I had an iPad 1 sitting in a drawer that couldn't run anything modern anymore, so I built SnapFrame. It's a Home Assistant add-on that serves a fullscreen slideshow as a plain web page, so any tablet with a browser can be the display.

The photos sit on a Samba share on your own network, iPhone HEIC files get converted to JPG, and there's no cloud service or account involved. Home Assistant can wake the frame when there's motion, show the weather for a bit and then go back to the photos.

Later I added a temperature badge in the corner and a bin-day reminder: you upload the leaflet from your municipality as a PDF and the collection dates are read out of it.

It's MIT licensed, and AI helped me with parts of the code and docs. I'd like to hear which old tablets people have tried it on.

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11 comments in c/homeassistant@lemmy.world view that post
[–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

Very cool - I need to try something like this. I wonder what happened to that old iPad.

I’ve been considering replacing my iPad since the screen is cracked and the battery is unhappy. It’s probably not noticeable from a distance.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 month ago

    A cracked screen and a tired battery matter a lot less once it's a frame - mine hangs on a wall on a charger and never runs on battery. If the battery is swollen rather than just weak, don't leave it charging unattended though.

    Nothing gets installed on the tablet either, it's just Safari in fullscreen pointed at the add-on, so an iPad that can't take app updates anymore is fine.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It looks good.

    I want to do something similar with an Android tablet so that I can replace the Amazon ad delivery system in my kitchen. All I use it for now is timers and a shopping list.

    I never get the time to do it though.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 month ago

    Straight answer: SnapFrame won't replace the timers and the shopping list. It does photos, a weather screen, and a bin-collection reminder - that's the lot.

    For a kitchen tablet the usual setup is a Home Assistant dashboard in a kiosk browser, where you can put a timer helper and a to-do list on screen, and SnapFrame as the thing it falls back to when nobody's using it.

    The display side is just a fullscreen web page, so an Android tablet is no problem at all - old iPad Safari was the hard part, Android browsers are easy in comparison.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    If the device can open a modern web page,

    Mine cannot, any hope for me? It's an iPad 2 from 2011.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    iPad 2 should actually be fine. It tops out at iOS 9.3.5, and Safari 9 is exactly the baseline I build against - that's why the layouts use plain px sizes and table-based fallbacks instead of flex gap and clamp(), which that Safari silently throws away.

    When an old iPad "can't open modern web pages" it's usually the TLS certificates rather than the page itself. SnapFrame is served from your own HA box over plain http on your LAN, so that part doesn't apply.

    If you try it and something renders wrong, tell me the iOS version and what looks off - that's the hardware the whole project is aimed at.

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  • Amazing! I finally got around to trying it and the browser is far less broken than I thought. It actually looks fine with some test pages from your github.

    I'll give it a spin in my HA and let you know how it goes. Thank you for your efforts!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Ooof. I have TWO iPad 1s. Still running. Sure would love to put them to use.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Correcting myself here: I actually have it running on an iPad 1, so it's worth a try after all.

    My baseline when building the layouts is Safari 9, so I can't promise every screen looks exactly right that far back. If something does render oddly on yours, tell me what it looks like and I'll have a go at fixing it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Thanks so much and very exciting!

    I’m not looking for much in the way of controls, just displaying some Now Playing info and a static but refreshing image from my security cameras.

    I’ll try it today!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Ooh, I have an iPad Air 2 with iOS 12! Sounds like it's overpowered for this task. 😂 I'm going to check out this add-on when I get home.

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