Google Pixel Tablet review: Clever accessories transform an unexciting tablet
Reed from Smart Home Solver gave his 2 cents in a video today. (https://youtu.be/JXvTzBlsVD4) Using Fully Kiosk Browser and a custom Home Assistant dashboard, it looks like he’s made great use of it.
I still don’t think my smart home is at the level where it needs a dedicated tablet to control it, but the magnetic dock does make this solution more interesting IMO.
I currently use fully kiosk on older kindle fire tablets with the show mode docks and love it.
As a control surface, I’d agree it’s not super useful. Voice is better as an ubiquitous control interface wherever you are or just your mobile.
But as a dashboard of useful info such as weather, location of family, schedule, and other important events happening in the house, I find it indespesible.
Having a few well positioned tablets around the house with the important details of the day ensures that that information is just present in my brain without having to go seek it out.
So just little things like whether it’s a good day to ride my bike to work or whether there is wet laundry in the washer or whether it’s trash day, are all things I automatically know without thinking about it. That is very valuable for me.
Yep.
Hopefully there’s a way to determine when it’s docked and autoload a specific dashboard.
$500 seems pretty steep to mostly use it as a smart display imo. Would be much more cost effective to get a cheaper tablet or raspberry pi and cheap display.
I’m interested. Waiting to see if there’s any issues setting it up so that the HA dashboard loads up instead of everything being locked into Google Home.
Nope. I’ve got an old Surface that I’m using as my home dashboard. It’s ancient, but running Home Assistant as a full screen browser app works great. I’ve still got a bunch of Google Home Minis floating around the house but I’m trying to get off them as soon as possible. I’m trying to de-cloud my smart home as much as possible and get everything to local control. I’m following the “Year of the Voice” very closely as I’m hoping that will be my way out of Google’s ecosystem at last.
I’m slowly trying to do this too. What I haven’t found a replacement for is the simple “set a timer”/“remind me”/“add to shopping list” stuff that I use it for.
Have you found a good way to replace those style of commands yet?
No I haven’t. It’s those exactly that keeps me using my Google Homes. Well those and being able to cast music, but you can fix that easily with local solutions.
It appears that Home Assistant will be able to do those things in the near future. At least I hope so.
