Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a Home Assistant Kiosk

by Emmet

Published Sep 25, 2024

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In this project, we will set up our Raspberry Pi to act as a Home Assistant kiosk.

A kiosk is a great way of interacting with your Home Assistant setup. It can give the user access to a wealth of information on a single screen, or with the addition of a touch screen, it can actually be used to control things around your home.

There are many different ways that you can set up a kiosk for the Home Assistant software. However, many of these ends up feeling either incredibly unstable, buggy or just super unresponsive. For example, we used to use a couple of Android tablets to act as our kiosks, but there were just continual random and unexplained issues. You would walk away for the tablet to randomly get stuck on a lock screen that you have previously disabled.

Needing something more reliable and with more control, we decided to grab one of our Raspberry Pis and use it as a kiosk instead. This setup lets you easily lock your kiosk to the Home Assistant web interface.

Best of all, thanks to the Raspberry Pi being a low-powered device, we don’t have to stress about it adding too much to the power bill if we were to keep them running 24/7.

For this guide, we are assuming that you already have Home Assistant set up on a device.

Equipment

Below is a list of equipment we used to set up our Raspberry Pi powered Home Assistant Kiosk.

Optional

Raspberry Pi Case ( Amazon )
USB Keyboard ( Amazon )
USB Mouse ( Amazon )
Monitor ( Amazon )

We last tested this tutorial on a Raspberry Pi 5 running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm Lite Edition.

Building a Home Assistant Kiosk with your Raspberry Pi

Over the following sections, we will show you how to easily set your Raspberry Pi to act as a Home Assistant Kiosk.

For this guide, we will be expecting you to be running the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS. The advantage of the lite edition is that it has significantly less overhead to worry about. Also, with less apps installed by default, there is simply less to go wrong.

Additionally, you must have your Raspberry Pi configured to use an SSH connection. With the way we are configuring the Pi, you won’t be able to access the terminal properly after setting up the kiosk.

Preparing your Raspberry Pi’s Operating System

1. Before we can begin to set up our Raspberry Pi as a Home Assistant kiosk, we should ensure that we are running an updated operating system,

You can update the package list cache and upgrade any out-of-date packages by running the following command.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

2. Your next step is to install the three main packages we require to set up our kiosk for Home Assistant.

xserver-org: Since we are using the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS, it is missing a window system. XServer is great, as it is still well-supported and has fewer issues than Wayland.
lightdm: On top of needing a window system, we must install a desktop manager. LightDM is a great choice for this as it is super lightweight and doesn’t require us to be running a full desktop experience.
chromium: The final piece of the puzzle is the Chromium web browser. This is one of the best browsers for the choice because it is incredibly well-supported and has a kiosk and app feature built directly into it.
onboard: Onboard is a virtual keyboard that we can use to allow you to type into your Home Assistant Kiosk without needing to attach a keyboard to your Raspberry Pi.
sed: The “sed” package will allow us to easily replace text within configuration files. Saving you from having to open it with a text editor.

Please note that this installation process can take some time. There is a considerable number of packages your Raspberry Pi will need to install.

sudo apt install xserver-xorg lightdm onboard chromium sed

Configuring your Pi to Launch a Light Desktop

3. Now that we have installed all the required packages, we need to configure a few more things.

The first of these tasks is to get our system to start up LightDM when it boots. This is as simple as setting the default behaviour of our system to start any service with “graphical.target“.

sudo systemctl --quiet set-default graphical.target

4. To stop you from having to log in to your account every time you want to use the Home Assistant kiosk on your Raspberry Pi, we will use the following line to add the current user to the “autologin-user” option.

We can make this whole process incredibly straightforward by using sed to search and edit the “/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf” config file.

sudo sed /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf -i -e "s/^\(#\|\)autologin-user=.*/autologin-user=$USER/"

5. Our next task is to get our Home Assistant kiosk to use the right screen resolution on our Raspberry Pi. Due to how we have set up this kiosk, we currently rely on the Pi to pick the right resolution correctly every time.

To make the next step easier, set a bash variable called “RESOLUTION” which holds your screen resolution using the width-by-height format. These values are in pixels.

RESOLUTION=<WIDTH>x<HEIGHT>

For example, since we are using a screen with a resolution of 1920 by 1080, we would use the following on our machine.

RESOLUTION=1920x1080

6. With the resolution environment variable set, we can use the sed tool to again adjust the settings for LightDM.

This time, the following command will reconfigure your system to set your screen resolution on boot.

sudo sed /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf -i -e "s/^\(#\|\)display-setup-script=.*/display-setup-script=xrandr -s $RESOLUTION/"

7. With the resolution now set, our next step is to disable the screen blanking functionality. Screen blanking is a protocol for stopping the video output of your Raspberry Pi, which will put your monitor on standby.

All you need to do to ensure this occurs is use the following command. This adjusts the command to start the X Server to include the “-s 0 DPMS” option. Simply put, we are ensuring screen blanking is disabled before the server even starts.

sudo sed /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf -i -e "s/^\(#\|\)xserver-command=.*/xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms/"

8. For all of these changes to take effect, we will need to restart our Raspberry Pi, which you can do by running the following command.

sudo reboot

Configuring the On-Screen Keyboard for your Kiosk

9. If you use a touchscreen for your Raspberry Pi powered Home Assistant Kiosk you will want to configure Onboard.

Onboard is one of the few virtual keyboards we found to work properly on the Raspberry Pi, Chromium, and Home Assistant.

To make this keyboard useful, we need to open its settings by running the following command.

DISPLAY=:0 onboard-settings

10. With the Onboard setting open, toggle the “Auto-show when editing text” option to allow Onboard to open within the Home Assistant interface.

The screen might look a bit weird due to the way we are handling the desktop on our kiosk.

Enable Keyboard Auto Show for Raspberry Pi Home Assistant virtual keyboard

11. You will see a warning that for the auto-show functionality to work, Gnome Accessibility will need to be enabled.

To proceed, click the “Yes” button to continue.

12. To save this settings change, you simply need to click the “Close” button.

13. We must restart the Raspberry Pi again to ensure that Onboard is working correctly.

You can restart your Pi by running the following command in the terminal.

sudo reboot

Writing a Script to Run your Home Assistant Kiosk on the Raspberry Pi

14. We next need to write a small script to launch your Home Assistant Kiosk on your Raspberry Pi.

The first part of this process is using the mkdir command to create a directory to store our script.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/kiosk/

15. With the directory created, we can move on to write a script called “kiosk.sh“.

You can begin writing this script using Nano by running the following command within the terminal.

sudo nano /opt/kiosk/kiosk.sh

16. Within this script, you must type out the following lines.

While filling out this file, you must fill out some key details.

<HOMEASSISTANTURL>: Replace this with the URL to where you access your Home Assistant dashboard.
<WIDTH>: With this value, you must specify your screen resolution width in pixels. For example, with a 1080p screen you would set this to 1920.
<HEIGHT>: Here you must set the screen resolution height in pixels. If you are using a 1080p screen, this will likely need to be set to 1080.

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/dbus-run-session /usr/bin/onboard &
/usr/bin/chromium --app=<HOMEASSISTANTURL>  --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --kiosk --window-position=0,0 --window-size=<WIDTH>,<HEIGHT>

If you don’t want the on-screen keyboard to help control your Raspberry Pi Home Assistant keyboard, remove the script’s line that starts Onboard.

17. After filling out the file’s contents, save and quit by pressing CTRL + X, Y, and then ENTER.

18. Since we want our standard user to be able to use this script to start up the Home Assistant kiosk, you will want to give it execute privileges by using the chmod command in the terminal.

sudo chmod +x /opt/kiosk/kiosk.sh

Setting up your Raspberry Pi Home Assistant Kiosk Service

19. To ensure that your Home Assistant dashboard is loaded on your Raspberry Pi Kiosk at boot, we will write a service file. The other advantage of using a service is that it will automatically be restarted if the system crashes for any reason.

You can begin to write this service file using Nano by running the following command.

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/kiosk.service

20. You will want to add the following lines within this service file. These lines tell the service to run the “kiosk.sh” script we wrote earlier. This is also where we will get your Home Assistant kiosk working on your Raspberry Pi.

While filling out this file, you will be required to replace “<USER>” with your username. For example, if your user is called “pi“, you would type in “pi” in place of “<USER>“.

[Unit]
Description=Home Assistant Kiosk
Wants=graphical.target
After=graphical.target

[Service]
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /opt/kiosk/kiosk.sh
Restart=always
User=<USER>
Group=<USER>

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

21. After filling out this file, you can save and quit by pressing CTRL + X, Y, and then ENTER.

22. With the service now written, we will want to enable it so that our Raspberry Pi will boot straight into the Home Assistant Kiosk.

Enabling the service is as easy as using the following command.

sudo systemctl enable kiosk

23. After enabling the service, you can start your Home Assistant kiosk immediately by running the following command within the terminal.

sudo systemctl start kiosk

24. If everything has worked correctly, you should now have a Home Assistant Kiosk up and running on your Raspberry Pi.

Everything should work just like how you would expect it to. Remember that if you are setting up a kiosk you will want to ensure that you tick the “Keep me logged in” checkbox.

Conclusion

If you have got this far in the project, you should now have successfully set up your Raspberry Pi to act as a versatile Home Assistant Kiosk.

The Raspberry Pi makes a great device to power your home assistant kiosk, especially when you pair it with a touch screen. You have significantly more control over many other solutions, such as using an Android tablet.

Please feel free to post a comment below if you have had any issues with setting up this kiosk on your Pi.

If you liked this project, we recommend you check out our many other Raspberry Pi projects. We also have plenty of guides covering improving your Home Assistant setup.

22 Comments

Tom on December 17, 2024 at 8:10 am

Do you think you could do this project with a simple Raspberry Pi Zero 2W? I would like to keep this as small and simple as possible.

Reply
1. Emmet on December 18, 2024 at 9:49 pm
  
  Editor
  
  Hi Tom,
  
  I believe while it would be possible it may not be the best experience. The problem largely comes down to the miniscule amount of memory on the Pi Zero 2W and Chromium being fairly memory hungry.
  
  I would be intrigued to hear if you do end up going ahead with it. I’m currently using a Raspberry Pi 5 but being able to swap it out with a Zero 2W would help much it much slimmer.
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
deelizzle on December 5, 2024 at 12:43 am

Now that I have my kiosk set up (thank you!), does anyone have a way to make it turn off the display at night and back on during the day? That would make my setup complete!

Reply
1. Emmet on December 5, 2024 at 11:36 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi Deelizzle,
  
  There is a few ways that you could achieve this with your Raspberry Pi powered home assistant kiosk. The easiest way I can think of is to write a script that re-enables DPMS and screen blanking during the night and then another to disable it during the day.
  
  I havent had the chance to test this myself as I’m away from my Raspberry Pi’s at the moment. However, these steps should hopefully all work. Please let me know if it functions or you have any issues and I’ll try my best to solve them.
  
  1. For this example, lets start by writing a script called “display-off.sh” by using the following command.
  
  sudo nano /opt/kiosk/display-off.sh
  
  2. Within this file enter the following lines.
  
  The second line sets it so the screen will sleep after one minute if it is woken up.
  
  The third line re-enables DPMS so the Pi can send a sleep signal to the screen.
  
  The fourth and final line tells the screen to turn off immediately
  
  #!/bin/bash xset s 60 60 xset dpms xset dpms force off
  
  3. Once you have written this script, save and quit by pressing CTRL + X, Y, and then ENTER.
  
  4. Next write a script that restores the original behavior of the kiosk called “display-on.sh”.
  
  sudo nano /opt/kiosk/display-on.sh
  
  5. In this file, enter the following lines.
  
  The first line should work the screen back up, the second should disable screen blanking and disable the DPMS signalling.
  
  #!/bin/bash xset force on xset s off -dpms
  
  6. Save and quit again.
  
  7. Next give both of these files execute privileges by using the chmod command.
  
  sudo chmod +X /opt/kiosk/display-on.sh sudo chmod +X /opt/kiosk/display-off.sh
  
  8. Finally, modify your crontab by using the command below. If asked what editor you want to use, I always recommend Nano.
  
  crontab -e
  
  9.Within this file, you will want to add two lines to the bottom. These are simple cron jobs that will fire each of the scripts at certain points in the day.
  
  With these examples we are turning the screen back on at 7 in the morning and then turning it off at 8 at night.
  
  0 7 * * * /bin/bash /opt/kiosk/display-on.sh 0 20 * * * /bin/bash /opt/kiosk/display-off.sh
  
  10. Once you have created these new jobs, save and quit by pressing CTRL + X, Y, and then ENTER.
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
2. Deelizzle on December 7, 2024 at 12:33 am
  
  Thanks! I tinkered around over the least few days and came up with almost the exact same thing so this is good corroboration!
  
  One additional thing is that I had to turn off the auto power off feature of the monitor, or else dpms force on wouldn’t work after three minutes of being off!
  
  Thanks so much!
  
  Reply
deelizzle on December 1, 2024 at 4:36 pm

This is great, but I have one problem: my touchscreen display is mounted in vertically (portrait). I managed to get the screen to render correctly by changing the xrandr to add “-o right”, but the cursor from the touchpad doesn’t rotate with it.

How do I map the touchscreen correctly?

Reply
1. deelizzle on December 2, 2024 at 8:36 am
  
  I figured it out. I added xinput with “sudo apt install xindex”.
  
  Then I figured out the correct input, which in my case was “xinput set-prop “Weida Hi-Tech CoolTouch® System” –type=float “Coordinate Transformation Matrix” 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 0 1″ (Weida being the controller for my touchscreen, and 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 0 1 being the sequence to rotate the input correctly). I put that xinput call in the kiosk.sh file described here, and it worked!
  
  Now the question is how do I make it so the screen turns off at night and turns on again in the morning?
  
  Reply
Pieter on December 1, 2024 at 12:38 am
This guide is fantastic. Got my touch screen kiosk working great.
I also wanted to rotate my screen into portrait mode. To do this, I took the following steps:
1. Create a startup script:
Open the terminal and create a new script file:
```
sudo nano /etc/lightdm/display-setup-script.sh
```
2. Add the xinput command to the script:
Add the following lines to the script to rotate the touch input:
```
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --rotate left
xinput set-prop  "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 
```
Replace with the actual ID number of your touch device, then save and exit.

3. Make the script executable:
```
sudo chmod +x /etc/lightdm/display-setup-script.sh 
```
4. Edit the lightdm.conf file to run the script:
```
display-setup-script=/etc/lightdm/display-setup-script.sh 
```
Save and exit.

5. Reboot your Raspberry Pi to apply the changes:

Hope this helps something else.

Reply
Phil on October 6, 2024 at 9:01 am

Hi I get as far as step 9 – open ONBOARD settings. I get this…
Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
(onboard-settings:942): Gdk-WARNING **: 22:26:47.193:

Can you suggest any way to rectify this please

Reply
1. Emmet on October 7, 2024 at 1:40 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi Phil,
  
  I’m unable to reproduce this issue on my end. Are you running this over SSH or running this locally on the terminal of your machine?
  
  You can try seeing what the “DISPLAY” value is set to by default by using the following command.
  
  echo $DISPLAY
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
4ordy on October 3, 2024 at 5:22 pm

Thanks for this article.

I cannot seem to get autologin to work, I just get a prompt on the screen and even if I input my account details screen goes blank and then login reappears.

Any ideas?
Thanks in Advance

Reply
1. Emmet on October 3, 2024 at 9:16 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi 4ordy,
  
  That is definitely unusual. Can you please try editing the “lightdm.conf” configuration file directly by using the following command.
  
  sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
  
  Within this file, you should see an option called “autologin-user”. It should be set to your username and the hashtag on it should have been removed. Can you please verify this?
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
2. Phil James on November 15, 2024 at 9:21 am
  
  Same issue here.
  
  I can confirm that /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf has autologin-user=myname and it still does not login
  
  Reply
3. Emmet on November 15, 2024 at 2:39 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi Phil,
  
  Maybe we might have to try doing this the long way (Even though in theory i’m just replicating what this script does).
  
  1. Launch the Raspi-config tool by using the following command.
  
  sudo raspi-config
  
  2. Go to “System Options”
  
  3. Select “Boot / Auto Login”
  
  4. Finally choose “Desktop Autologin Desktop GUI“.
  
  5. Press “ESC” to exit out of the tool.
  
  6. Finally restart your Raspberry pi using the following command
  
  sudo reboot
  
  Please let me know if this solves your issue.
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
4. Phil on November 16, 2024 at 4:00 am
  
  Same issue. After completing the above instructions, boots to login, enter my login credentials, screen turns black, then back to a login prompt.
  
  Fresh download of rasp-pi lite yesterday installed on a rasp pi 3.
  
  Reply
5. Emmet on November 16, 2024 at 10:27 am
  
  Editor
  Hi Phil,
  
  Can you please try running the following two commands and let me know if it resolves the issue for you.
  
  sudo sed /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf -i -e "s/^$#\|$user-session=.*/user-session=LXDE-pi-x/" sudo sed /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf -i -e "s/^$#\|$autologin-session=.*/autologin-session=LXDE-pi-x/"
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
6. Phil on December 12, 2024 at 3:25 pm
  
  Sorry for the delayed update. I purchased a raspberry pi 5 and followed the instructions and it worked perfectly. It has something to do with attempting it on a raspberry pi 3 that has the issues.
  
  Reply
7. Phil James on November 15, 2024 at 9:37 am
  
  Continuous loop just like 4ordy
  
  Reply
5ft24dave on September 30, 2024 at 10:31 am

Followed the instructions to the letter, ps -ef shows onboard running, but tapping in any box that reqires a text input does not bring the onboard keyboard to the front to use.

Reply
1. Emmet on September 30, 2024 at 1:33 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi 5ft24dave,
  
  Could you please re-run the “DISPLAY=:0 onboard-settings” command again and verify that the “Auto-show when editing text” option remained on? I have one weird situation where this randomly turned off on me.
  
  Another thing to possibly change is to re-adjust the Kiosk bash script so that onboard is launched after Chromium.
  
  /usr/bin/chromium --app= --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --kiosk --window-position=0,0 --window-size=, & /usr/bin/dbus-run-session /usr/bin/onboard
  
  Please let me know if this resolves the issue.
  
  Kind regards,
  Emmet
  
  Reply
2. Randomdude on November 12, 2024 at 8:35 am
  
  Hi Emmet,
  
  I came here because of the same issue. All the onboard settings are correct, but no pop-up for login when the chromium kiosk mode is active.
  
  The switch of the startup order of the two processes seems not to work.
  In fact the onboard startup actually shuts down or crashes the chromium kiosk process and thus the service fails.
  
  Reply
3. Lewis on November 17, 2024 at 3:29 am
  
  Was able to figure out what was going on.
  
  In the Onboard settings, under Window, check “Force window to top”.
  
  Worked for me when Chromium was full screen and in kiosk mode.
  
  Reply