My Cheap Smart Home Setup - Wall Mounted Controller

Smart Homes (or bedrooms) are a great conversation starters, that's true only if you're the one that controls them. When your guests aren't able to...

Smart Homes (or bedrooms) are a great conversation starters, that’s true only if you’re the one that controls them. When your guests aren’t able to use your smart home setup it ain’t fun for them. The solution-route I decided to take is the one that includes a Wall Mounted Panel.

Guide

To make this project you need:

Hardware

IKEA PLUTTS (0.99$) [LINK];
Wall Adapter (Free with the tablet);
El Cheapo Android Tablet (5$ from Subito.it, an italian Craiglist-like site).

Software (Raspberry Pi Side)

Home Assistant (check out the guide here).

Software (Android Tablet Side)

P.S.: You’ll need to root your Android Tablet if you want to hide the system bar.

Installation of AppDaemon

AppDaemon is a sandboxed environment for writing apps for Home Assistant.
You can find the documentation here.

Here’re the steps to install AppDaemon:

We first need to retrieve the “appdaemon” package. You can use pip3 to retrieve and install it.
```
$ sudo pip3 install appdaemon
```
Now we need to create a file called appdaemon.yaml somewhere.
I decided to put it in my Home Assistant Configuration directory.
```
cd /path/to/homeassistant/dir
mkdir appdaemon
cd appdaemon
touch appdaemon.yaml
```
Then we need to edit the appdaemon configuration file.
```
nano appdaemon.yaml
```
The minimal configuration is something like that:
```
AppDaemon:
  disable_apps: 1
  threads: 10
HASS:
  ha_key: YOUR_HOMEASSISTANT_PASSWORD
  ha_url: YOUR_HOMEASSISTANT_URL
```
You can copy-paste it and change the values accordingly to your needs.

Now that we have AppDaemon installed we need to daemonize it.

To daemonize it you need to:

Create a new file inside /etc/systemd/system/.

$ sudo touch /etc/systemd/system/appdaemon.service

Now we need to edit that file with the editor of our choice and describe our service.

[Unit]
Description=AppDaemon service for Home Assistant

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/appdaemon -c /path/to/homeassistant/dir

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

We’re almost done. We need to activate our service. To do so you’ve to type:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable appdaemon.service --now

We’re able to start the service now.
```
$ sudo service appdaemon start
```

Installation of HADashboard

HADashboard will be the heart of our wall mounted panel.

To install it you need to:

Edit the appdaemon.yaml configuration file. Open it with the text editor of your choice.
Now we need to append to that file the HADashboard configuration.
```
HADashboard:
  dash_url: http://YOUR_HA_IP:5050
```

Now you’ve to create some folders inside the configuration directory.

mkdir compiled
mkdir compiled/css
mkdir compiled/javascript
mkdir compiled/html

Finally we have to make another folder to store our dashboards.
```
mkdir dashboards
```
Now we’ve to relaunch the appdaemon service. We can do it by sending this command:
```
$ sudo service appdaemon restart
```
Fire up your browser and try to load the dashboard url, you should see a warning page.

You’re all set! Now we have to build our dashboards. To learn how, follow this guide [LINK].

Eliseo Martelli