Hello, I am not the creator of this application. I report only this functionality
I’ve created this little app for my wall-mounted tablets to wake the screen on motion detect.
How is this different from other apps you might ask? First, it is only a background app and does not display the actual content. In my case I simply use the HomeAssistant companion app to display my dashboards. The HA mobile app is doing a way better job at displaying the dashboards than trying to embed home assistant into a foreign app. Also, this way it has the added benefit of having out of the box sensor support for everything that’s exposed by the HA mobile app without any extra setup. Yakk is simply running in the background and it takes care of turning the screen on when motion is detected. It is extremely lightweight, only consumes about 50-80MB RAM and very little CPU.
The main reason I’ve created this app is that I wanted a simple and lightweight way to wake the screen on motion detect without all the compromises. I looked at available solutions and while FullyKIOSK is a really nice app it is an overkill in a home environment. At least for my use case it was and it’s significantly slower than the HA mobile app. Unfortunately, I had very little luck with open source and free alternatives as they were often unstable and bloated with many non functional features and bugs while draining the battery very fast.
Instead, Yakk is letting Android turn off the screen and also letting the device enter a lower power state. Obviously it can not go all the way down to deep sleep mode as it is constantly watching the camera but during testing my battery lasts on average 2-3 times longer compared to the alternatives.
If your use case is similar to mine; and you just want to wake your device while you’re approaching it you might want to give Yakk a try. It is extremely simple to set up, just give it the necessary permissions and you’re good to go.
Features:
- Turn on the display when detecting motion
- MJPEG Camera support (up to 10 concurrent streams)
- Automatically start Yakk and a companion app after device boot
Motion Detection Setup:
- Enable Motion Detect in Yakk and make sure to exclude it from battery optimizations on newer Android versions.
- Make sure your device has no pattern or PIN lock enabled.
- Give permissions to your camera and to send notifications on Android 13+
- Adjust your screen timeout to your liking under Settings → Display → Screen Timeout (e.g. 15seconds)
- If needed; adjust sensitivity and latch time settings.
Sensitivity dictates how sensitive the motion detection algorithm is while
latch time will activate motion detection after a continuous length of motion.
You can test your settings interactively in “Camera Preview” mode.
Yakk will show you a warning if it detects incorrect configurations or missing permissions.
It’s completely free, no strings (or ads) attached. There’s also a website with more detailed installation and configuration instructions (see APK Direct Download Link, forum only allows 2 links per post)
If you encounter issues or need help or just have an idea how to make it better, send me an email to info[at]bkappz[dot]com
