Jailbreak an Echo Show and build a Home Assistant dashboard for it

The poster, u/rlarts on r/homeassistant, bought a used first-generation Echo Show 8 to use as a kitchen display. Claude ran on a separate Raspberry Pi, read the published jailbreak instructions, adapted them so it could carry out the steps itself from Linux, and wiped Amazon's software off the device. The poster then wrote a requirements markdown file listing what to show and control, with one hard rule: all processing happens in Home Assistant and on the Pi, and the Echo is only a kiosk browser pointed at a page the Pi serves. Claude worked out which data Home Assistant already had and which outside APIs were needed (the free UK National Rail feed, Octopus Agile electricity rates), produced a handoff package for the visual design, which the poster did in Claude Design, and then built and deployed the dashboard.

The dashboard runs. Panels appear when they are relevant: a commute view on office days that also watches the inbound service a train is running before it becomes the poster's train, so delays show up before they are announced; half-hourly electricity prices plus usage and bill tracking, which replaced the smart meter's own display; an estimated arrival time for both partners on the way home, using Home Assistant zones placed after rail junctions to guess which train the poster boarded; recipes; media controls; and light and dark themes by time of day. Since launch the work has been small tweaks and stripping out wording that sounded like Claude. Some data in the shared photos was mocked.

The jailbreak removes Alexa entirely, so voice control is gone unless you add something else; the poster has not replaced it yet. The poster says only "Claude" running on the Pi and does not name the harness, though it ran the jailbreak steps itself. The rail data comes from National Rail's free Darwin feeds, which need a developer sign-up.