This is a Python/pygame application that provides a simple home automation dashboard that works with Home Assistant. It's made to work on limited Linux platforms with e-ink displays, such as e-readers.
The standard Home Assistant UI requires a pretty full-featured web browser and the Kobo Clara HDs that I wanted to use have a web browser that doesn't work with it.
For a while I used HADashboard but I couldn't configure it how I liked it and couldn't persuade the Kobo browser to show it full screen.
I also wanted to play around with building my own Yocto-based Linux distribution, to get a newer kernel and userspace running on the Kobos.
For developing on a desktop computer you'll need recent Python (>=3.8) and the packages in requirements.txt.
To run on a device you'll need it to be running a Linux system with all the appropriate dependencies. I made a Yocto layer that will produce a working system with HAslate installed. You can find it at meta-kobo-clara-hd.
For development you can run the application in a window with
haslate --window. The editable configuration directory is /tmp/haslate/config/haslate.yaml.
On device the application will run automatically at startup. The Yocto system installs it in /home/koboapp/haslate. The editable configuration is on an externally-accessible partition on the device's SD card, mounted at /media/data/config/haslate.yaml.
Pressing the power button on the device will exit HAslate, by default the system is configured to restart it immediately.
When the application starts it tries to find the editable configuration file. If there isn't one then it copies the last configuration to the editable configuration file. If there isn't any configuration then it copies a configuration template to the editable configuration file and asks the user to edit the configuration.
Configuration is in YAML format, the template has comments describing the contents.
The user can edit the editable configuration file by plugging the device into a computer, the new configuration will be applied when the device is unplugged.
Pull requests are welcome. For major changes please open an issue first to discuss what you want to change.
The application is currently in a state where it has the minimal functions I need.
- Implement multiple pages.
- Use proper logging instead of
print(although the application is run from systemd so output ends up in a logfile) - Improve error handling
- Improve text layout
- Make HAslate less hardware-specific
- Allow backlight control (it's currently always on)