My personal home assistant kiosk display
- Studio Code Server
- Advanced SSH & Web Terminal
- The calendar integration for your calendars such as Google Calendar or CalDAV (I use both)
- The weather service integration you want to use (I use National Weather Service)
- GTFS
Configuration for the GTFS, GTFS Realtime, and CalDAV entities are in configuration.yaml. Add these to your global configuration.yaml on your Home Assistant instance. using the Studio Code Server is the easiest way to do this. If you use NextCloud, you can insert your NextCloud URL and username where shown in the config. You will need to add the password to your secrets.yaml file. I live by Alameda Station in Denver and I frequently go to DU, so I need the stop information for those areas, but feel free to use those as examples to modify how you would like.
Stop and route ids for GTFS can be found by exploring here
Configuring the Home Assistant GTFS integration involves downloading the GTFS data from RTD, or whatever other transit service you use, and putting that zip file in the config/gtfs directory on your home assistant instance. Using the Studio Code Server is the easiest way to do this. I put mine at config/gtfs/rtd.zip. This will have to periodically be redownloaded manually.
I also added zones for Alameda Station and DU so they show up on the map. Zones can be added in Home Assistant in Settings -> Areas & Zones.
To make the dashboard, I added a new dashboard in Settings -> Dashboards called Kitchen Display. The dashboard only has one view, and the configuration for that view can be found in kitchen-display.yaml. You'll need to add your own calendar entities.
The display consists of a vertical 1920x1080 IPS monitor (IPS is important for readability at bad viewing angles) and a raspberry pi. The raspberry pi doesn't need to be anything special because it will just be serving a web page. The setup for the pi consists of a few steps:
- install raspberry pi OS
- log in to home assistant on raspberry pi web browser and set it to remember you
- change the display orientation in the display settings
- add shell script to launch dashboard
- add systemd service to automatically start the script
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
Don't forget to do this!
Alternatively, you can set up your display to automatically log in. The docs for this feature are here. Here is an example snippet for this type of set up:
homeassistant:
auth_providers:
- type: trusted_networks
trusted_networks:
- RASPBERRY_PI_IP_ADDRESS/32
trusted_users:
RASPBERRY_PI_IP_ADDRESS:
- HOME_ASSISTANT_USER_ID_FOR_PI_LOGIN
allow_bypass_login: true
- type: home-assistanthttps://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-screen-resolution/
The shell script is home-assistant-kiosk.sh. You can put it wherever feels best to you, but I just put it in the home directory of the pi user, /home/pi/home-assistant-kiosk.sh. You'll need to add your home assistant IP address in the script.
The service is home-assistant-kiosk.service. You'll put this file in /etc/systemd/system/ and run the following commands in the terminal on your raspberry pi or over SSH:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start home-assistant-kiosk
sudo systemctl enable home-assistant-kiosk
And you're done!
The main annoyance I have with this project is that I haven't been able to have the dashboard automatically update when I make changes to the configuration. Currently, whenever I make changes, I SSH into my raspberry pi and run
sudo systemctl restart home-assistant-kiosk
It's not perfect, and I would prefer an automated solution. There are some ideas in this thread, but I haven't implemented any yet.