Monitor or tablet?

Maybe stupid question, but I have to decide if plug a monitor to the Macmini (there is one thought for Raspberry which is quite slim and has HDMI input) and use that to show control pages and Grafana charts, or use a tablet.
The pro of the monitor is that I always have a look also at the server itself if something is not working, the contra is that if I am working remotely (from the iMac), Safari will be in background.

Did anyone had the same “problem”.

Thanks

Not a silly question at all. I don't use control pages very much anymore as I've written a custom Javascript SPA (single page application) for most of my GUI interactions with Indigo. Otherwise, I use a combination of Indigo Touch for Web and the Indigo Touch app -- especially if I'm remote.

The idea behind the SPA is to add control screens throughout the house -- but I haven't gotten that far. I'm leaning towards POE Raspberry Pi clients with touchscreens. So I guess that would be my recommendation.

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Very nice, my idea is to buy this one

https://amzn.eu/d/81ubqOf

Only need to remember to open the website when finished working remotely

But with an HDMI screen I have direct access to the server if something happens

What do you mean with Pi client? Any link?

I haven't settled on any hardware yet, but I'm thinking it would need to be at least 4x5 inches (maybe 6x9) to be at all useful. The Raspberry Pi client would be a simple web browser running my SPA.

Is is then a simply Pi with a monitor attached to it and the Pi loads the webpage running on the Indigo server? Nice solution
But with this if Indigo is down you see nothing, don’t you?

In my (at this point largely imaginary) setup, if Indigo is down you wouldn't see anything. The SPA I've written actually runs via the Indigo Web Server and relies on a custom plugin. But since it's browser-based, it wouldn't be to hard to redirect the view to something else if communication with Indigo were lost.

Interesting Dave - is it possible for a mere mortal to build an SPA page - what plug-in are you talking about?

How do you handle the charts you have on your page?

I know how much time I spend keeping my control pages updated so I would love to understand what other options are doable (without a masters in CS).

Every time I cycle in another old IPAD apple always changes the resolution and my pages need a ton of work to look right again. Do the SPA pages self heal if displayed at different resolutions?

Thanks for any help…

What I've built is custom to our installation. For example, all the rooms in the application are hard-coded to our home. Here's an overview the tech I used:

• Custom Indigo Plugin - this is a plugin that's tailored to our home and our Indigo install (it wouldn't work for anyone else). It uses a Websocket API (not Indigo's Websocket API) to communicate between Indigo and any clients. This is not because there's something wrong with Indigo's API (it's awesome!) but because I wrote all this before the v2 API was released and I've been too busy to refactor the thing to use Indigo's API.

• SPA - the application runs in a browser and is served by Indigo's Webserver -- the files are saved to:
  /Library/Application Support/Perceptive Automation/Indigo 2023.2/Web Assets/static.
  It's coded in Vue, Bootstrap 5, Charts.js, vanilla JavaScript, and CSS (and a few other JavaScript libraries like v-calendar). The SPA is responsive -- meaning that the content adjusts to the environment it's being viewed on (desktop, mobile, etc.)

• Charts - the charts are served using Charts.js and the data comes from various sources -- mostly CSV data I save to my home network and Indigo device states.

I'd say this is a pretty advanced project and -- without a strong understanding of Python and JavaScript -- it's probably too much for most folks (with the exception of Python, I had to learn all the stuff above from scratch).

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Thanks Dave - what I find most interesting is that you said Indigo will serve up a web page - I have some pretty easy to use software for building web sites.

So I would just FTP all the web page files to that directory and then just point to it and Indigo would take care of the rest. That would be great!!!!

You're welcome.

I feel the original thread is getting a bit hijacked, so we should start a new thread. I'll just add there's no reason to ftp the files to that folder -- if you have access to the Indigo machine, you can simply save the files there.

OK