A dedicated touchscreen for Home Assistant at the bedside sounds great — until you price out the parts. A Raspberry Pi with a display, power supply, and case runs you $150–$200 before you've written a single line of YAML. A second-gen Echo Show 5 on eBay? Around $100, pre-built, with a speaker, mic, and a camera already inside.
Why a Jailbroken Echo Show Makes Sense
The Echo Show 5 isn't appealing because it's an Amazon product — it's appealing despite that. The hardware is solid, the price is low, and the 2nd-gen units are old enough that Amazon no longer supports them. That means they'd otherwise end up in a landfill. Flashing Lineage OS (a clean Android build) wipes Fire OS entirely, severs any Amazon tie-in, and turns the device into a capable little Android tablet you actually control.
The process takes about an hour the first time, following guides by YouTuber Mark Watt and a blog post by Derek Seaman. After that, it's a standard Android device. Install the Home Assistant app, point it at your server, and you're running a local smart home display with zero subscriptions.
View Assist: More Than Kiosk Mode
Home Assistant's built-in kiosk mode works, but it's bare-bones. View Assist — a HACS integration — is what makes the Echo Show genuinely useful. It lets you:
- Turn the display on/off remotely from Home Assistant
- Control volume and mute from automations
- Use the device as a media player
- Add a persistent navbar for quick dashboard switching
It's the difference between a screen that shows your dashboard and one that actually behaves like a smart display.
Building the Bedside Dashboard
The 5-inch screen is small, so the dashboard has to be ruthless about what it shows. A good bedside layout keeps it simple:
- Home view: Time, date, and current weather — big enough to read without glasses
- Baby monitor: Full-panel view of a UniFi Protect G4 Instant camera (2K, USB-C, cry detection, no cloud subscription required)
- Security cameras: Swipeable CCTV feeds for those middle-of-the-night "what was that?" moments
- AC controls and lights: Quick toggles for the bedroom without reaching for your phone
The navbar card from HACS ties it together and also surfaces a compact media player widget whenever something is playing.
The 3D Printed Enclosure
The Echo Show 5's default screen angle is designed for a desk or bench — when it's at bedside-table height and eye-level, the display faces slightly downward and becomes awkward to read from bed. A 3D printed enclosure fixes this by tilting the screen back to a more usable angle. The two-piece design (body + bezel) prints cleanly on a standard FDM printer, and the bezel includes flexible tabs that let you press the volume and mute buttons without removing the device. An X-Tool UV laser engraved button labels onto the prints and cut a cork foot pad to keep it from sliding around on the nightstand.
Is It Worth It?
If you already have a Home Assistant setup and a 3D printer, this is one of the best-value smart display projects you can do right now. The Echo Show 5 hardware is purpose-built for exactly this use case — touchscreen, speaker, mic, and camera in a compact form factor. Lineage OS and View Assist together give you full local control with no Amazon account, no cloud dependency, and no monthly fees. For $100 in hardware and an afternoon of setup, that's hard to beat.
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