While waiting for Amazon to get round to reviewing my Node-RED Alexa Smart Home Skill I’ve needed something to hack on.
I’ve been keeping an eye on what folk have been doing with Node-RED Dashboard and a common use case keeps coming up. That is running the UI on a Android tablet mounted on a wall as a way to keep track of and control things around the house. This got me thinking about how to set something like this up.
For the best results you really want to run this totally full screen, there are ways to get this to happen with Chrome, but it’s a bit convoluted. Sure you can add it as a shortcut on the home screen but I thought there had to be a easier/better way.
So I started to have a bit of a play and came up with a new app. It’s basically just a full screen Activity with a WebView, with a few of extra features.
- Set URL – Pick a URL to load when the phone boots, or the app is launched.
- Launch on boot – The app can be configured to start up as soon as the phone finishes booting.
- Take Screen Lock – This prevents the screen from powering off or locking so the page is always visible.
You can change the URL by swiping from the left hand edge of the screen, this will cause the action bar to appear, from this you can select “Settings”.
The app is in the Google Play store here, the code is on Github here
Update v1.1.0
Post version v1.1.0 you can now access the menu to change the URL by long pressing anywhere on the page. This is because Android now uses the swipe from the edge of the screen for the back action.