After 6 months of using Amazon Fire HD tablet and Home Assistant

After 6 months of using Amazon Fire HD tablet and Home Assistant

Link to the original blog post with a nice text/pictures layout.

I wrote about the FireHD tablet & Home Assistant:

• How to make Fire HD tablet talk in Home Assistant
• Simple tablet charge controller using Sonoff’s ZBMini
• I even 3d printed the wall mount for it

*** update 1. Aug. 2024 ***

After half a year of using the Fire HD tablet for Home Assistant display, I can not recommend it because:

• It frequently loses connection to Home Assistant. In such cases, it does not receive commands from HA, which means, it doesn’t react to the ‘notify’ automation described above.
• It doesn’t matter if I use the FKB or HA companion app, the connection still drops after a few hours after the tablet reboot.
• Sometimes the connection is restored by itself, but not for long.
• I tried to configure auto-reboot (which restores the connection), but I failed. Didn’t find any method to do it. I tried several launchers and automation tools, but all require an unrooted device to reboot it. Maybe I missed something?
• I tried to get rid of FKB (Fully Kiosk Browser) and use only the HA companion app, because HA seems more stable. FKB wakes up the screen ok and circumvents the lock screen but the HA app doesn’t. I never managed to fully disable the lock screen at screen wake-up for more than a few weeks at the beginning. I used Fire Toolbox, but it seems one of the updates broke unlock screen functionality.

Bottom line: the tablet is unreliable, too restricted/locked and there is no possibility to unroot it and configure it as I would like it. Probably it’s just I’m too dumb to configure it correctly. I invested a lot of time trying to make it work and I gave up. It’s too bad, because it’s a nice tablet for HA display and misses the sweet spot (price/functionality) for only for a little.
Next time I’ll buy a tablet that runs Linux or PosmarketOS.