Home automation with touchscreen

So I have been trying various configurations and packages on the RasPi 2 with official touchscreen and have struggled with a few different scenarios that I am curious whether any of you folks have solved or worked on.

  • I would prefer a touchscreen mounted on the wall for ease for various family members. Some don’t have “smart devices” yet and/or don’t want to remember various apps for various systems in the house.

  • I have several different “systems” including Insteon hub, Nest thermostat and Milestone Security camera system that I would like to at least access in some form from a central device.

  • I also have an extensive media network in place running through all of the TV’s. Plex front-end for viewing and transcoding etc.

I was interested in the RaspPi for various reasons, but I am starting to wonder if I would be better off with a small server to run all this on the backend that is connected to a touchscreen in the wall. I was originally interested in the RaspPi as I could then add those devices to room as separate zones and would allow relatively easy scaling. So far, I have struggled with a single framework that could display the cameras, call audio to play the whole home audio system and control the Insteon scenes if need be and HVAC. The RaspPi seems to be great at single threads. As an audio player OR a this OR a that, but not necessarily all of them. openHAB seems to be a perfect framework but just not sure the infrastructure is right. Has anyone set-up a similar set-up with RaspPi? I know many folks have gotten awful close but they usually don’t specify which components they are using for what.

My apologies for the length, many brilliant folks here, so curious for any insight. Thanks a lot!

You might want to have a look into using a cheap tablet and mounting that to the wall.

A Pi plus the screen (and any peripherals) makes things a bit messy.

There are a couple of loooong threads that you will learn lots from

The latter uses a framework called Dashing which is no longer supported and I wouldn’t recommend it. But it might inspire you if you wanted to learn some web skills :slight_smile:

There is an app for iOS Livo on iOS

Here is the LiVi manual, it is pretty feature intensive http://ctrl-h.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/LiVo_2.0_Manual.pdf

Both platforms have very good remotes for Kodi and SqueezeBox. And of course there is HomeKit.

I think it is better to have many ways to control rather than the one. I can pull up a on screen display on the Mac Mini that runs the visual stuff in our house and use a HTTP request to send a command to openHAB, then use the Logitech Harmony, or a switch on the wall, or any phone or tablet (and yes, sometimes Siri).

That is one of the reasons I enjoy openHAB, it really does let you control anything from anything.

There is also this: phpMyDomo : a convenient OpenHab Web Interface