Home Assistant

The frame joins Home Assistant as a proper device over MQTT. It publishes its sensor readings and a screen switch to your broker, and Home Assistant discovers them on its own, with no YAML to write. Set it up under Settings → Home Assistant.

What you need

• An MQTT broker on your network, such as the Mosquitto add-on.
• Home Assistant’s MQTT integration with discovery enabled, which is the default.
• At least one Bluetooth sensor if you want readings. The screen switch is published either way.

Connecting to the broker

Under Settings → Home Assistant, fill in the connection:

• Broker, as tcp:// or ssl:// with a host and port, for example tcp://192.168.1.10:1883.
• Client ID, unique to this frame.
• Username and Password, if your broker requires them.

This same broker also feeds MQTT sensors, so it is not tied to Home Assistant, and readings can come from any source on the broker. Once a broker is set, turn on the Home Assistant bridge.

What it exposes

With the bridge on, Home Assistant discovers one device, labelled with the Pi’s model and the running frame version, carrying:

• each Bluetooth sensor’s readings, temperature and humidity as sensors, motion as a binary sensor;
• a Screen switch, to turn the panel on or off from Home Assistant;
• a read-only screen-power sensor, showing whether the panel is actually lit;
• Raspberry Pi diagnostics: CPU temperature, memory usage, and uptime sensors, plus an undervoltage problem sensor that flags an inadequate power supply;
• a last touch timestamp, updated when someone taps the frame’s own screen. Clicks in the admin interface don’t count.

Only Bluetooth sensors are bridged. Mock sensors are a development aid, and MQTT sensor readings already come from the broker, so re-publishing them would loop.

Showing Home Assistant’s own data on the frame

The bridge sends data to Home Assistant. To go the other way and show a Home Assistant entity on the frame, enable Home Assistant’s MQTT Statestream integration so it publishes entity states to the broker, then read them back as MQTT sensors.

The switch reflects intent, not the live panel. Motion and idle blanking move the screen-power sensor but leave the switch alone. Turning the switch on re-enables motion auto-wake. Turning it off forces the screen off and holds it there. With no motion sensor, it is a plain on-and-off. See Slideshow & display.

Bridge settings

• Node ID is the device’s identity in Home Assistant, its device id and the prefix for every entity. Give each frame a distinct value if you run more than one.
• Base topic namespaces the state, command, and availability topics.
• Discovery prefix must match Home Assistant’s MQTT discovery prefix, homeassistant by default.
• Stale after marks a sensor unavailable in Home Assistant when no reading arrives within the window. An entity shows as available only while both the frame and that sensor are online, so a dead frame and a silent sensor both surface honestly instead of leaving a stale value looking live.

Restart required

The broker connection and the bridge settings take effect after the frame restarts.

Using it

The device appears under Settings → Devices & services → MQTT in Home Assistant. From there you can add its entities to dashboards, or fold them into automations: blank the screen when you leave, wake it when you are back, or use the frame’s motion and climate readings elsewhere in your home.

Alongside the screen switch and the sensors you configured, the bridge publishes the frame’s own diagnostics: CPU temperature, memory use, uptime, last touch, hostname, IP address, and undervoltage on Pi hardware. Version, model, and board revision appear on the device card itself.

Reboot and shutdown

The frame can also expose two buttons that act on the Raspberry Pi itself:

Button	What it does
Reboot	Restarts the whole device. Photos resume once it is back, usually within a minute.
Shutdown	Powers the device off. It stays off until someone powers it on again.

Both are ordinary Home Assistant buttons, so an automation can call them: power the frame down while you are away, or reboot it on a schedule.

Shutdown is one-way

Nothing on the frame can undo a shutdown. The device stays off until its power is physically cycled or switched back on. On a PoE switch you can restore power from the switch; otherwise it means walking over to it.

Home Assistant fires a button the instant it is pressed, with no confirmation. The same two controls sit on the admin dashboard’s System card, where they ask first.

Installed before version 1.2.3?

The buttons are published only when the Pi grants the frame permission to reboot and power off, which software updates alone do not deliver. If they are missing, rerun the install script from Install; it keeps your settings and photos.

Every setting on this page maps to a key in the configuration reference.