One Raspberry Pi as a Server and Client with 7" touch

Your RPi will struggle running OH and a full Graphic interface OS

If you want to try it despite Vincent’s warnings I recommend the following.

  1. Create a new SD card and install the standard raspbian
  2. Configure and get the touch screen working. You could just start with your existing display.
  3. Install openHAB using apt-get
  4. Configure as desired.

You could even install using the openHABian Manual instructions if you prefer.

There is nothing special about openHAB or openHABian in this regard.

However, depending on how big and extensive your OH config is you will likely run into performance issues. Frankly, some of the startup times I’ve seen reported on this forum by users running on RPi 3s is already unacceptable in my book.

You also need to pay attention to power draw if the screen draws its power from the RPi instead of having its own separate power supply. The CPU will be drawing more power. Your USB dongles will be drawing more power. The RPi may not be able to power it all.

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Thanks to the both of you!

Because of the warnings I decided to use two RPI3B+'s.

Thanks for the help!

Best Regards Robert

Goop luck, keep up posted with your progress, others will be interest too.
Maybe start a new thread with a presentation of your setup once it’s all working

@Robert_K Did you test to have server and client on 1 Raspberry?
Update me please because I wanna test too.

I just ordered my 7" display so I’ll be trying this soon. Glad I read this forum first!

What browser will you use? I have a trimmed down chromium that’s works nicely with my 512MB oPi zero. If you don’t want to go the route of compiling your own browser, there are lots of less resource hogging browsers then chrome. Doing both OH and HabPanel on same rPi? I would suggest not to. I tried pushing an RPi with chromium-browser and simple css animations alone can basically cripple it, let alone adding OH in it.

If your home automation is “critical,” as in you have home security and stuff, I suggest you give it a dedicated hardware

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I installed Chromium and Firefox and Kweb. Kweb is a little TOO stripped down and didn’t render HABPanel well. Chromium did great but didn’t scroll when a drop down extended beyond the bottom of the screen. Firefox won.

My security company (ADT) doesn’t have any kind of API, you have to use their app. Period. That used to bother me but now it is making sense. So yeah, I have both OH and HABPanel on the same device. Chromium was a bit slow but Firefox is working fine. Running on a RPi 3b+ with a 32GB SD card.

Here’s the setup so far (having problems with weather widget):
IMG_0342
One thing I would like to do is install a screen saver that does a slideshow of photos. I can get a slideshow and I can get a screen saver but I haven’t found one that does both yet. Any suggestions?

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Check the gallery and search the forums. I think someone posted some code to enable a screensaver in HABPanel.

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Or a screensaver that activates a HabPanel panel that has an image slideshow?

Wink wink :slight_smile:

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You know, I never thought of a HABPanel extension that would do that. It just never occurred to me. I will take a look. Thank you!

Wow. Did I ask the right person or what?!? Thanks. :grinning:

:slight_smile: haha

Hey Lucky, is there a setting so that when you interrupt it, it takes you back to a specific dashboard? Right now when I stop the slideshow I’m looking at that dashboard and I’d rather go back to my main one.

I feel like I missed a setting or something.

For anyone interested in trying this here’s what I did:

I did a fresh OpenHABian install on a 32GB SD card. I usually use 16GB but I figured the extra space would be worth it.

I set up my bindings and things via the normal web interface. Once I was mostly happy, I installed the 7" touch screen.

OpenHABian does not come with a desktop so I had to SSH in and install one. The one that comes with Raspbian is Pixel. Here’s how to install it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install raspberrypi-ui-mods

When you’re done, reboot and you should see the desktop. Upsidedown. SSH in again (or do this before you reboot, why didn’t I think of that then??)

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Add the following to the beginning of the file:

lcd_rotate=2

And reboot to make it take effect.

You’ll also need to install a browser. My experience is that Firefox works the best for our application.

Now when you want to use OpenHAB from the RPi itself, open a browse and navigate to localhost:8080

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Currently, no. It stops where the rotation stops. Please post on the GitHub link so I can track requests

I will do that.

Hi everyone,

this is exactly the topic that interests me a lot.
I also want to use only one PI for openHab and displaying HabPanel.

I want to try it with RPi 4B, 4GB.

Maybe one of you can tell me if it makes sense with this type of device.

Thanks a lot for your support :wink:

The Pi4 should have no problems handling both openHAB and a display.

Hi. I use openhabian. When I had openhab 2, I find in docs how I can turn on LCD, but now I’m using openhab 3 and I can’t find how I can turn on LCD((