Back in 2011, the HP Touchpad went on firesale, and I bought one on a whim and installed CyanogenMod on it to run Android. It's really not a very capable tablet, so it mostly just sat around unused for the last 15 years. Recently, I thought I would vibe code an Android app for it to serve as a HomeAssistant dashboard to show the current temperature, time, and solar/battery information for my house. The project lives on gitlab now.

As I mention in the README, I doubt anyone is going to use the code as it stands, since my TouchPad is running an outdated version of Android, even for how old the hardware is. The important thing is to know this is possible, and fairly easy to do. All I did was use the free online ChatGPT, and it spit out all the code which I had to paste into files myself. There are only a small handful of files so this was relatively painless. In the span of about an hour, I had worked out (1) a dedicated Android app was preferred to trying to get any kind of web interface to work in the ancient browsers running on the tablet, (2) setting up the build environment, and (3) getting a rudimentary version of the project built and deployed.

I intentionally prompted it in a way to set up a project skeleton, with enough worked examples (like reading temperatures, plotting power levels, etc.) so that I could edit it further to suit my taste. All in all, I am more than satisfied with how this turned out. The TouchPad would have been e-waste otherwise, but now it is solving a real problem I have had, which is that nobody in the family wants to use HomeAssistant directly; we all just want a dedicated live-updating dashboard to look at.