So I might have just stumbled upon a Home Assistant hardware gold mine but you tell me... My lovely lady had an old Surface Pro 2 lying around, and I needed a Home Assistant remote. It worked ALMOST PERFECTLY.

• Touchscreen that auto rotate orientation

• Battery that gets 6 hours on "balanced"

• detachable magnetic charging cable

• detachable magnetic keyboard/mouse if you need to get in and make some changes

• would be super easy to design a wall mount using the magnetic charging

• Kickstand for sitting up on a table

I know ya'll love your Linux distros for this but getting it setup with Windows was just so much easier.

• OS is Tiny10 by NTDEV (Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC)

• Activated via generic KMS key via Microsoft

• Chrome auto-start on boot by simply dropping a Chrome.exe shortcut into shell:startup

• Set home assistant as home page or bake into shell:startup

• Chrome Extension for forcing chrome into fullscreen always.

Works like a god damn charm! The only downsides that I have yet figure out are:

• I think this version of Windows10 stripped the classic "screen saver" from the OS. However, you can disable auto lock on timeout with a DWORD value at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. "ConsoleLockDisplayOffTimeout" value 0. Screen will just black out depending on what you have set in power plan.

• Screen doesn't auto rotate orientation unless the magnetic keyboard is docked.

Looking on ebay, these can be purchased for under $100. I'm seeing v3 and v4 of this for the same. That seems like an insane good deal for a VERY powerful HA remote. When I did a bunch of searching yesterday I did not see this as a suggested option for people looking for cheap hardware. So far, I'm super happy with it.

I'm still pretty new to HA and I'm learning as I go, but I was surprised how well this worked after not seeing any recommendations of using it around the web. MAYBE THIS IS A SHIFT!