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I have a house full of smart home devices and other gadgets, which are (mostly) controlled by Home Assistant running on a mini PC. Which is great because I don’t need to flip through different apps, but it still means I need my phone or computer to see what’s going on in my house. And that is a problem, but it can also be solved quite easily with an old kindle.
You’ve probably seen all kinds of projects. that use Android tablets and other devices for build a smart display Home Assistant. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, just that using an older Kindle is better. It’s even better than a standalone E Ink display, because it has everything you need and the process of turning it into a smart home display has never been easier.
Why a Kindle specifically?
The hard work is done for you.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the humble E Ink Kindle is the best product Amazon has ever made. The hardware is great; It has Wi-Fi, and whether you have a Paperwhite or a regular Kindle, the screen is easy to read in almost all lighting conditions. And that was before people figured out how to jailbreak it to put other software on the device.
Once this is done, you can use webhooks and APIs to create a smart home control panel on the Kindle, and a few more lines of code will allow you to use the Kindle as a control device. I have even put Queue scale on my Kindle so I always think I’m home and can control my smart home from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection. And since I rarely go anywhere without it because I love reading while I wait, it’s the perfect smart home display controller for my needs.
And it has a touch screen
we have used various other e-ink screens to show the status of our smart homes, calendars and other important information. Pairing an E Ink display with an ESP32 It’s a fantastic project and if you find a photo frame in the right size, you can create a display that rivals anything you can get in stores.
Except for one thing: most standalone E Ink displays for project use don’t have a touch screen. That’s fine if all you want is informational feedback, but I think smart home displays should also have some level of interactivity. Sure, you can’t use Alexa on a Kindle to control your smart home, but the touchscreen and some webhooks can turn it into a perfectly usable panel for controlling lights, fans, and anything else you want to access easily.
E Ink is absolutely the best choice for smart home displays
Low consumption, easy to read and fades into the environment.
Whether you are monitor a home server Or keep an eye on your smart home, E Ink is the right display technology for the job. It’s easy to read from across the room and uses reflected ambient light, so it’s visible in almost all lighting conditions. But the best thing is that it only consumes power when the image changes, so it consumes power and is perfect for battery-powered boards.
The only problem is that most E Ink panels come without the other parts needed to turn them into functional displays or as DIY kits that require some level of electronics and coding knowledge. Which is fine if you want to learn those things, but there is another option.
9/10
Use a Kindle like you smart home display It means you don’t have to worry about mounting the hardware. We have used them for wall calendars and for home assistant with great success. The setup process can be a bit complicatedas you need to jailbreak it to install the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) and the software that displays the panel via WebSockets, but it’s worth it in the end.
Most projects I’ve found that use a Kindle as a smart home control panel use apps like Puppeteer to take screenshots of Home Assistant and then send those images to the Kindle, rather than using a direct connection. That’s fine for monitoring, but you can set up RDP on your smart home server and use the Kindle’s touchscreen as a control plane, with a little extra work. It may not work on all Kindles as not all built-in web browsers work, but it is an option.
Kindles can do much more than Amazon wants you to use them
Connecting an old Kindle to Home Assistant makes it a fantastic smart home display panel. And with the right software tweaks, you can use the touch screen to control your home, instead of just using the screen for monitoring. It’s still a pretty complicated project, but it’s not as in-depth as using a standalone E Ink display, since all the hardware is done for you.
- SW
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Windows, macOS, Linux
- iOS compatible
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Yeah
