The topic I revived a cheap Android tablet by turning it into a Home Assistant control panel is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve started looking into ways I can repurpose old hardware. PC rigs are the easiest to revitalize, as Proxmox is all they need to turn into functioning LXC (and sometimes, even VM) hosting workstations. Meanwhile, individual components like graphics cards, RAM sticks, and storage drives serve as decent additions to my existing home lab nodes.
Even old Android devices are malleable enough to serve in smart home setups, especially since they come pre-loaded with a bunch of sensors. Tablets, for one, can double as incredible monitoring panels, especially once you pair them with kiosk browsers. Me? I revived mine as a Home Assistant control panel – one that not only acts as a typical dashboard, but also serves as the frontend for my voice control pipeline.
And it’s all thanks to the cool sensors included in modern smartphones
If you’ve read my articles on turning laptops into server nodes, you’ve probably seen my warnings about the built-in battery – and they apply to tablets and smartphones as well. On paper, a battery may seem like an upgrade compared to cheap displays that shut down as soon as the power source is cut off. However, keeping a tablet plugged in at 100% capacity around the clock can cause it to swell, essentially transforming it from an extra convenience into a potential fire hazard over time.
It’s easier to disconnect batteries on old laptops, but it requires extra circuitry shenanigans to pull off on modern mobile devices. Fortunately, the Home Assistant Companion App has a neat workaround – one that involves using a smart plug to charge my tablet. While it’s still ideal to get rid of the battery altogether, I’ve designed automation rules that sense the battery level on my tablet. Once the battery hits 80%, the automation sends a power-off signal to my smart plug. Likewise, when the battery percentage dips below 10%, my automation triggers and powers on the smart plug hooked up to my tablet. As long as I run routine checkups on the battery wear level every few months, I don’t have to worry about ending up on the cover of an r/spicypillows thread with this setup.
Since Home Assistant’s Companion App also has a kiosk mode of sorts, I avoided configuring additional tools. You see, enabling the Device home screen option within the Companion app section of the Settings page forces my tablet to open the HASS UI as its home interface. Sure, I still see the taskbar and navigation buttons, but since I plan to switch between different dashboards anyway, I don’t mind sticking to the HASS Companion App… at least, for now.
Level up your Home Assistant game with these neat HACS integrations
Although my tablet’s larger screen is better than a smartphone’s for managing my disorganized dashboards, I’d originally designed them for desktop UIs. So, they’re pretty unintuitive for my tablet-turned-control panel. That’s where genius developer Clooos’ Bubble Card package comes in handy.
Bubble Card lets me group similar entities under a single header that, when tapped, opens a pop-up window. for example, I can simply add the LED lights under a section, with a pop-up featuring the controls for each lamp. It has horizontal button stacks when I need to include different actions for my devices, and I use it extensively to add controls for my home server nodes. I’ll admit that it takes a while to fine-tune all the visual elements in Bubble Card, but it’s a game-changer for designing intuitive UIs that I can access from my tablet-powered control panel.
Had I worked on this project a year ago, I’d probably have to flash microcontrollers and configure microphone modules to create a voice assistant that responds to activation phrases. However, Open Home Foundation recently added the wake word detection facility to the HASS Companion App. Enabling it within the Companion app settings lets my tablet recognize and process wake words to trigger the Assist functionality. On a barebones setup, saying the hot word simply pulls up the Assist tool, and I’d have to type everything manually.
But since I wanted a full-on voice assistant, I hooked HASS up to a bunch of AI models I host on my home lab nodes. My current conversation agent is Gemma-4-26B-A4B, which runs on my aged hardware thanks to MoE offloading. Meanwhile, faster-whisper serves as the speech-to-text model, with Piper acting as the text-to-speech engine. Combining all that with my tablet’s wake word detection turns my old companion into a reliable smart home control panel that I can operate with just my voice.
If you’re not a fan of Home Assistant, you can use your tablet in different DIY projects. It may be too big to serve as a custom dashcam, but you can arm it with a kiosk browser app and point it to your Frigate instance’s web UI to get a touchscreen monitor capable of displaying your security cameras’ footage 24/7. Likewise, pairing it with an OPDS client and Calibre-Web can turn your tablet into a dedicated ebook reader. Or, you could go down the Termux route and use this powerful app to run all sorts of distributions and FOSS apps directly on your tablet.