How to make a rule to load a black screen

Is there a way to load a dashboard that is nothing, but jet black based on house mode?

I think you can just create a dashboard with blank tiles. Then have a rule that loads that dashboard based on your house mode status. It’s not the same as turning off the display so the black screen will still emit light.

I use Fully Kiosk Browser to turn off my table screens when the tablets’ cameras don’t detect motion and turns them back on when there is motion detected.

Thanks! I would have thought so too…but all I see that might load a page is the GET in the HTTP action part of a rule.

If that’s supposed to work…it’s not for me. Hoping someone has a good example.

Did you ever get the issues sorted out with Hubitat and the Fully Kiosk Driver?

Since you have that driver, normally you would use it to control Fully Kiosk and which dashboard is displayed… or even to start / stop the screensaver.

Nope…still happens somewhat random and often. The weird part of the problem is that when Hubitat send a status change to Fully Kiosk it works (even though the brightness is turned way down I can see the tile change) when the packet comes back to the tablet from the Internet, but I can neither ping the tablet, nor does it respond to the Hub on the local network. It responding to the cloud doesn’t make it start responding to the local network like it was an ARP problem or something.

That’s why I was trying to make this happen from the cloud.

Is there any way to make a SharpTools screen change by the status of a tile changing?

On the Hubitat side several say they have this same problem.

If you mean you literally can’t sent an ICMP ping request to the tablet, that could be indicative of a more fundamental local networking issue.

In your Hubitat thread, it sounds like sidjohn1 was suggesting that the Fully Kiosk API sometimes becomes unresponsive. But if you fundamentally can’t ping or otherwise communicate with the tablet over the LAN, that could be a more fundamental networking issue.

Perhaps framing the question differently on the Hubitat community or posting in the original Fully Kiosk device driver thread could be helpful? I suspect that adding SharpTools in the title of the thread is throwing people off. The data point that the tablet is still connected to the internet and can visit websites is a helpful point, but adding it to the title of the thread might throw some people off.


There are two different types of communication being discussed here.

  1. Communicating directly with the Fully Kiosk App + API
  2. SharpTools Dashboards (web app) getting status updates

Fully Kiosk API

The Hubitat device driver that enables you to control Fully Kiosk Browser to do things like change which dashboard is displayed is direct communication over your LAN from your Hub to the Fully Kiosk API running on the tablet.

Hub --> Tablet (Fully Kiosk API) 

SharpTools Status Updates

SharpTools receiving status updates is quite different. The hub is pushing updates to the SharpTools cloud… then each dashboard on a tablet establishes a persistent connection to SharpTools which it can then use for 2-way realtime updates.

# Connection is established
Tablet (dashboard) --> SharpTools Cloud

# Existing connection used for realtime events
Tablet (dashboard) <--> SharpTools Cloud <-- Hub 

–

Again, framing this as the status change coming “to Fully Kiosk” might unintentionally mislead some readers. In this case, Fully Kiosk is basically just a wrapper for the underlying system webview… and it’s actually the SharpTools webapp which is receiving the device status updates.

The communication issues with Fully Kiosk seem to be specifically related to the driver communication (eg. over the LAN).

Thanks for all the detail! I was a network engineer/architect since 1992 until I retired a couple years ago. I kind of get that kind of stuff. Unless the MAC’s were getting mess up in some devices, I really don’t think it’s the “network” :upside_down_face:…but one thing I learned about troubleshooting is…you never know until you know.

I’ve look at the resolution in all the routers and windows tables, the MAC is hard coded in the Hubitat driver.

I need to set up Wireshark, I guess. Not being able to ping the tablet locally from a Windows 11 station, when I can ping everything else seems to point in the direction of the tablet.

I understand your preference not to use SharpTools or Fully Kiosk as at least at this point it seems like a device problem. I guess I need to learn how to see the tables on a tablet. :melting_face:

1 Like