Raspberry pi touch screen interface with Kivy

Hi!

I’m new here, and just got started with openHAB (2), really like the platform and all the bindings! Great work.

I’m using an official raspberry pi 7" touchscreen that i’ve built into the wall of my living room to control openHAB (apart from my phone and tablet). Currently I use the basic ui in a chrome browser with some extensions to make it work better with my touchscreen.

I would like to get a bit more from this screen, both in the form of functionality, the use of touch etc. and the looks, creating more of a dashboard that I can swipe through.

I was thinking about building a dashboard/ui with Kivy for my Pi, no experience with Kivy, but would be nice to learn…

Anybody else that is interested in such a project? Or are there projects like this out there already?

Thanks!

do you know that both iOS and android have specific apps for openhab?

maybe your time bring more value by helping these projects…

Does a raspberry pi run iOS or Android? OK, it can run Android but not well yet…

Besided that, I don’t think the UI of the native apps is the best for a dashboard.

Hi @bramkragten

have you seen project rotini created by @igor? I personally think it looks good as a dash.
However as you say a pi might not be the best option for android but what I’ve seen so far is that it should work. Should you give it a try either Kivy or Android on the PI please let us know.

Hi @fog,

I have seen it yes, that indeed looks awesome. I was thinking of making something like that for the raspberry.

Before I start on Kivy, i’ll try to run android on my pi, but what I’ve read so far, does not sound promising…

just out of curiosity, why is it important to have it on the raspberry? Why can’t you work with an android tablet?

Purely aesthetic, I didn’t want to stick tablet on my wall, with wires or a frame, but a screen that would be flush with my wall. Therefore, the touch screen of raspberry appealed to me.

Not thought about / knew there were better interfaces for openhab on android.

I realized that I had some bias here, for me, I assumed that a touchscreen would be less nicely then a premade tablet. I did not think about the flexibility of the screen on how you make it look.
thanks for explaining. Make sense now.

I’m also heading in the RPI/touchscreen direction. My main objective is to freely choose TFT size and use ethernet/PoE, so I’ll be interested to hear about your progress.
Why do you think Android will be a problem?

Because as far I’m aware there is no hardware acceleration (performance issue), and no drivers for bluetooth and wifi. I would like to use bluetooth, need to use wifi…

But there might be hope… https://android.googlesource.com/device/pifoundation/rpi3/

According to this site http://raspex.exton.se/?p=356 both wifi and bt is up, and since he also mentions youtube as working, graphics shouldn’t be too bad?

This is the RPI3 though.

Sounds promising. I’ll give that a try tonight! :slight_smile: Hopefully it will also support the touchscreen.
I have both RPI2 and 3, so I’ll try both.

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Hi There

I also look for an alternative touch device. Why? I don’t like google or apple on my wall(s) :wink:
Let me know, if you go further with Kivy.

Regards
Michael

Try


… works on any browser, so you could use it on your RPi panel without additional programming.

Edit: also works with openHAB 2

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@sihui
Thank you very much. I’ll try it

Hi, you should habe a look to HABpanel. It’s easy to use and client Javascript only.
Beat regards, Markus,

Hi,

this does look like an older thread, but i’m looking to do the same as @bramkragten. I was already building a Kivy App and have a working app for controllling a mopidy music server. That works great!

But i’m looking to centralize all integrations on one central point (i was thinking of openhab). I have a complex setup however:

  • Loxone (with KNX) for home automation -> works with openhab2
  • Mopidy music players for multi room audio
  • Motu 24Ao for multi room distribution
  • Hikvision camera’s for monitoring

I want a custom kivy front end on my Rpi3 with 7" Pi TFT because when you need to start a web browser performance is poor and integration to play a rtsp stream (from my surveilance cameras) is a little tricky and flaky.

The playback of the camera images is perfect in Kivy, the remote control (using javascript websocket library of mopidy) works also great.

I would like to develop a kivy front for the openhab project, but there is only a REST API, what about status updates? Shouldn’t there be a websocket API to listen for events? Or is this already available?

I have some experience with kivy programming the front for mopidy & for my camera’s, so if possible it should not be a problem to write a front for openhab in Kivy.

The reason i chose the Pi TFT’s is the same, it looks great on the wall without any visible cables.

Thanks in advance for your answer.

Kind regards,

Tom