hass-browser_mod: Entities become "unavailable" after 5 minutes

I am using browser_mod 1.1.6 with HA 0.116.2 and have a Galaxy Tab A as a wall-mounted dashboard, running LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10) with latest Fully Kiosk Browser and WebView.

I have setup browser_mod like this:

browser_mod:
  devices:
    398e7aa2-9f66b227:
      name: tablet
  disable:
    - all

As long as the tablet is showing HA, the entities are available (binary_sensor and light are “on”). After the 10s timeout defined in Fully Kiosk Browser to turn off the screen, the light is switching to off. In Android, I have disabled all screensavers and power saving settings, I have kept the screen timeout at 1min, as there is no option to disable it completely. When I move in front of the tablet, Fully Kiosk Browser’s motion detection turns the screen back on and the light entity goes back to “on”.

But when I haven’t moved in front of the tablet for about 4min30s in front of the screen, all entities become unavailable.

I have already disabled this setting in the HA user settings:

Automatically close connection
Should we close the connection to the server after being hidden for 5 minutes?

Is there anything else I can configure to keep them available? Otherwise, I cannot interact with it in automations when the tablet’s screen is off. My plan was to activate the screen when someone rings the doorbell and then show the front camera’s more-info screen.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 4 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 36 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Second attempt:
var audio = new Audio('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anars/blank-audio/master/45-seconds-of-silence.mp3');
audio.loop = true;
audio.play();
Going on 30 minutes and it is still reachable!

Note: second attempt was just to test if looping works as well, this allows us to have no time limit AND use a smaller mp3 file. I suspect that length of the mp3 file is a tradeoff between CPU usage and file size, but it is probably negligible as long as we’re not looping 0.1 second mp3 files…

After spending all day trying to find a solution for this, this code mentioned above works perfectly to solve the issue!

One important note that I was fighting with all afternoon that I didn’t realize I had on, make sure “Consider Device in Use while Audio Playing” is not turned on in Other Settings. It’s working great now!

T3chArmy on Oct 10, 2022

force_stay_awake doesn’t seem to be working for me either

saxopwn on Dec 2, 2021

Hello. Bumping this since there are no new updates. I’ve tried both official workarounds (force_stay_awake and screensaver) none works. I have screen off disabled but screensaver is lighting up after 15 seconds of inactivity. If screensaver is left uninterrupted for 5 minutes, entities will become unavailable. I haven’t tried using silent mp3 play loop and would like to avoid it if not necessary.

maretodoric on Nov 29, 2021