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Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY

p.kaczmarek2 2784 16
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  • Old Samsung Tab A10 used as a Home Assistant control panel on a desk with a 3D-printed stand, screen active. .
    Have an old tablet that's been sitting in a drawer for years collecting dust? Give it a second life and turn it into a control panel for the Home Assistant - the mini project shown here is very simple, and gives you full control over your own home automation. You don't even need a dedicated app - a simple web browser will do. I will show here in practice what this can look like.

    The starting point is a working touchscreen tablet. Probably many of us have one that is either already too weak for today's applications or, for example, has problems with the range or the cell inside. Already at this stage we have 90% of the fun ready to go. We used the Samsung Tab A10 (SM-T510) for the presentation.
    Now all that's left to do, according to preference, is to disable or select screen blanking in the settings, log in to our HA panel and place the link on the desktop and prepare the power station. You can use a 3D printer for this:
    Samsung Tab A10 tablet on a stand by a desk, displaying a Home Assistant control panel. .
    Depending on our taste, we can choose a wall mount or a stand on a table or desk. In the case of a desk stand, the legs will also be useful:
    Old Samsung Tab A10 tablet mounted as a Home Assistant control panel on a desk, displaying the home automation dashboard. .
    Samsung Tab A10 tablet on a simple stand displaying the Home Assistant control panel. .
    At this stage we already have a virtually finished project, although here you can still think about optimising the cabling and buy at least an angled USB connector, or you can even go a step further and plug in the power supply from the back of the tablet. This, of course, only if you feel up to opening it up and reworking it.
    Old Samsung Tab A10 tablet used as a Home Assistant control panel, placed on a stand on a desk. .
    The end result depends on what we set ourselves on the Dashboard and Home Assistant views, below are examples from us:
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    Old Samsung Tab A10 tablet on a white stand displaying a Home Assistant control panel. .

    In summary , this was probably the simplest DIY I've ever shown on the forum, but at the same time you have to admit that the result is quite good. I was motivated to publish by a post in one of the topics about Waveshare boards . I intend to cover the HA GUI in more detail separately in the future, but this will already be shown independently of the tablets.
    I invite you to comment - or have you tried converting an old tablet into a control panel? What experiences have you had with this, what form of attachment and power supply have you chosen? .
    PS: Photos are courtesy of @DeDaMrAz .

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    About Author
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
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    p.kaczmarek2 wrote 12321 posts with rating 10207, helped 583 times. Been with us since 2014 year.
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  • #2 21583560
    @GUTEK@
    Level 31  
    That "old" tablet from the description is a 2019 Samsung with an 8 core processor and Android 9 (maybe it got an update to a newer one, I haven't looked). How this is old hardware is beyond me. Turns out that my smartphone bought in January 2021 should have been disposed of by now too.

    On the other hand, the tablet I own, the Archos G9 Turbo, is no longer fit for purpose, despite still having a great battery life. Because, due to Android 4.0.4 (unofficially there is version 5.1, which also doesn't help anymore), no modern browser supports it and the Home Assistant itself doesn't load properly.
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  • #3 21583614
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    Modern websites, applications and also browsers are simply getting more and more resource-intensive and it is hard to do anything concrete about it. I myself deplore this and often try to run and speed up old computers, but these are the facts.

    Any tablet capable of opening an HA site will be suitable for the project. If the HA website doesn't work on a particular browser, then you can look for an alternative. It would also be interesting to ask the creators of HA or to investigate what is going on in their website that older browsers sometimes can't handle.
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  • #5 21583732
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    I did the same with an old tablet installed HomeHabit. Unfortunately it drained the battery due to being connected to the charger all the time and I had to do a quick rewrite to turn the charger on/off when it detected 20% and 80%.

    I think the idea of using old tablets for home automation is awesome - don't throw it away - use it.
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  • Helpful post
    #7 21583802
    lexx_
    Level 12  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    I invite you to comment - or have you tried converting an old tablet into a control panel? What experiences have you had with this, what form of mounting and power supply have you chosen?
    .
    I chose a wall mount so that no cables are visible, and it looks like this:
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    The mount on the tablet side looks like this:
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    The second part of the mount is located in the wall:
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    The mounting solution itself is done as follows: a power cable with an angled plug is plugged into the tablet, so that the plug protrudes only minimally without spoiling the appearance. The mount is magnetic, with a magnetic power connector in the middle. There are 4 magnets around the perimeter, so the tablet can be inserted into the socket and rotated 90 degrees, so it can be positioned vertically and horizontally. The mount has been designed so that the tablet stands away from the wall minimally. The wall section is made to fit into a regular electrical box. As I have a deep box into which 230v is fed, the electronics from the USB charger are on the back, so that there is a nice 5v on the power connector.

    This approach works so well for me that I still use it elsewhere, for a different tablet, but here is an arm with an overhang with the ability to adjust it as desired:
    Touch control panel for Home Assistant - how to use an old tablet? Simple mini DIY .
    In this arm at the other end of the cable from the magnetic connector is a regular USB plug which is plugged into the charger.
  • #8 21583870
    krzbor
    Level 27  
    My solution is to buy a case for the tablet. We remove the cover from the case, as we are only interested in the plastic frame. The frame is screwed to the wall and the tablet can be easily inserted ro the frame. Power supply via USB with an angled plug. The problem was forcing it to light up - I didn't want it to light up non-stop. I noticed that when power is connected the tablet always lights up. There is a PIR sensor from the alarm near the tablet and I decided to take advantage of this - when the sensor detects movement the power is temporarily disconnected and when it returns the tablet lights up for a set time (this is already a standard Android feature). This works well, although there is a delay in lighting up (about 2s).
    Drawbacks of the solution:
    - generally there is power all the time - one battery had already faded and was due for replacement,
    - start-up delay,
    - periodic suspension of the tablet, specifically WiFi connectivity.
    New mobiles have an extended battery life mode of charging to 80%. Unfortunately this tablet doesn't have that.
  • #9 21583883
    lexx_
    Level 12  
    krzbor wrote:
    The problem was forcing it to light up - I didn't want it to light up non-stop.
    .
    A good solution is Fully Kiosk Browser which integrates very nicely with HA. Unfortunately, the options package that allows you to use it to its full potential is paid, but it can be enabled for free, provided you don't mind the watermark on the screen. Once the licence is purchased, this watermark disappears.
    Fully Kiosk + HA integration allows you to see and control the screen, e.g. turn it on or off from the dashboard or via automation. The Fully Kiosk itself also has a motion detection option (it can use a camera or microphone for this), and this allows the screen to be on only when someone is in the room.
    krzbor wrote:
    generally there is power all the time - one battery had already faded and was due for replacement,
    .
    We're in a thread about Home Assistant, and here's the native solution - once HA is installed on an Android device, the app will expose entities to the HA server informing, among other things, the battery level. If we plug the charger in via some sort of smart plug, then we're only a step away from doing automation where we simply switch the charger power on/off so that the battery is maintained between 20 and 80%.
  • #10 21583887
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    gulson wrote:
    Unfortunately, the battery faded due to being constantly plugged into the charger and I had to quickly convert to charger on/off when 20% and 80% is detected.
    .
    I wonder to what extent it would be possible to simply plug into the battery socket with the power supply. At the moment I don't know if or how these batteries report their presence - whether there's just some resistance there, or some kind of protocol. However, I remember once when the charging module on an old phone broke, I was able to get it working by applying the correct voltage to the battery connector. Perhaps someone reading this knows what the situation is with this?
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  • #11 21583926
    krzbor
    Level 27  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    I wonder to what extent it would be possible to simply plug into the battery socket with the power supply.
    .
    It's not that simple. There really is miniaturisation there, with the battery plugged in with tape (no normal cables).
  • #12 21583948
    lexx_
    Level 12  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    gulson wrote:
    Unhappily, the battery faded due to being constantly plugged into the charger and I had to do a quick rewrite to turn the charger on/off when 20% and 80% is detected.

    I wonder to what extent it would be possible to just plug into the battery socket with the power supply. At the moment, I don't know if or how these batteries report their presence - is there just some resistance there, or some protocol. However, I remember once when the charging module on an old phone broke, I was able to get it working by applying the correct voltage to the battery connector. Maybe someone reading this knows what the situation is with this?
    .
    Retaining the existing battery means that we have a mobile device all the time, in my case with the magnetic connector of the tablet I can simply detach it from the wall and use it as a remote control from the sofa for example. However, as for the battery itself, I had one tablet that I wanted to use as a panel with just a dead battery. It was hard to open, and after opening it up, it turned out that the battery was connected to the main board by a strip which had a 6pin connector at the end, which would suggest some kind of protocol there. The old solutions had a thermistor, so some kind of substitute resistance would have been enough to "fool" the device. In this particular case, after weighing up the pros and cons, and looking at the prices of second-hand tablets with Android 5+, I simply decided that I would dispose of the whole thing and do it as I presented - in the event of damage to the tablet, I am able to reposition the whole mount to a new device in 5 minutes, keeping it mobile.
  • #13 21584236
    krzbor
    Level 27  
    gulson wrote:
    Unfortunately, the battery drained due to being constantly connected to the charger and I had to quickly convert to charger on/off after detecting 20% and 80%.
    How did you do the detection?
  • #14 21584372
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    The home assisant additionally runs in the background on the tablet, and the tablet exhibits its battery status as another sensor. That is, the tablet is an additional user.
    After that, only automation as below 20% it turns on the smart socket, as above 80% it turns off.
  • #15 21584627
    chemik_16
    Level 26  
    I simply replace the cells with cells in steel cases - they never swell, and they have the ~700mAh
    From simple solutions you can also give a diode before the battery.
    There is usually no control there, it is enough to supply ~4V, but you would have to have a fairly powerful inverter, because such a tablet likes to draw these 3-5A from the battery at times, otherwise it will switch off.
  • #16 21587094
    szpila
    Level 17  
    >>21584372 .

    I've done exactly the same thing at my place, and additionally introduced a charging counter. Every fifth charge the tablet charges to full, the socket turns off when the entity state changes from "charging" to "full". It is also possible to make a protection for a dead battery that never wants to charge to full on e.g. the entity state is "charging", the battery level is above say "95%" and in such a state it is more than 20 minutes. Then switch off the socket.
  • #17 21595907
    Scyzor
    Level 13  
    Hello.
    Instead of using the HA app and Full Kiosk you can use the WallPanel app. It is unfortunately not in the Google Store and you have to install from github Link . There is motion detection by the camera and it also issues battery data via MQTT.
    Everything runs on android 7.0, the tablet is a Huawei Media Pad T3.
    Huawei MediaPad T3 tablet running the WallPanel app, displaying the Home Assistant interface on its main screen. .
    Huawei Media Pad T3 tablet running WallPanel app displaying Home Assistant interface. .
    For me, the most important option was that the app can be set as the default for the screen, so when we launch the tablet we immediately have a view from HA
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Topic summary

The discussion focuses on repurposing old tablets as touch control panels for Home Assistant (HA) home automation systems using simple DIY methods. Tablets with sufficient hardware and Android versions capable of running modern browsers or HA-compatible apps are suitable. The Samsung Tab A10 (SM-T510) is highlighted as a practical example. Challenges include browser compatibility on older Android versions (e.g., Android 4.0.4 on Archos G9 Turbo) due to outdated Android WebView components, which prevent HA web interface loading. Solutions involve using alternative browsers or dedicated apps like Fully Kiosk Browser (with motion detection and screen control features) or WallPanel (offering motion detection and MQTT battery reporting). Power management is critical: continuous charging can degrade batteries, so automation to toggle charging based on battery levels (e.g., 20%-80%) via smart plugs is recommended. Mounting solutions include magnetic wall mounts with angled power connectors for minimal cable visibility and easy tablet removal. Battery replacement or bypassing is complex due to proprietary connectors and embedded protocols; some users opt to retain batteries for mobility. Additional automation strategies include using PIR sensors to control screen wake times and integrating HA battery status entities for smart charging control. The use of external displays like TVs with Raspberry Pi Zero W running Grafana for HA data visualization is also mentioned.
Summary generated by the language model.
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