully with this version. But it will run in Chrome. So I run Fully to use the wakeup on motion but have Chrome running on top with the Dashboard. It's not as pretty, but it gets me by. If I remember correctly the Sharptools dashboard will work just fine on Fully in Android 4. But I wanted the local dashboard so it was functional when my internet goes down. Which is far too often.
My biggest gripe with this method is if I reboot my hub the dashboard no longer responds till I do a refresh manually. If it would run on the Fully I could do an automatic refresh.
If anyone can recommend a method to root a tablet, I am looking for suggestions. I have an old Samsung Tablet stuck on Android 4 that is practically useless that I would love to make useful again. Like @j715 , I haven't had any luck trying the install methods.
I'm not an expert but I think one major stumbling block for certain devices is whether the bootloader can be unlocked or not. Some devices with unlockable bootloaders just won't be able to be rooted or have custom OS's installed on them. Just my 30,000ft understanding.
It's a Tab 4 I believe. Even if it doesn't get any faster, i would love to test rooting a device before I were to try it on something newer like my cell phone.
