Wall mounted Node-RED touch screen device: Request for ideas and volunteers

I am using enocean HT sensors on every room. They work with solar power and or battery. It uses a USB stick on a raspi with node red. Very reliable.
As touch screen you could use the new raspi terminal from seed studio. It is not cheap but very powerful. It can run your complete temp management.
I am using shelly and unipi relays to switch my thermo valves and plugs.
If you are interested I can share my node red application with you.

Hello @juntiedt,
Do you mean this one? If so, Chris also mentioned that one a couple of hours ago, and it is indeed rather expensive and the cables are visible on the side...

reTerminal

Have a look starting at minute 7

another video
reTerminal

My temperature management console (runing on a raspi 4, not on reTerminal):

That is indeed a nice device with lot of options. Might be usefull for a lot of use cases. But the cables are visible on the sides, and is quite expensive when you need a series of those. So I won't be able to use it.

Perhaps wait a little bit - Black Friday is coming soon. Perhaps you can get a little bit more RAM and a faster processor for the same price (my 7ā€ fire is struggling with tabs containing many widgets). But on a 7ā€ SD display you will only get a certain amount of items. I believe you will avoid scrolling.

Do you want a display in every room?
I actually have to tablets on which I run my thermo management , sonos and net atmo etc. Heating profiles are managed with cronplus. if I want to do it manuell, I switch with the clock symbol and use the slider. My heating profiles are optimized over some month and I use manual not very often.

Heating is only a single feature for which I want to have a screen in every room. As you can see in my first post:

  • In the bathroom I want to show temperature and humidity, and you should be able to control it with buttons on the dashboard.
  • At the top of my stairs I want to show a keyboard to enable/disable the alarm easily when we go to sleep. And it should beep when we go downstairs in the morning while having forgotten to disable the alarm.
  • In my bedroom I want to show my camera's easily, to get a quick overview of what is happening when the alarm suddenly goes of.
  • ...

My 2 cents:

I wouldn't run node-red on a tablet: the tablet will only run the browser showing the node-red dashboard.
Instead I would run the node-red instances on a single cheap server (raspberry pi 4 or a low end intel nuc device) using docker. With docker you can easily spin up several instances (one for each room). Node-red is using between 50-200MB of RAM so on a 4GB RAM device you can spin up 20 node-red instances in parallel.

Especially in that setup you must see that the browser keeps somehow the network connection alive. I remember to have "connection lost" issues in the dashboard when the tablet was not used for quite some time. I guess there are ways to overcome this issue.

Also take care that the node-red dashboard can take up quite some resources which might be an issue on low spec tablets.

Hi @janvda,
Yes indeed that was the outcome of the above discussion. To use a cheap Fire 7 tablet, and run the lightweight dashboards on Node-RED that is hosted in a central Raspberry.

Do you mean a Fire 7 with more RAM, or you mean another tablet?
Anyway I would setup a lightweight dashboard page, containing only functionality for a specific room. And in most rooms a 7 inch is more than big enough. Only e.g. in kitchen and living room I have planned to install e.g. a 10 inch. Moreover the lady of the house wouldn't be pleased with large screens all over the place.

I bought 2x Fire 7" screens and found it perfectly adequate for living room use (a single NR dashboard). But after a year I wanted something a little bit faster as I found it could be slightly laggy which isn't great when you just want to turn the lights on. Also I fancied a larger screen to display a bit more - sparsely presented - info e.g. weather. Haven't installed the 10 yet but I have tested it with FullyKiosk and I do prefer the 10" size as long as it can be placed somewhere discreet e.g. around a corner etc. (I have similar specification requirement driven by the "fairer" people within the home!)

Can you give me an idea of how laggy it is? One of ly use cases is to display a kepad to (de)activate my Node-RED alarm system. So I enter the room and e.g. the PIR detector in that room will activate the alarm. Then I have 30 seonds to disable the alarm system. So I tab with my finger on the touch screen, which needs to display the dashboard. Then I can enter my code, to disarm the system.
Do you think something like that will be possible on a Fire 7 tablet? Or is it too slow perhaps?

What type of keypad? Is it a set of buttons arranged on the dashboard, or are you accepting an input using Android keypad? It will work for either, but I would say it can be a bit laggy bringing up the Android keypad.

Happy to test this for you and do a quick video if you want to send any flows over!

Fire 7 1GB - Fire 8 2GB or 8plus 3GB and wireless charging (could be nice as discussed before)

I like the 8 as itā€™s available in white (no black brick on the wall) the 8plus is only available in black.

I expect here in Germany -40% on Black Friday. So perhaps you get an 8 for the price of an 7.

Yes indeed. I don't have build one yet, since I haven't bought a device yet. So simply press some buttons on the screen, and that code is send to the flow. But I don't have any idea how long it takes to wake up, start the dashboard and reconnect to Node-RED...

Hi, I have an alarm keyboard with dashboard buttons on the tablet (Node-RED is on RPi).
I use the Chrome browser to display the dashboard.
Also, with the help of the MacroDroid application, on a macro trigger (screen on), action calls (force landscape, auto brightness and start chrome shortcut).

Some 8 sec from the black screen to the full dashboard.

Some things are a bit tricky on tablet, depending on the version of Android, MacroDroid, etc., eg calling Chrome shortcut should have been solved using the AutomateFlow application ... It was not supported by MacroDroid at that time ...
This is all done in +2 years so I don't know what has changed ... Both MacroDroid and AutomateFlow still exist and are evolving so I believe that everything is even better ....

The tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016), model SM-T580.

As for the mechanics, there is a thin round metal plate on the back of the tablet, and a magnet on the wall (from HDD :wink: ),
The magnet is attached to the wall and covered with the housing of the modular switch (the switch has been removed and the original cover for the empty space has been placed in its place (over the magnet).

Charging is solved classically with cable, itā€™s not visually best but itā€™s not a critical for me...
Maybe in the future I will put the Wireless Charging Receiver on the tablet and the charger on the wall.

My small tip: the best alarm is without a keypad, because a thief can't enter a password if there is no physical where ... :upside_down_face: :upside_down_face:

If the family members have access to the network on which NR is, everyone turns on/off alarm from their phone ...

I personally turn it off before entering the apartment.

Lucky me I donā€™t need an alarm system. I have the best in the world. Sorry amazon delivery guy. If you pass 3 gates and two signs thatā€™s whatā€™s left :joy:

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I hate races, especially when coming home for the store, my wife would never tolerate such a situation. I use Bluetooth Low Energy beacons on key fobs for "presence detection". One on each of our car keys. If we are both gone the alarm activates a few seconds after it detects we are gone, when one of us arrives it deactivates the alarm usually before we are out of the car. I have PiZeroW running the beacon software in a few locations (the one in the garage is very important) and node-red flows send the status via MQTT to the central controller. Works very well. Only downside is the CR2032 batteries only seem to last a small fraction of the they the manufacturer says they should need to change them typically every 2-4 months.

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My Fire 7 is kept always connected and FullyKiosk (the app I use to display Node-RED) has a nice screensaver and sleep function which turns off the display, but keeps the page loaded there. Also I use the camera wake function. So when you walk in front of the tablet on the wall, it just wakes up immediately and because dashboard is already started, there is no lag in that respect.

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I'm going to have to give FullyKiosk a try, as buying a Fire tablet will be easier than setting up another Pi3B+touch screen system, if you can accept "lock screen ads" it would less expensive as well. I've never used a Fire Tablet so I've no idea if they would be too obnoxious or not.

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I have my Fire tablets running without having to see any ads.

FullyKiosk keeps the device always on, and it launches at startup. Also I donā€™t ever register the device at startup as thereā€™s a workaround to this requirement!

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