I switched from smarttiles to action tiles. I do miss my custom colors and Icons; my tile color was based on room. But action tiles is nice and runs much smoother. The customization with smarttiles was more fun than funcitional and hopefully it comes to action tiles soon. Anyway this is what I came up with.
i have it on an old Samsung tab 2 7in. I found a 5x7 picture frame that fit perfectly without modification and secured it to the side of our kitchen cabinet. Power runs through a hole i drilled into cabinet and to an outlet underneath.
I think my biggest complaint with action tiles has to do with the tile sets. I am limited with space on my 7in tablet and the weather tiles are different sizes. It would be nice if I could just drag and drop tiles where i want instead of putting them in a tileset; this would prevent me from having to scroll left to right and I could fill up “dead space” with tiles.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2123
Thanks for the mini-review and sharing the Panels you’ve built with ActionTiles, Zachary!
We totally hear all the folks that miss “custom CSS” and are steadily working on an update to the app which lays a foundation for more customizability. ActionTiles was re-architected from scratch to deliver lots more performance and functionality; but to get to release, we held back on flexibility in quite a few ways.
Since the March release, though, we have put out major features like PIN Protected Tiles, multiple Tile Sizes, icon selection, Garage Door support, etc., etc…
We want to keep “continuously improving” the AT platform, right along with SmartThings!
@625alex just tossed his latest innovations over to me for some QA testing, and I’m super stoked at the opportunities this will open up in future releases for ActionTiles customers.
One key characteristic of a Tileset is that they always start on a “new row”.
To avoid blank areas to the right side, you must combine Tiles into the same Tileset
To manipulate where Tiles are placed, you can insert and arrange Blank Tiles within a Tileset.
The nature of ActionTiles Panels is that they respond to screen size and orientation automatically, which is somewhat at odds with a “drag and drop” on a fixed-size grid. But that’s not an uncommon request, so … who knows, there may be a way for us to layer a drag and drop configuration UI onto the current layout configuration UI… someday.
This is amazing! My wife would love it.
What would be the steps to take to install this dashboard on my tablet?
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2125
I agree that “Floorplan” layout is really cool and it still is a design used by some other high-end home automation systems. Those systems offer custom panel design services at a cost of $ thousands per home. Quite a lot more than ActionTiles License prices!!!
@BrianAg95 cleverly and manually overlaid SmartTiles (no longer available for new installations) on top of an externally created floor plan image.
But SmartTiles and ActionTiles were designed for optimal and responsive layout simplicity… i.e, Tiles are rendered left to right, top to bottom in sequence, resembling, but not exactly implementing, a grid.
We want to further enhance the layout builder before possibly changing the layout engine; that’s because there has been some amount of customer requests to improve the builder, but relatively “none” for floor plan / non-grid layouts… And because the latter requires a tremendous amount of development work and complexity questions to address.
There is only 1 DIY UI builder product that comes even close, and it’s most common critique is its complexity.
We are assuming, for now, that floorplan layouts are either “passé”, inefficient, or too complex for DIY. It would take a lot of convincing (and money !) to make this an ActionTiles feature.
As tgauchat mentioned, I created a custom layout of the OLD SmartTiles product, prior to their release of the fully implemented solution(ActionTiles). In the OLD version you could create custom layouts, and MANUALLY align icons/buttons wherever you wanted (in my case as mentioned it was based on a grid layout, with custom spacing), if you delved in the layout code and created a web CSS sheet to control your layout.
While it was really cool, based on the usage of ActionTiles the ability/flexibility/overhead of allowing this level of customization is not on their development roadmap.
I have to say in my unique situation for controlling a ton of stuff in one room the floorplan made a lot of sense, however I do think it would be highly inefficient and cluttered/difficult to layout for larger areas and/or larger numbers of devices.
I ended up ditching the idea partly due to smartthings interaction with smarttiles, and partly due to my dissatisfaction with the tablet I was using for this. I have no doubt if I dropped some nice change on a nicer tablet then the only remaining issue was the smarttiles interaction issue, however that was dropped in favor of ActionTiles.
However at about this time a 4 button wall mountable remote was released, and since I was able to decide on 4 primary actions for all those lights (theater on, poker on, walkway on, and all off) (same as the primary buttons on the floorplan layout) I switched from a wall tablet to the wall mounted 4 button remote.
There is still quite a bit of flexibility with some of the additional enhancements that have been introduced over the last few months (size of each tile, spacing between tiles). I have posted these in several different threads and while maybe not as elaborate as what some folks have done with Action Tiles, it gives me access to almost every device and function with a complete walkthrough of all panels (forward and backward). This is all being displayed on a 5.5" Android z Force. I have a whole separate set of panels and sizing for my larger tablets. You would be surprised at just how much can fit in that little bit of real estate. Here’s the Android screenshots again:
I agree this would be a killer feature to have within AT.
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2128
It was cool… and maybe it will come back to some degree or even more in ActionTiles: You see, we never publish our “roadmap”, so that we can have maximum flexibility to respond to the market and not make promises we can’t keep or suddenly decide to “break”.
I personally think this would be a “killer feature”; but we have to figure out if and how we handle many other popular higher priority items first.
The Panel Builder layout engine and the Panel Viewer rendering engine could actually be more abstracted from each other in creative ways. We will have to breathe and do some serious “out-of-the-box” thinking to figure out what ways to make layout “easier” and/or more powerful without having to rewrite too much code.
Drag & Drop on a Grid is officially a Feature Request on our Feedback Forum, so be sure to add your Votes:
This looks to be the same as this one at Best Buy which I can definitely NOT recommend. It seems that model is discontinued at Best Buy and they have replaced it with the …8100 model.
I purchased this last year and when it started having WiFi problems, I took it back to exchange. The new one did the same thing so I just returned it and never looked back. Of course YMMV…
I had purchased these from Best Buy earlier in the year as part of my experiment in setting up Action tiles in my home.
I didn’t experience any connectivity issues that Bill stated. However, you are limited to connecting to 2.4ghz only. And from a performance standpoint, it’s a bit sluggish. It was fine for what I am using it for as simply a display that wakes up displaying my ActionTiles Panels with the Fully Kiosk Browser. Outside of using it for anything else, I would recommend upgrading to something a little better and with a lot more processing speed. In this case, cheap cost comes at a price.
Thank you @bne and @WB70 could you recommend some model of 7/8/10 inch? I I will only use to Smartthings(Action Tiles+Tasker+Lannoucer+BigTalker) and Google Calendar.
EDIT: I want to buy something on Black Friday if I get good prices
You might look into the Fire tablets especially with BF coming up. Many have had success running ActionTiles and Fully on them. I am not sure about Tasker and the other apps you want to use. You may have to dig around here and on the AT forums.
My only concern with the Fire’s is I’m hearing that they won’t wake directly to Fully and that they wake to the lock screen instead
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2136
That is correct.
The best available solution is to tap through to developer mode and activate “never turn off when plugged in”, to minimize the times the lock screen will appear.
Combine that with Fully (or who knows in the future?) which has an option to dim or switch to a screen saver after a certain number of seconds or minutes.
Personally if you are going to do things right and budget can be taken out of the equation and you could get a better deal on BF, I would throw money at a Lenovo or a Galaxy with all the bells and whistles. Fingerprint, motion sensors built in. That’s just my take. I’m prepping post Xmas as I have spent in excess of $2500 since January and half of that was on Lights, So after Xmas, I am going to replace both of my tablets with these:
Anything will work, but I like to do things my way and that usually comes with a price.
In the Content Settings for Fully Kiosk, there is a configurable option to Enable Pop Ups. I believe that is what you want.
However, this is only configurable with the PLUS version (paid for) of Fully.
That’s how mine is setup for using Fully on my tablet strictly for use with ActionTiles. I prefer this browser because the tablet doesn’t allow automatic wake up and Fully allows the front camera to be used as detection to automatically wake it up presenting me with my AT Panel. It’s my preference for tablets and my use case.
I created a custom frame for my kindle fire 7 and 8 HD as I couldnt find something for this that I liked that would hide the cords. The Kindle fits into the wood frame and has spots to plug in audio and usb power. I’m going to change up the endmill used to make this and shrink a bit but I wanted to share what I have so far.
!) to make this an ActionTiles feature.
So after Xmas, I am going to replace both of my tablets with these:
