Display
A habitat is more use on a shelf than in a browser tab you closed. Anything with a screen and a modern browser can show one all day, and none of it needs an account on the device or anything installed.
Open the habitat you want on the shelf, then Share. That gives you a read-only link anybody can open without signing in, which is what the shelf device uses. Under the link is a QR code, which saves typing it into a device with no keyboard worth using.
The link updates by itself. Things you buy turn up on the shelf within a minute or so, along with anything you move about from the computer. Stop sharing, or issue a new link, and the old one goes dead, so a screen in a shared office is not permanent by accident.
The one most people already have in a drawer. Point its camera at the QR code, add it to the Home Screen, turn off Auto-Lock and leave it plugged in. About five minutes. The one thing to check first is the iPadOS version, because habitats are drawn with WebGL 2 and Safari only got that in iPadOS 15.
The step-by-step iPad guideThe least work of the lot: open the share link in a window, drag it onto the monitor you are not typing on, and then press F11. That order round, because full screen takes whichever screen the window is already on, and moving it afterwards means dropping out of full screen and doing it again. On a Mac in Safari it is Ctrl-Cmd-F. The camera drifts around on its own after a few seconds of nobody touching it, so it behaves like something to glance at rather than something to use.
Lively Wallpaper or Wallpaper Engine can put the habitat behind your desktop icons, where the wallpaper would normally be. It stays live, keeps drifting, and picks up new arrivals without replacing a picture every few minutes.
The Windows wallpaper guideFine if the television has a browser you can type a URL into, and better still if you can cast a tab to it from a laptop. Worth knowing before you start: smart TV browsers are the least predictable thing on this page, and an old one may not have WebGL 2 at all. If it will not load, that is usually why.
The answer for an iPad too old to work, and the tidiest result if you do not mind the setup. A Pi 4 or newer running Chromium in kiosk mode on the share link will sit behind a monitor and come back on its own after a power cut. There is no Toiling Away hardware to buy; this is an ordinary browser on an ordinary Pi.
If you already have a wall tablet showing the heating and the front door, a habitat can be one more card on it. Add a Webpage card and give it the share link. There is nothing to install and no add-on to trust.
In the dashboard's three-dot menu chooseEdit dashboard, thenAdd card, thenWebpage. Or edit the YAML directly:
type: iframe
url: https://app.toilingaway.com/t/YOUR-SHARE-TOKEN?chrome=none
aspect_ratio: 75%That habitat has nothing on it but the habitat. See below for what?chrome= does.
Give it room.A habitat is a view rather than a readout, and a card two rows high shows very little of one. aspect_ratio is a percentage of the card's width, so 75% is four by three and 56% is widescreen. A panel-mode dashboard with the habitat as its only card is the version worth looking at.
It has to be the share link.A card pointed at the app itself will stay blank: only the share link may be framed, which is what stops a page you did not build putting your account in one.
Your dashboard has to be on https.A browser will not load an https frame inside an http page, so a Home Assistant reached over plain http shows an empty card and says so only in the developer console.
A habitat is one half of what Home Assistant is good for here. The other - reporting desk presence as recorded time - needs nothing but an automation hitting a URL, and has its own guide.
A share link is built to be sent to somebody, so it says whose habitat it is and offers a way to start your own. On a screen in your own hallway, none of that is for anybody. Add ?chrome= to the end of the link to take it off. It works on any screen, not only Home Assistant.
| Add this | What you get |
|---|---|
| nothing | The habitat, its name and owner, a link to their other habitats, and the invitation to start your own. What anyone opening a link you sent them sees. |
| ?chrome=controls | The habitat, the two camera buttons - reset view and auto-rotate - and the sound button. Nothing that names anybody or links anywhere. Use this on a tablet you will actually touch, and it is the only way to stop the drifting from inside the card. It is also the level that can make noise: sound needs its own button on screen, so ?chrome=none stays silent. |
| ?chrome=none | The habitat and nothing else. Use this on a screen nobody touches. It drifts slowly on its own, because auto-rotate is on until something turns it off, and inside a dashboard card nothing has. |
?embed is separate from these settings. It is reserved for the silent, control-free demo tour on the marketing page. A normal tour still refuses ?chrome=none, because a viewer needs a way to leave it.
Tapping a creature still works.It says what species it is and nothing else, on every setting. That is the same for a stranger opening the link as for you, and there is nothing on a share link that can be changed by pressing it.
A link that stops working still says so.If you revoke the share link or issue a new one, the screen says the habitat is no longer shared rather than going quietly blank, whatever you set here.
Send us a picture of how you display your habitat. We would like to see what people put them on, and the good ideas will end up on this page.
help@toilingaway.com