Home Assistant video monitor?

[stone compass]

So I have home assistant on a little "mini PC" and it has an HDMI output as well as a keyboard/mouse. I would love to have that display useful for running/operating Home assistant. I was wondering if there is a way to have a simple browser like chromium or Firefox "boot up" and be visible on the screen attached to the Home Assistant OS computer in some manner?

It wouldn't have to be super fast or responsive but I would prefer to have something other than what looks like a bash shell prompt ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I've even gone so far as considering putting like a Pi ZERO there and using it JUST to run chromium for the monitor/mouse combo, but I wanted to check before I pursued hardware options... 🙂

[trail shore]

What would you plan to use that browser for? It sounds like it's just for show

You could run HAOS in a VM on top of Debian or Proxmox, but the goal isn't clear

[rapid phoenix]

I don't think HAOS lets you mess with the hardware directly enough to easily do that (at least it isn't meant to, so you probably shouldn't). You'd have to banish HAOS into a VM or something and then run another OS with a browser in "Kiosk mode" (that's one keyword you want to google for) on the "real" machine

[stone compass]

The goal of the exercise would be to use the keyboard/mouse/video display that is sitting more or less "dormant" on the hardware.

As an example, you couldn't quickly check the logs or turn off a light or restart HAOS or other mundane functions when the box is right in front of you. You would instead have to get your cell phone or walk over to a PC to do these small changes.

If there were a way to run FireFox as a plugin and have it connect to the keyboard/monitor that exists on the HAOS hardware, it seems like it would be useful since its right there being unused at the moment.

Lets say you have a Raspberry Pi 500 unit:

It has video out and a keyboard & mouse connection via USB. These aren't really useful in the existing HAOS setup.

Also, for a short while I was running HAOS on a Pi5 mounted in the SmartiPi Touchscreen case:

I got that case with the Pi5 because it has as huge amount of free space to allow HaTs and extra PCBs ..

After I loaded HAOS the touchscreen doesn't really do anything. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I am just wondering if a very simple chromium browser or similar could be setup to allow touchscreen or mouse/key/monitor to be used since the hardware is there on almost every HAOS bare-metal install...

I guess its not possible and/or to complex and out of scope though..

I s'pose I could put a 2nd pi inside that big case and run a basic raspberry Pi OS on it and use it just for the touchscreen .. but man that seems like overkill

[rapid phoenix]

thing is, it's almost trivial to do, just not with HAOS, because it's explicitly meant to be more a "protect the user from themselves" kind of situation (or more precisely "prevent most breakages by making the outer shell of the system immutable")

tbf, HAOS is the reason I first completely disregarded homeassistant as an option for my personal smart home setup entirely. Because everything and everyone was pushing me towards it because it's "a good way to get into homeassistant" and stuff. But I wanted/needed more control/hackability and felt deeply uncomfortable with HAOS, so I went on a bit of an Odyssey, including developing and running my own home automation system with Google Home support for a few years. Before finally re-trying homeassistant in its docker-variant and deeming it "worthy"