Just curious, is there any control panel type project for ST using a cheap tablet display?
There are quite a few options. Some require a paid license, some are free. These are all browser-based so they will work on any hardware. I think people typically choose an Amazon fire tablet when itās on sale if they are looking for cheap hardware.
See the following recent discussion for the most popular ones. (The topic title is a clickable link)
Note that @tgauchat , Who was one of the developers of actiontiles, sadly passed away last year. He is very much missed. If you have any questions about any of his posts in that thread, just reply to them and tag @625alex to get a response.
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And hereās a typical hardware discussion:
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Looks like @JDRoberts has you pointed in the right direction!
Iām the lead dashboard developer for SharpTools, so if thereās anything I can help with, feel free to tag me or PM me.
As JDRoberts mentioned, Fire Tablets tend to be a popular choice as theyāre a good balance of price / performance and have a wide variety of docks, wall mounts, and other accessories available for them. The following thread over in the SharpTools community has some good notes on tablets that are commonly used for dashboards:
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Thank you for the feedback, these are so cool
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I am going play around more with both SharpTools and ActionTile over the weekend. Given Black Friday is right around the corner, most likely will used a FireHD for the display. Based on what I gather so far, will see which solution handle the following use cases better.
- Sonos playback with album cover / station selection etc
- I have an IP based camera which I believe I can just hit it from an URL. will see which solution works best to just bring over the raw data stream.
I just started down this journey after Prime Day, when I picked up a cheap Fire HD 10. I have been playing with SharpTools and Fully Kiosk Browser. The link below was useful for setting up Google Play Store.
With Fully Kiosk Browser, I can still use Alexa, but have the SharpTools panel resume control after a preset time. So, I can ask for the weather or tell her to turn on a light, but avoid all of the other spam loaded on the tablet. I can exit the kiosk to use the tablet as, well, a tablet.
I havenāt yet decided if SharpTools will be my long term solution. I burned right through the free trial and barely scratched the surface of capabilities. Looking forward to learning how your journey goes.
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Feel free to ping me or shoot a note to support@sharptools.io if we can help with anything related to SharpTools! 
In the meantime, @jamesguitar3 has a neat writeup on making a āJukeboxā style dashboard using Album Art here:
And you can find some tips on adding Media Tiles in the following article:
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Hopefully youāve been enjoying playing around with all the features! I sent you a PM in case youād like us to reset your trial.
We generally donāt recommend installing the Google Play store on Fire Tablets unless thereās a specific need as it can introduce performance issues (especially on older generation Fire Tablets).
As the comments in the linked article mention, itās best to grab the Fire OS version of Fully Kiosk Browser directly from the download box on their website.
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Iāve been using ActionTiles for a couple years now, have a tablet mounted in a hallway by my garage entry door where the old alarm system panel was (older 8th gen 8" Fire tablet). Itās fairly customizable and works well.
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Absolutely. For my use case, I expect the tablet will spend 70% of its life as a wall-mounted panel. I like the option of taking it down to use as a pseudo-Android tablet. No need to side load Google Play for most folks.
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