Over the past few months, I’ve been looking for ways I can repurpose old gear. It is easiest to revive as PC devices Proxmox is all they need turning into working LXC (and sometimes even VM) hosting workstations. Meanwhile, individual components such as graphics cards, RAM sticks, and storage drives serve as worthy additions to my existing home lab nodes.
Even older Android devices are flexible enough to serve as smart home devices, especially since they come preloaded with a bunch of sensors. Tablets can double as incredible monitoring panels, especially after pairing them with kiosk browsers. I? I recreated mine as a Home Assistant control panel – it serves not only as a typical dashboard, but also as the front end of my voice control pipeline.
I need the Home Assistant Companion App for my temporary control panel
Automating it is what I need to solve the battery problem
If you’ve read my articles about turning laptops into server nodes, you’ve probably seen my warnings about the internal battery – and they apply to tablets and smartphones as well. On paper, the battery may seem superior compared to cheap displays that turn off as soon as the power source is cut. However, leaving the tablet plugged in at 100% capacity day and night can cause it to swell, which over time can turn it from an added convenience to a potential fire hazard.
It’s easier to disconnect the batteries on older laptops, but on modern mobile devices it requires extra circuit tricks. Fortunately, the Home Assistant Companion App has a neat solution – it involves using a smart plug to charge my tablet. While it’s still ideal to remove the battery completely, I’ve developed automation routines that sense the battery level on my tablet. Once the battery reaches 80%, the automation sends a shutdown signal to my smart outlet. Likewise, when the battery percentage drops below 10%, my automation kicks in and activates the smart plug that connects to my tablet. As long as I do regular battery wear level checks every few months, I don’t have to worry about the battery cap falling off. r/spice pillows theme with this setup.
Since Home Assistant’s Companion App also has a sort of kiosk mode, I avoided configuring additional tools. You can see that enabling the Device home screen option in the Companion app section of the Settings page forces my tablet to open HASS UI as the main interface. Sure, I still see the taskbar and navigation buttons, but since I plan on switching between different dashboards anyway, I don’t mind sticking with the HASS Companion App… at least for now.
Bubble Card is the main UI element in my dashboards
Squeezing multiple devices in Bubble Card pop-ups is one way to get a clean interface
Although my tablet’s larger screen is better than a smartphone for managing my disorganized dashboards, I originally designed them for desktop user interfaces. So they’re pretty unintuitive for my tablet-turned-dashboard. This is where the Bubble Card package from genius developer Clooos comes in handy.
Bubble Card allows me to group similar objects under a single heading that opens a pop-up window when tapped. For example, I can simply add LED lights to the bottom of the unit with a pop-up containing the controls for each bulb. It has horizontal button stacks when I need to include different actions for my devices, and I use it extensively to add controls for home server nodes. Admittedly, adjusting all the visual elements in Bubble Card takes some time, but it’s a game changer for intuitive UI design that I can access from my tablet-enabled control panel.
My tablet also serves as a Home Assistant voice satellite
My native AI models power the voice assistant pipeline
If I were working on this project a year ago, I would probably have to flash microcontrollers and configure microphone modules to create a voice assistant that responds to activation phrases. However, the Open House Foundation recently added wake word detector to the HASS Companion App. Enabling it in the Companion app settings allows my tablet to recognize and process wake-up words to trigger Assist. In the barebones setup, saying hot just brings up the Assist tool and I have to type everything manually.
But since I wanted a full voice assistant, I hooked up HASS to a bunch of AI models I had running on my home lab nodes. My current speaking agent Gemma-4-26B-A4BIt works on my old hardware thanks to the TN dump. Meanwhile, faster Whisper serves as a speech-to-text model, while Piper acts as a text-to-speech engine. Combining all of this with my tablet’s wake word detection turns my old friend into a reliable smart home control panel that I can operate with just my voice.
But there’s more you can do with older Android tablets
If you’re not a fan of Home Assistant, you can use your tablet for a variety of DIY projects. It might be too big to serve as a dedicated surveillance camera, but you can arm it with a kiosk browser app and point it at your Frigate instance’s web UI to get a touchscreen monitor that can display your security camera footage 24/7. Likewise, pairing it with the OPDS client and Calibre-Web can turn your tablet into a dedicated e-book reader. Or you can go down the Termux route and use this powerful program to run all kinds of distributions and FOSS programs right on your tablet.
- OS
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Windows, macOS, Linux
- Compatible with iOS
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Yes
- Compatible with Android
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Yes
